To be pedantic, the original poster is technically correct---DRM doesn't cause those people to come into being---but almost certainly was mistaken in his/her word choice....:-)
Well, I suppose DRM could effect a person if somebody gets so annoyed by it that he throws the DVD player out the window and goes out for a night on the town, meets the perfect girl, then one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, a DRM-effected child is born, but... thats about as likely as a pig flying without a trebuchet....
In the United States, there's nothing preventing eBay users from filing an antitrust civil suit. The government doesn't have to do anything. In fact, quite frankly, I think it would be a great idea for... say ten thousand eBay sellers who have gotten screwed by PayPal to file a class action. Knock their greedy scheme down a couple pegs. Oh, and be sure to do it in the 9th Circuit (e.g. California) where eBay's binding arbitration clause isn't worth the paper they didn't print it on.
The thing is, all this could be solved by adding a "Read More" link to expand out the section to include more detail. In its current version, it does look watered down to be more corporate-friendly even if that was not the intent.
Ah. Yes, that makes a huge difference. I have a 7200 RPM Apple drive. I didn't know the MacBook Pro was available with the 7200 RPM drive. I guess that's an option that is no longer offered.
That said, I wouldn't have expected the difference to be quite that extreme (factor of 15 on Safari launch is HUGE)... except that the 4200 was a couple generations of hard drive back and laptop drives have increased in performance a lot recently. IIRC, there was a significant performance difference between the 7200.1 and the 7200.2 Momentus series in Seagate's line just in the last two years or so.
Either your hard drive is an older model than the current one or you don't have nearly enough RAM. My MacBook (3GB) with an Apple-labeled 7200 RPM Seagate drive boots to Finder in 27 seconds from when I hit the power button. Safari launch is so close to instantaneous that it isn't worth timing. iTunes launch takes about 12 seconds. Dashboard: about three seconds, two of which are spent blocked waiting for hosts out on the Internet to reply.
Seriously, if it takes 30 seconds to launch Safari with a current MBP, something is massively wrong. It only takes 22 seconds (in 10.4, admittedly) on my old G3 PowerBook... while still paging from the boot.... Get more RAM.
That's a cold boot. Hibernation actually can take longer, depending on how much RAM you have and how many pages are dirty.
I noticed on my parents' iMac the boot time was much longer the first time after installing an OSX patch and I figured it was just because OSX had to truly shut down completely and reboot from scratch to apply the patch.
No, the boot time is very long after an OS install because all the boot caches have to be rebuilt. Different computers require different drivers. Mac OS X combines all of the drivers for a specific machine along with the kernel and wraps them up into a single file so that it can be read in all at once (and fairly contiguously) instead of bouncing all around the disk reading thousands of individual files one at a time.
When the OS is updated, a number of those drivers change (and the kernel changes), so the OS has to go back through all the drivers and rebuild the cache. In the process of doing so, it is also loading each of those drivers the slow way (one file at a time), so booting takes a lot longer. The same thing happens if you carry a hard drive with a Mac OS X installation from one machine to another (unless they are roughly the same model of machine, that is).
Anyway, that boot cache is one big reason Mac OS X boots so quickly. Another big reason is that it puts off a lot of stuff until after it has booted so that it can bring up the UI as quickly as possible. In many cases, daemons may not all be started by the time Finder comes up, for example. The third reason is that Mac OS X runs a lot of daemons on demand, which means that the daemon starts running the first time something sends it a request. This further defers starting a lot of services until much later.
That goes to show what a little grammar error can do to understanding. Put another way, whether the GP was right depends on what your definition of the word "is" is.
I think the GP intended to use the word "was".
I know the media is latching on to this, but if you look at the mission articles in Wikipedia since Columbia, there has been a "rescue mission" for EVERY flight. It seems that the only difference here is that this rescue mission is set to go at a moment's notice [because ISS is not available] while other rescues would take some weeks to set up (as ISS was [not is] available for the rescue shelter [in earlier missions]).
Sadly, yes, that is pretty much what the court system in the U.S. has degraded into. Don't get me started on how many lawyers there are who knowingly mislead their clients and support them in filing frivolous suits and who should be disbarred but have not been....
In addition to changes to decrease wind resistance, there are lots of mass changes you could make that would have a tremendous impact. Use aluminum for the skin/floor/* instead of sheet metal. Use a carbon composite for the superstructure instead of steel. Use aluminum for the engine block instead of iron. Use carbon composites instead of steel for the seat structures. Reduce the size of the gas tank. And so on.
Chances are, if the car disappeared more than three hours ago, it is gone. Within just a handful of hours, it has already had its plates replaced, been driven into some chop shop somewhere in the country, and is no longer identifiable. After that, this is what insurance is for.
You misunderstand. If somebody takes your kid, you call 911. They issue an amber alert. As soon as that goes out, the vehicle's tags get distributed to every traffic camera in the state/region, which immediately check their logs and if that car has been driven anywhere in the past three hours, reports back
We're talking about a heck of a lot of traffic cameras, at least here in California. You would not be looking for one car in 40,000 square miles. If the car travels more than a few blocks in just about any direction around here, it would be picked up by a different traffic camera more recently. The last such location, therefore, regardless of whether that was five minutes ago or a couple of hours ago, gives you a pretty darn good indication of where the vehicle is currently located (within just a handful of city blocks).
Also, by itself, this doesn't establish probable cause for searching anything. It allows police to rapidly determine where the vehicle was last, which then allows them to drive around and watch for the car parked on the side of the road. Having a car with a kidnapped kid parked in front of your house establishes probable cause for searching your house whether it gets reported by somebody who notices the amber alert and spots the car or gets reported by a traffic camera saying that it entered a particular neighborhood and then the police drive into the neighborhood and spot the car themselves. The net effect is identical. The only difference is the probability of catching the bad guy goes up dramatically all without compromising the rights of the general public to be free from unwarranted government tracking.
Exactly. This is a horrifying privacy invasion, particularly given that it is trivial to create a similar system that doesn't have any of those flaws.
A modest counterproposal: build a database of all stolen vehicles and all vehicles listed in an amber alert. Set up computer systems on each camera with the appropriate detection and set them to log vehicle plate information that is listed in the stolen vehicle/amber alert database permanently and to store all vehicle information in temporary storage that is overwritten when it is more than three hours old. Provide a programming interface that tells each device to check its temporary storage buffer for a single plate upon request and use this when a new amber alert or stolen car is added to the database.
This does two things: it solves the problem of amber alerts and stolen vehicles as defined and goes one step farther by providing a reasonable buffer time during which if an amber alert is called or a car is stolen, prior records can be searched for the vehicle in question (and only the vehicle in question).
Include strict laws that absolutely prohibit any extension of the temporary buffer period beyond 3 hours and prohibit any publication, distribution, or transmission of the data stored in the temporary buffer except for a list of detection events for a single plate as queried through the aforementioned interface. Include strict laws that provide criminal liability for knowingly adding a plate to the suspect vehicle database that does not belong to a stolen vehicle or a vehicle listed in an amber alert or other A.P.B.
Adams' asides, while visual, were generally funny....
She paused with grief as the full meaning of this hit her, and she shuddered and started to weep again, like a pure white nightingale whose eggs have been stolen and eaten by a fateful cat.
Marvin grumbled, "Look at me, brain the size of a planet, wasting my time comforting someone who is sad over losing an idiot."
Trillian's mood lightened a bit and she smiled a quirky smile.
It's a strange thing, humor. Sometimes it hits you like a feather, sometimes like a tonne of bricks that mysteriously appeared over Gelatinous V after an infinite improbability drive inadvertently converted one of Zaphod's heads during a tight cornering procedure. But always it hits you, and so it hit Marvin that his comment was funny and he began to laugh.
Marvin laughing? This can't be good, Trillian thought.
His laugh was terrifying, like a maniacal scientest cackling over his creation and screaming, "It's ALIIIIIIVE" as he accidentally threw the switch again and electrocuted his creature back to the death from whence it came. And then he stopped laughing.
"Somehow, this just doesn't seem right," Marvin said. "Oh well. Worth a try. I think one day, I'm just going to wake up and find that this is all a dream. Wake up and... wake up... wake up..."
"Trillian," Arthur said, "Wake up. You were having a bad dream about a clueless nit trying to write a new story in the style of Douglas Adams and utterly failing to produce the desired levels of humour."
Trilian blinked her eyes, squinted, thought "Oh, screw it", and promptly fell back asleep.
True about HFCS being rare in Europe. Doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of prepackaged foods with truckloads of sugar, though. And we got some yogurt in Italy last summer that was chock full of HFCS, IIRC, so it's not unheard of even there.
Even among the prepackaged health food crowd (with a few possible exceptions like fresh bagged carrots), people who eat prepackaged foods are more likely to be in a hurry (or else they would buy fresh), and thus more prone to stress, and thus more prone to obesity. They are also less likely to have time to get exercise, and thus more prone to obesity. And so on....:-)
The point wasn't to speculate about what common cause triggered both the obesity/diabetes and the Bisphenol A. The point was that it is pretty trivial to come up with plausible explanations in which a common cause could result in both increased BPA exposure (which presumably would result in increased BPA uptake) and obesity.
Your reverse causation theory is also interesting. Obesity would presumably cause additional uptake of foods, and if you are eating more foods and tend towards prepackaged stuff, that by itself would lead to greater uptake of BPA along with it.
That said, if Bisphenol A interferes with hormones, it would not be surprising if that resulted in weight gain. As such, the causation theory is also quite plausible.
Until more studies are done, it is just correlation. One would hope, however, that in light of the correlation, there will be a significant push to step up studies to determine causation or lack thereof.
Evidence that eating foods with more sweeteners leads to greater obesity, which in turn leads to diabetes? Do I really need to cite studies for something so commonly accepted? Okay, here's a good start:
I'm not saying that all type 2 diabetes is caused by obesity---it is well established that this is not the case---but it is well established that a fair percentage of people with type 2 diabetes became diabetic after gaining weight and that these people often cease to be diabetic after surgical intervention to forces weight loss. That's about as clear an establishment of causation as you can get.... The causative mechanism is even somewhat understood at this point.
Or did you mean the proof about the preservatives?
Follow the links from there for loads of info on this subject.
It is fairly well established that sodium benzoate when combined with ascorbic acid (sorry, wrong acid in my previous post... my bad) releases benzene, which is a well known carcinogen.
Word to the wise: if you're buying soft drinks or fruit juices preserved with sodium benzoate, be sure to drink them immediately. Don't let them sit on the shelf of your home. What you don't know can kill you.
But as with any system of resource sharing (especially bandwidth), some devices/users will simply ignore the rules to improve their own performance: flag every transmission as ultra-high-priority and so forth. You can't expect users, or even manufacturers, to "play fair." And I'm not convinced that regulation can force people to play fair. Unlike objective measures like antenna transmission power, things like "priority" are more open to interpretation (or misinterpretation, if you prefer). I suppose the same solution as for cell-phones could be applied: if you charge someone for every transmission, they are forced to conserve bandwidth.
It's worse than that. This requires an unrealistic model of signal propagation. It makes the naive assumption that a channel is free because you can't see anybody using it. If you have thee devices, A, B, and C arranged physically in a straight line, spaced equally at more than half their maximum range, B can talk to both A and C, but neither A nor C can see signals from one another. In a naive implementation of frequency hopping, A and C can end up talking on the same frequency, and then B can't hear either of them without a directional antenna array.... The real world requires more than just looking for an empty slot in the spectrum....
Slashdot Mirror
Narf.
To be pedantic, the original poster is technically correct---DRM doesn't cause those people to come into being---but almost certainly was mistaken in his/her word choice.... :-)
Well, I suppose DRM could effect a person if somebody gets so annoyed by it that he throws the DVD player out the window and goes out for a night on the town, meets the perfect girl, then one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, a DRM-effected child is born, but... thats about as likely as a pig flying without a trebuchet....
Indeed, Pounds are the problem---the players start at something like 190 Pounds... and the discs at 15 or so.... :-)
In the United States, there's nothing preventing eBay users from filing an antitrust civil suit. The government doesn't have to do anything. In fact, quite frankly, I think it would be a great idea for... say ten thousand eBay sellers who have gotten screwed by PayPal to file a class action. Knock their greedy scheme down a couple pegs. Oh, and be sure to do it in the 9th Circuit (e.g. California) where eBay's binding arbitration clause isn't worth the paper they didn't print it on.
The thing is, all this could be solved by adding a "Read More" link to expand out the section to include more detail. In its current version, it does look watered down to be more corporate-friendly even if that was not the intent.
And just to clarify that first paragraph, by Apple drive, I mean I have an Apple-label 7200.2 Seagate Momentus....
Ah. Yes, that makes a huge difference. I have a 7200 RPM Apple drive. I didn't know the MacBook Pro was available with the 7200 RPM drive. I guess that's an option that is no longer offered.
That said, I wouldn't have expected the difference to be quite that extreme (factor of 15 on Safari launch is HUGE)... except that the 4200 was a couple generations of hard drive back and laptop drives have increased in performance a lot recently. IIRC, there was a significant performance difference between the 7200.1 and the 7200.2 Momentus series in Seagate's line just in the last two years or so.
Either your hard drive is an older model than the current one or you don't have nearly enough RAM. My MacBook (3GB) with an Apple-labeled 7200 RPM Seagate drive boots to Finder in 27 seconds from when I hit the power button. Safari launch is so close to instantaneous that it isn't worth timing. iTunes launch takes about 12 seconds. Dashboard: about three seconds, two of which are spent blocked waiting for hosts out on the Internet to reply.
Seriously, if it takes 30 seconds to launch Safari with a current MBP, something is massively wrong. It only takes 22 seconds (in 10.4, admittedly) on my old G3 PowerBook... while still paging from the boot.... Get more RAM.
That's a cold boot. Hibernation actually can take longer, depending on how much RAM you have and how many pages are dirty.
No, the boot time is very long after an OS install because all the boot caches have to be rebuilt. Different computers require different drivers. Mac OS X combines all of the drivers for a specific machine along with the kernel and wraps them up into a single file so that it can be read in all at once (and fairly contiguously) instead of bouncing all around the disk reading thousands of individual files one at a time.
When the OS is updated, a number of those drivers change (and the kernel changes), so the OS has to go back through all the drivers and rebuild the cache. In the process of doing so, it is also loading each of those drivers the slow way (one file at a time), so booting takes a lot longer. The same thing happens if you carry a hard drive with a Mac OS X installation from one machine to another (unless they are roughly the same model of machine, that is).
Anyway, that boot cache is one big reason Mac OS X boots so quickly. Another big reason is that it puts off a lot of stuff until after it has booted so that it can bring up the UI as quickly as possible. In many cases, daemons may not all be started by the time Finder comes up, for example. The third reason is that Mac OS X runs a lot of daemons on demand, which means that the daemon starts running the first time something sends it a request. This further defers starting a lot of services until much later.
The best choice for you is probably Mac OS X.... Mac OS X cold boots in about 20-25 seconds on a Macbook....
That goes to show what a little grammar error can do to understanding. Put another way, whether the GP was right depends on what your definition of the word "is" is.
I think the GP intended to use the word "was".
And Perl stores its classes how?
I've flipped two birds at one stoner.... Does that count?
Sadly, yes, that is pretty much what the court system in the U.S. has degraded into. Don't get me started on how many lawyers there are who knowingly mislead their clients and support them in filing frivolous suits and who should be disbarred but have not been....
At least in the U.S., truth is considered an airtight defense against a libel suit....
err.. souvlakia.
No, no, it's the Czech herd souvlaki in Czech herd souvalkia.
In addition to changes to decrease wind resistance, there are lots of mass changes you could make that would have a tremendous impact. Use aluminum for the skin/floor/* instead of sheet metal. Use a carbon composite for the superstructure instead of steel. Use aluminum for the engine block instead of iron. Use carbon composites instead of steel for the seat structures. Reduce the size of the gas tank. And so on.
Chances are, if the car disappeared more than three hours ago, it is gone. Within just a handful of hours, it has already had its plates replaced, been driven into some chop shop somewhere in the country, and is no longer identifiable. After that, this is what insurance is for.
You misunderstand. If somebody takes your kid, you call 911. They issue an amber alert. As soon as that goes out, the vehicle's tags get distributed to every traffic camera in the state/region, which immediately check their logs and if that car has been driven anywhere in the past three hours, reports back
We're talking about a heck of a lot of traffic cameras, at least here in California. You would not be looking for one car in 40,000 square miles. If the car travels more than a few blocks in just about any direction around here, it would be picked up by a different traffic camera more recently. The last such location, therefore, regardless of whether that was five minutes ago or a couple of hours ago, gives you a pretty darn good indication of where the vehicle is currently located (within just a handful of city blocks).
Also, by itself, this doesn't establish probable cause for searching anything. It allows police to rapidly determine where the vehicle was last, which then allows them to drive around and watch for the car parked on the side of the road. Having a car with a kidnapped kid parked in front of your house establishes probable cause for searching your house whether it gets reported by somebody who notices the amber alert and spots the car or gets reported by a traffic camera saying that it entered a particular neighborhood and then the police drive into the neighborhood and spot the car themselves. The net effect is identical. The only difference is the probability of catching the bad guy goes up dramatically all without compromising the rights of the general public to be free from unwarranted government tracking.
Exactly. This is a horrifying privacy invasion, particularly given that it is trivial to create a similar system that doesn't have any of those flaws.
A modest counterproposal: build a database of all stolen vehicles and all vehicles listed in an amber alert. Set up computer systems on each camera with the appropriate detection and set them to log vehicle plate information that is listed in the stolen vehicle/amber alert database permanently and to store all vehicle information in temporary storage that is overwritten when it is more than three hours old. Provide a programming interface that tells each device to check its temporary storage buffer for a single plate upon request and use this when a new amber alert or stolen car is added to the database.
This does two things: it solves the problem of amber alerts and stolen vehicles as defined and goes one step farther by providing a reasonable buffer time during which if an amber alert is called or a car is stolen, prior records can be searched for the vehicle in question (and only the vehicle in question).
Include strict laws that absolutely prohibit any extension of the temporary buffer period beyond 3 hours and prohibit any publication, distribution, or transmission of the data stored in the temporary buffer except for a list of detection events for a single plate as queried through the aforementioned interface. Include strict laws that provide criminal liability for knowingly adding a plate to the suspect vehicle database that does not belong to a stolen vehicle or a vehicle listed in an amber alert or other A.P.B.
Adams' asides, while visual, were generally funny....
Marvin grumbled, "Look at me, brain the size of a planet, wasting my time comforting someone who is sad over losing an idiot."
Trillian's mood lightened a bit and she smiled a quirky smile.
It's a strange thing, humor. Sometimes it hits you like a feather, sometimes like a tonne of bricks that mysteriously appeared over Gelatinous V after an infinite improbability drive inadvertently converted one of Zaphod's heads during a tight cornering procedure. But always it hits you, and so it hit Marvin that his comment was funny and he began to laugh.
Marvin laughing? This can't be good, Trillian thought.
His laugh was terrifying, like a maniacal scientest cackling over his creation and screaming, "It's ALIIIIIIVE" as he accidentally threw the switch again and electrocuted his creature back to the death from whence it came. And then he stopped laughing.
"Somehow, this just doesn't seem right," Marvin said. "Oh well. Worth a try. I think one day, I'm just going to wake up and find that this is all a dream. Wake up and... wake up... wake up..."
"Trillian," Arthur said, "Wake up. You were having a bad dream about a clueless nit trying to write a new story in the style of Douglas Adams and utterly failing to produce the desired levels of humour."
Trilian blinked her eyes, squinted, thought "Oh, screw it", and promptly fell back asleep.
True about HFCS being rare in Europe. Doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of prepackaged foods with truckloads of sugar, though. And we got some yogurt in Italy last summer that was chock full of HFCS, IIRC, so it's not unheard of even there.
Even among the prepackaged health food crowd (with a few possible exceptions like fresh bagged carrots), people who eat prepackaged foods are more likely to be in a hurry (or else they would buy fresh), and thus more prone to stress, and thus more prone to obesity. They are also less likely to have time to get exercise, and thus more prone to obesity. And so on.... :-)
The point wasn't to speculate about what common cause triggered both the obesity/diabetes and the Bisphenol A. The point was that it is pretty trivial to come up with plausible explanations in which a common cause could result in both increased BPA exposure (which presumably would result in increased BPA uptake) and obesity.
Your reverse causation theory is also interesting. Obesity would presumably cause additional uptake of foods, and if you are eating more foods and tend towards prepackaged stuff, that by itself would lead to greater uptake of BPA along with it.
That said, if Bisphenol A interferes with hormones, it would not be surprising if that resulted in weight gain. As such, the causation theory is also quite plausible.
Until more studies are done, it is just correlation. One would hope, however, that in light of the correlation, there will be a significant push to step up studies to determine causation or lack thereof.
Evidence that eating foods with more sweeteners leads to greater obesity, which in turn leads to diabetes? Do I really need to cite studies for something so commonly accepted? Okay, here's a good start:
http://news.healingwell.com/index.php?p=news1&id=521780
http://healthlink.mcw.edu/article/941223597.html
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/uvahealth/adult_diabetes/obover.cfm
I'm not saying that all type 2 diabetes is caused by obesity---it is well established that this is not the case---but it is well established that a fair percentage of people with type 2 diabetes became diabetic after gaining weight and that these people often cease to be diabetic after surgical intervention to forces weight loss. That's about as clear an establishment of causation as you can get.... The causative mechanism is even somewhat understood at this point.
Or did you mean the proof about the preservatives?
http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Science-Nutrition/FDA-re-opens-probe-into-benzene-contamination-of-soft-drinks
Follow the links from there for loads of info on this subject.
It is fairly well established that sodium benzoate when combined with ascorbic acid (sorry, wrong acid in my previous post... my bad) releases benzene, which is a well known carcinogen.
Word to the wise: if you're buying soft drinks or fruit juices preserved with sodium benzoate, be sure to drink them immediately. Don't let them sit on the shelf of your home. What you don't know can kill you.
It's worse than that. This requires an unrealistic model of signal propagation. It makes the naive assumption that a channel is free because you can't see anybody using it. If you have thee devices, A, B, and C arranged physically in a straight line, spaced equally at more than half their maximum range, B can talk to both A and C, but neither A nor C can see signals from one another. In a naive implementation of frequency hopping, A and C can end up talking on the same frequency, and then B can't hear either of them without a directional antenna array.... The real world requires more than just looking for an empty slot in the spectrum....