You are correct, but the amount of dark matter figured in this way was roughly four times the amount of visible matter. A full tripling of visible matter (which is not what happened - these are teeny tiny stars, which is why they were missed before) would only set dark and visible matter roughly equal to each other.
It won't boost as much as you think. It increases the number of stars, but red dwarfs are small and not very massive. They are usually stars that went nova but were too small to collapse and form a black hole.
A handful of super-massive black holes could probably cover this tripling of the stars.
Even if the amount of matter tripled, however, it still would not eliminate dark matter. Currently, visible matter accounts for 4.6% of the matter in the observable universe. Dark matter accounts for 23% (the rest is dark energy). Tripling the visible matter would bump it up to 13.8% of matter in the universe, and would bring dark matter down to 13.8%, or roughly equal.
That's still a hell of a lot of dark matter that is currently invisible, and is still plenty to screw up astronomical observations.
I'm rooting for the guy, but he has made a serious blunder.
USCG registered Far Cry's copyright on behalf of the German studio that owns it in January 2010. Registrations must be made within 60 days of publication, and Shirokov claims they lied to the USCO by stating the movie was released in April, 2009. That would be copyright fraud, and would completely invalidate all of USCG's lawsuits, and could possibly land them jail time. However, Far Cry was released in April 2009 in the Netherlands. The US release was, in fact, November 2009.
The case basically unhinges after that, and the only argument he really has left is that the majority of law-suits by USCG were for either issued before November 2009 (limiting maximum penalty to actual damages - or about $25), or were for infringement occurring before November 2009. In both cases a $1500 settlement threat could be considered coercion. That would mean the racketeering claim might still stand, but I'm not sure anything else would. I don't think an offer to settle for $1500 even though the maximum penalty is about $25 is illegal, and I don't believe insinuating a $300k per item penalty is illegal, since I believe what is stated in the settlement offer is factually correct (there have been $300k+ judgments before, but in these types of cases the statutory damages have limits to about $7k, if I remember correctly). The combination and the fact that they send these letters to people they know cannot afford representation, combined with the fact that they have never, ever sued anyone who rejected their offer, should make the racketeering case a decent option.
He is also attempting to push the issue that these mass-multidefendant lawsuits are frivolous and waste the court's time - the exact charge USCG leveled against the lawyer selling DIY motions to dismiss kits. That might be fruitful too (it's the one I really want him to win).
The problem would be that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
Pro equipment currently generally holds around 32gb or so of data. 2TB is not in any way pitiful for professional equipment. At 25mb per picture (12MP D90 RAW) that's 80,000 pictures or an hour of video at 6x the resolution of 1080p video. Photographers have never been able to hold 80,000 pictures, ever. 6 hours of 1080p is pretty good too, especially since that format isn't going to change for another decade or more, at least.
Now, as to why the 2TB limit, it is almost certainly do to technical limitations and a balance between what is practical and what is possible. It may be possible to get a 64TB storage cap, but the necessary spec changes may well have made it harder to get the technology to market in a reasonable time frame and at a reasonable cost.
Also, since digital camera optics are already approaching their physical limits, and thus the size of the images aren't likely to grow very quickly, it may be a very long time before the spec needs to change again (for cameras, anyway).
God I can't stand that stupid meme!! Who the fuck cares if you like it or think it's important or whatever? This is clearly designed to allow manufacturers to increase the speed and capacity of the cameras professional photographers use in a multi-platform compatible format. It is a critical first step, unless you like being locked in to whatever memory format Sony, or Nikon, or whoever your camera manufacturer is decides to create.
A specification is necessary for multiple developers to create compatible hardware. You need to have the spec before you create the hardware or it's worthless.
Rich my ass, it's a mediocre jab with an unclear target followed by a solution the target is almost certainly considering.
Is he making fun of Adobe? Or Australia? If it's Adobe, the initial jab is not sarcasm, it's simply accurate. If the target is the Aussie govt., it's not effectively making fun of their decision, because they are doing exactly what the sarcastic remark suggests before the remark is made, and thus the remark makes no sense at all.
If by some chance he's actually mocking the decision to move away from PDFs (it really doesn't sound like it, the second half would make no sense), then he's an idiot.
It would be wonderful sarcasm if the Aussie govt. had just decided to use PDF exclusively in spite of poor accessibility for the blind - the target would be clear, the remark would be scathing, and the feigned ignorance of a solution would be funny, but it doesn't work at all in this case.
Seriously sarcasm seems like a lost art these days.
It is appropriate for any acronym for which the underlying meaning is no longer clearly understood by people who use the acronym.
Most people don't know that ATM means Automated Teller Machine; ATM has become the name of the machine, not just an acronym for the name, so it's appropriate to call it a machine even though it also calls itself a machine. Same with PIN, most people don't recognize it as Personal Identification Number, so it's appropriate to call it a PIN number even though it also calls itself a number.
Same with PDF, PDF is the name of the format - it's not a PD formatted document, it's a PDF formatted document.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons for secrecy.
One example people should be personally intimate with is voting anonymity. If votes cast were tied to the individuals casting them, then votes could easily be coerced or purchased. This completely undermines the entire democratic system.
At the same time, votes by lawmakers on bills are tied to the individual and tracked, so that the voters can hold their representatives responsible. This too is very important for an honest democratic system.
That's just an example you should be familiar with, but it proves the point that in some cases secrecy prevents corruption, while in other cases it is transparency that prevents corruption.
What Wikileaks should have done is expose those documents which show wrongdoing but leave the legitimately private documents private. That is responsible journalism. They didn't do that, however, and have almost certainly caused as much or more harm than they prevented. For example, embarrassing Iran and damaging US-Iranian relations is going to make it much more difficult to come to peaceful resolutions in times of conflict. This is almost certainly going to get more people killed than need to be.
Those figures are wrong, Bank of America only has $2.77 trillion in assets (according to WP), not $2.3 quadrillion. It should say the figures are in thousands of dollars, or drop the figures by three decimal places.
It's no different than Tony Hayward's hearing on the BP spill. The guy was six levels of management up from the accident, he never had intimate knowledge of what was done there or what may have gone wrong, all he had were reports from people who should know.
If these kinds of hearings were anything more than political rope-a-dope they would have subpoenaed the people who were intimately involved with the process. You would see engineers, accountants, and mid-level managers in the hearings instead of CEO's.
A lot of dirty laundry isn't corruption, it's just frank truthfulness that is embarrassing for one party, and it is good decency to keep such things private.
The US cable is a perfect example: the vast majority of the documents released were simply frank opinions of lower-level government employees about various countries' representatives and leaders. These opinions are 100% truthful, are in no way an indication of any kind of corruption, yet they should not be made public as they can damage relations with said country. Many of the documents were simply informative, and can be used to expose civilians who provided information about various organizations that actually are corrupt enough to kill that individual or his family.
The only purpose for publishing such information is to destroy someone's reputation. That is not a legitimate reason in my opinion. It's little more than spiteful gossip, and it can actually get innocent people killed.
If there was evidence of corruption in the recent releases, then publish it. There is no need to reveal every private conversation or every sensitive but irrelevant document.
The beef the GP is talking about is the fact that lately Wikileaks has only been leaking US secrets. I can guarantee there are many countries around the world guilty of much, much more corruption than the US government or US corporations, yet they seem to be getting a pass. This is what people have a problem with, and it does not in any way contradict the objection to Wikileaks's lack of discretion in what they publish.
Expose corruption - US citizens actually do want to know the specifics of their government's corruption - but use a little discretion. It is becoming clear that the purpose of Wikileaks is not to expose corruption, but to hurt the US. In my opinion that contradicts their claimed position of neutrality and claimed goal of exposing corruption worldwide.
The essence of trademarks is that they cannot be used to impersonate a brand.
In most cases the specific industry involved is very important, but in some cases the infringing company can be in a completely different industry and still infringe.
For example, if some guy named George Apple starts a furniture business and decides to name it "Apple's Fine Furniture", then there isn't going to be any trademark infringement. It's obvious he doesn't care about Apple Inc's product image, he simply named the company after himself.
Now, if that same guy decides to make chairs that happen to look exactly like the Apple logo, then he is almost certainly guilty of trademark infringement. In that case, he is clearly trying to use Apple Inc's brand to boost his own sales.
This case would fall into the latter. The figurine maker is clearly trying to use Apple's brand to boost their own sales, and that violates trademark law. If it were just a guy on a platform in a turtle-neck holding a cell phone it would be no problem. But the Apple logo as the platform makes it clear they are attempting to profit off of Apple's brand name.
Likenesses of people are ok, as far as I am aware, but logos are not.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct, but the amount of dark matter figured in this way was roughly four times the amount of visible matter. A full tripling of visible matter (which is not what happened - these are teeny tiny stars, which is why they were missed before) would only set dark and visible matter roughly equal to each other.
It won't boost as much as you think. It increases the number of stars, but red dwarfs are small and not very massive. They are usually stars that went nova but were too small to collapse and form a black hole.
A handful of super-massive black holes could probably cover this tripling of the stars.
Even if the amount of matter tripled, however, it still would not eliminate dark matter. Currently, visible matter accounts for 4.6% of the matter in the observable universe. Dark matter accounts for 23% (the rest is dark energy). Tripling the visible matter would bump it up to 13.8% of matter in the universe, and would bring dark matter down to 13.8%, or roughly equal.
That's still a hell of a lot of dark matter that is currently invisible, and is still plenty to screw up astronomical observations.
I'm rooting for the guy, but he has made a serious blunder.
USCG registered Far Cry's copyright on behalf of the German studio that owns it in January 2010. Registrations must be made within 60 days of publication, and Shirokov claims they lied to the USCO by stating the movie was released in April, 2009. That would be copyright fraud, and would completely invalidate all of USCG's lawsuits, and could possibly land them jail time. However, Far Cry was released in April 2009 in the Netherlands. The US release was, in fact, November 2009.
The case basically unhinges after that, and the only argument he really has left is that the majority of law-suits by USCG were for either issued before November 2009 (limiting maximum penalty to actual damages - or about $25), or were for infringement occurring before November 2009. In both cases a $1500 settlement threat could be considered coercion. That would mean the racketeering claim might still stand, but I'm not sure anything else would. I don't think an offer to settle for $1500 even though the maximum penalty is about $25 is illegal, and I don't believe insinuating a $300k per item penalty is illegal, since I believe what is stated in the settlement offer is factually correct (there have been $300k+ judgments before, but in these types of cases the statutory damages have limits to about $7k, if I remember correctly). The combination and the fact that they send these letters to people they know cannot afford representation, combined with the fact that they have never, ever sued anyone who rejected their offer, should make the racketeering case a decent option.
He is also attempting to push the issue that these mass-multidefendant lawsuits are frivolous and waste the court's time - the exact charge USCG leveled against the lawyer selling DIY motions to dismiss kits. That might be fruitful too (it's the one I really want him to win).
The problem would be that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
Pro equipment currently generally holds around 32gb or so of data. 2TB is not in any way pitiful for professional equipment. At 25mb per picture (12MP D90 RAW) that's 80,000 pictures or an hour of video at 6x the resolution of 1080p video. Photographers have never been able to hold 80,000 pictures, ever. 6 hours of 1080p is pretty good too, especially since that format isn't going to change for another decade or more, at least.
Now, as to why the 2TB limit, it is almost certainly do to technical limitations and a balance between what is practical and what is possible. It may be possible to get a 64TB storage cap, but the necessary spec changes may well have made it harder to get the technology to market in a reasonable time frame and at a reasonable cost.
Also, since digital camera optics are already approaching their physical limits, and thus the size of the images aren't likely to grow very quickly, it may be a very long time before the spec needs to change again (for cameras, anyway).
Wake me up when...
Wake me up when you go fuck yourself.
God I can't stand that stupid meme!! Who the fuck cares if you like it or think it's important or whatever? This is clearly designed to allow manufacturers to increase the speed and capacity of the cameras professional photographers use in a multi-platform compatible format. It is a critical first step, unless you like being locked in to whatever memory format Sony, or Nikon, or whoever your camera manufacturer is decides to create.
A specification is necessary for multiple developers to create compatible hardware. You need to have the spec before you create the hardware or it's worthless.
Moron.
Exactly, it's a presentation format - it should be used for presentations.
It shouldn't be used for documents that need to be used for anything other than presentation.
It would be nice if PDF were a more all-around document format, but it wasn't designed that way and changing that is difficult at best.
Rich my ass, it's a mediocre jab with an unclear target followed by a solution the target is almost certainly considering.
Is he making fun of Adobe? Or Australia? If it's Adobe, the initial jab is not sarcasm, it's simply accurate. If the target is the Aussie govt., it's not effectively making fun of their decision, because they are doing exactly what the sarcastic remark suggests before the remark is made, and thus the remark makes no sense at all.
If by some chance he's actually mocking the decision to move away from PDFs (it really doesn't sound like it, the second half would make no sense), then he's an idiot.
It would be wonderful sarcasm if the Aussie govt. had just decided to use PDF exclusively in spite of poor accessibility for the blind - the target would be clear, the remark would be scathing, and the feigned ignorance of a solution would be funny, but it doesn't work at all in this case.
Seriously sarcasm seems like a lost art these days.
What does it matter that they can't read the text? PDFs aren't about content, they are about preserving the layout.
Just a guess here, but that is probably the exact reason they don't want government agencies to use PDFs for all their forms.
It is appropriate for any acronym for which the underlying meaning is no longer clearly understood by people who use the acronym.
Most people don't know that ATM means Automated Teller Machine; ATM has become the name of the machine, not just an acronym for the name, so it's appropriate to call it a machine even though it also calls itself a machine. Same with PIN, most people don't recognize it as Personal Identification Number, so it's appropriate to call it a PIN number even though it also calls itself a number.
Same with PDF, PDF is the name of the format - it's not a PD formatted document, it's a PDF formatted document.
Saying PDF format is appropriate.
The same is true for many acronyms.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons for secrecy.
One example people should be personally intimate with is voting anonymity. If votes cast were tied to the individuals casting them, then votes could easily be coerced or purchased. This completely undermines the entire democratic system.
At the same time, votes by lawmakers on bills are tied to the individual and tracked, so that the voters can hold their representatives responsible. This too is very important for an honest democratic system.
That's just an example you should be familiar with, but it proves the point that in some cases secrecy prevents corruption, while in other cases it is transparency that prevents corruption.
What Wikileaks should have done is expose those documents which show wrongdoing but leave the legitimately private documents private. That is responsible journalism. They didn't do that, however, and have almost certainly caused as much or more harm than they prevented. For example, embarrassing Iran and damaging US-Iranian relations is going to make it much more difficult to come to peaceful resolutions in times of conflict. This is almost certainly going to get more people killed than need to be.
Those figures are wrong, Bank of America only has $2.77 trillion in assets (according to WP), not $2.3 quadrillion. It should say the figures are in thousands of dollars, or drop the figures by three decimal places.
It's no different than Tony Hayward's hearing on the BP spill. The guy was six levels of management up from the accident, he never had intimate knowledge of what was done there or what may have gone wrong, all he had were reports from people who should know.
If these kinds of hearings were anything more than political rope-a-dope they would have subpoenaed the people who were intimately involved with the process. You would see engineers, accountants, and mid-level managers in the hearings instead of CEO's.
Not if the material is almost exclusively anti-US. If there is a good mix it will go a long way toward invalidating those claims, though.
When is a good time, then? There's never a time when this won't happen.
It's actually pretty easy to figure that out.
When the status quo is more painful than the pain caused by changing the status quo, it's time to change the status quo.
Attempting to do so before then is simply causing more pain that it is worth.
A lot of dirty laundry isn't corruption, it's just frank truthfulness that is embarrassing for one party, and it is good decency to keep such things private.
The US cable is a perfect example: the vast majority of the documents released were simply frank opinions of lower-level government employees about various countries' representatives and leaders. These opinions are 100% truthful, are in no way an indication of any kind of corruption, yet they should not be made public as they can damage relations with said country. Many of the documents were simply informative, and can be used to expose civilians who provided information about various organizations that actually are corrupt enough to kill that individual or his family.
The only purpose for publishing such information is to destroy someone's reputation. That is not a legitimate reason in my opinion. It's little more than spiteful gossip, and it can actually get innocent people killed.
If there was evidence of corruption in the recent releases, then publish it. There is no need to reveal every private conversation or every sensitive but irrelevant document.
The beef the GP is talking about is the fact that lately Wikileaks has only been leaking US secrets. I can guarantee there are many countries around the world guilty of much, much more corruption than the US government or US corporations, yet they seem to be getting a pass. This is what people have a problem with, and it does not in any way contradict the objection to Wikileaks's lack of discretion in what they publish.
Expose corruption - US citizens actually do want to know the specifics of their government's corruption - but use a little discretion. It is becoming clear that the purpose of Wikileaks is not to expose corruption, but to hurt the US. In my opinion that contradicts their claimed position of neutrality and claimed goal of exposing corruption worldwide.
Wouldn't it be better to just make 10 louder?
Or, you know, the oodles of trademarks the figurine infringes on (Apple logo multiple times, and iPhone likeness).
Why? He's ignorant, not insightful.
It's hard to sue someone in China (or Korea, or wherever) for infringing upon a US trademark.
US trademark applies in the US. China doesn't respect trademarks and copyright like the US does.
The essence of trademarks is that they cannot be used to impersonate a brand.
In most cases the specific industry involved is very important, but in some cases the infringing company can be in a completely different industry and still infringe.
For example, if some guy named George Apple starts a furniture business and decides to name it "Apple's Fine Furniture", then there isn't going to be any trademark infringement. It's obvious he doesn't care about Apple Inc's product image, he simply named the company after himself.
Now, if that same guy decides to make chairs that happen to look exactly like the Apple logo, then he is almost certainly guilty of trademark infringement. In that case, he is clearly trying to use Apple Inc's brand to boost his own sales.
This case would fall into the latter. The figurine maker is clearly trying to use Apple's brand to boost their own sales, and that violates trademark law. If it were just a guy on a platform in a turtle-neck holding a cell phone it would be no problem. But the Apple logo as the platform makes it clear they are attempting to profit off of Apple's brand name.
Likenesses of people are ok, as far as I am aware, but logos are not.
It's overrated because there is a thread much funnier above.
It's not that funny, others are better.
He's suspected of raping two Swedish girls, dumbass.
Heh, peach prize, wouldn't that be nice?
Peace is what I meant, obviously.
And Obama for simply not being Bush.
The Nobel Peach Prize has been a joke ever since Carter received it, and probably even before that.
A little journalistic integrity would be nice.
Assange and Wikileaks lack such integrity completely.