Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen write about this in The Science of Discworld III:
Warp drives have the same drawback as wormholes. You need exotic matter to create the gravitational repulsion needed to distort spacetime in this unusual way. Other schemes for warp drives have been proposed, which allegedly overcame this obstacle, but they have their own drawbacks.... [I]n fact, Ken Olum and others have proved that any type of warp drive [requires negative energy].
There are limits to the lifetime of any given amount of negative energy. For wormholes and warp drives these limits imply that such structures must either be very small, or else the region of negative energy must be extremely thin...
Warp drives, if anything, are worse. To travel at 10 times lightspeed (a mere Star Trek Warp Factor 2) the thickness of the bubble's wall must be 10^-32 metres. If the starship is 200 yards (200m) long, the energy required to make the bubble has to be 10 billion times the mass of the known universe.
A lot of people in this thread are completely misunderstanding the legislation. It's 70 years period. Not 70 years post-mortem. And this applies to the actual recording, not to the composition (which, as has been already mentioned, is life+70). The difference between the two is huge.
I've generally thought of hardcore in terms of depth and not breadth. A hardcore gamer is the guy who goes around and gets every item in an RPG. Then, because he wants to squeeze more out of the game, he does it again without magic. Hardore gamers are the speedrunners, the sequence breakers, and the level characters. They try to squeeze out every drop of fun that they can, generally leading the rest of us to go "really?"
Next thing you know, they're going to patent patenting. Actually, even better: they'll patent patents. At least then maybe the American government will review the law.
Honestly, I've never, EVER found them to be worth a grain of salt. When installing a product (Norton 2005 I think), it refused to activate itself. So I looked on the website. I tried everything they offered, like their "Complete Removal Tool" to do a clean reinstall, and nothing worked. So I finally broke down and went onto their online support. Their advice was EXACTLY the same as the advice I'd already been given by their website. They (plural!) couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that I had already tried everything.
I had to reinstall Windows twice to get it to work.
This is true - space-based solar power is indeed a very good (though not nearly perfect!) solution to energy needs. It also neatly solves energy locality problems - just install a receiver wherever you want, ideally. (probably not in the first version of the technology)
The downside is that importing energy from space upsets Earth's balance - but hopefully the new energy can be used to help remove some of the uneeded, less useful energy (atmospheric thermal energy, I'm looking at you).
But the potential is enormous. Coating the sunny side of the moon with solar arrays would provide something like 20 TW of power if I recall correctly - several times the total energy consumption of the Earth today.
Video games are a lot like books and, to a lesser extent, movies. I don't mind minor details. If you told me that in the next Zelda game, Ganon was in fact the one behind it all, I wouldn't be surprised (even if it wasn't immediately obvious, as in TP).
Stuff you can tell me:
Minor details.
Plot details which I have deduced or otherwise expected by the time I'm given the spoiler.
Semi-believable information in a manner that leads me to doubt its veracity.
Minor plot twists (without context) that keep me wondering when they will occur - such as saying that some character will do X unexpected action (betrayals are a great example)
The big nonos are the ending and any major plot twists. Also, subplots should count as full-on plots within themselves - they may be relatively minor, but don't give me the endings or twists to those either.
The best spoilers are the ones that leave me wondering when and how (even if) they are happen - these have to be very vague, and just pique enough interest. As I said, betrayals are always good. But some other good ones include a pacifist character killing someone intentionally, or someone doing something else totally unexpectedly. This is the sort of thing that keeps me reading/playing/watching.
Haven't you seen the ads? Mac OS X doesn't get viruses. This story is a complete fabrication, bankrolled by Microsoft, created to instil fear in The Perfect Operating System. Please link real stories next time.
Seriously. Make a new user & group. Chown a binary to that user & group. chmod ug+s the binary. Ensure you have execution permissions. Run it.
That pretty much satisfies everything in the patent - the program has a limited set of permissions associated with it that can be loaded on a per-program basis every time it executes.
I would like to apologize to everyone involved for being so judgmental, even though I never actually commented on the topic or said anything to anyone. I think I jumped to conclusions too (although the "people are stupid" doctrine continues to perform well).
If you RTFP (Read The F***ing Patent) (TM and Copyright (C) 2008 "coppro"), then you would see that it requires a "viewing surface", limiting the patent to a 2-D desktop environment. Also, my interpretation is that things can't hang in the middle, but I'm not nearly as sure about that (it's patent language, and the diagrams aren't loading).
I disagree. The video game has a double-layered fourth wall, from a narrative point of view. While it's true that the character does act according to the player's actions, there are two very definite fourth walls visible. The first is the existence of the game period, and is broken when a character instructs you to, say, press the A button, but as if it were a part of natural speech. The character's speech acknowledges the video game, but only in the sense to convey information to the player. The other manner is when the characters actually break the fourth wall (such as in Super Paper Mario, when the player is addressed as "Hey, you! Yeah, you, in front of the TV!" (quote is from memory)).
The topic is misleading; the decision made was that Bell was not unfairly discriminating aganist wholesale providers (like Teksavvy) versus their own customers. The CRTC has not yet reached a decision about the whole issue of traffic shaping in general (though they did find that Bell had enough justification to implement it against their wholesalers so as not to discriminate against direct customers). Michael Geist explains it better.
I don't know about everyone else here, but from reading TFOP, it looks like he's working for a housing developer trying to build a house that can be controlled from the client's phone (it's not clear whether they are building for a specific client or attempting to sell, but it's irrelevant). As such, the iPhone (or iPod Touch) is the worst possible platform, as the idea is clearly to provide a specific application for one client, and Apple's distribution methods simply do not allow for it. A web-based interface is surely the best, as the client then doesn't need to buy a specific phone, but I would in the near future recommend Android from a moral standpoint, to try and support it and help kick Apple's dominance (which is stupid).
The last one in list is possibly over-the-top
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
I'm a self-trained coder, and while I can Hello, World in many languages, I can't do Perl -> SQL. Perl I can do, SQL I can do, but I've never done both together.
That's just how things are.
Seriously. Read The Science of Discworld and, in particular, it's sequels (all co-authored Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart in addition to Pratchett). They (particularly #2) touch upon this subject.
The only way to invoke the notwithstanding clause is through Parliament (or in a provincial case, the Legislature). The big problem with this treaty is that by signing the treaty they can effectively bypass Parliament. They cannot invoke the notwithstanding clause without passing it through the regular channels of legislation.
It's especially bizarre, since there is no way this law could be enforced. The Supreme Court would prevent it from being enforced under the principles of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Any politician supporting this treaty would be an idiot, because he would back our country into an inescapable hole.
Paragraph 1 of the Charter says that
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. and Paragraph 8 says that
Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure. This is definitely unreasonable search and seizure, and there's no way you can justify searching private devices without cause for copyright infringement. Also note that this paragraph says "everyone", not "every citizen of Canada".
1. Add powerful new hardware (*COMPLETE*)
2. Design/steal software to automatically mirror all linked pages.
3. Hijack linked DNS entries so as to prevent slowdown due to/. effect.
4. ???
5. Profit!
But that's the fundamental flaw in belief - if Microsoft takes the right approach and is really going to throw anything and everything out the window, they stand to make a massive gain.
Example: Microsoft has better system APIs than does Apple. For an application on a Mac (with an Apple library), your choices are pretty much either Carbon or Cocoa. Cocoa only works with Objective-C code (see the recent article about them having to port Photoshop from C++ to Objective-C. This should not every happen). But Apple has chosen to make Carbon not available for 64-bit apps. Microsoft provides the C API, a C++ wrapper, and the.NET framework (which works for many different languages, such as C#). Fundamentally, Microsoft has much less of a xenophobic policy than Apple.
Microsoft has the ability to make a platform that's much more friendly to developers and users alike. They have the ability to make a secure platform, and to address flaws that have existed in the design since its inception. If the seize the opportunity and truly redesign their system, they have the ability to beat Apple at this, and also to make a platform that is appealing to Linux users. If Microsoft produces a good operating system that is useable, good to develop on, and not overly costly, I will likely dual boot because I would like it. Apple would have to fundamentally overhaul their business methods before I would enjoy using a Mac (disclaimer: I do not use many of the things that are advertised for Macs on any platform. I use the command-line almost exclusively).
Microsoft is currently experiencing a powerful internal conflict between the status quo and new technologies. People deride them for making attempts like OOXML and the open source covenants because they don't mean anything, but I don't think that's it. Many of the newer and younger programmers, developers, and researchers have used or contributed to open source. The traditional corporate hierarchy, though (read: Ballmer), have their own opinions. So we get compromises that look like half-hearted attempts at embracing new technologies. Microsoft will soon have to swing one way, and I desperately hope that it will be towards openness. IBM knows how to unite a proprietary business with an open perspective. Apple is a bit unsure, but thinks they do. Microsoft doesn't, but wants to. If they actually figure it out, they will regain their position of superiority.
Slashdot Mirror
Warp drives have the same drawback as wormholes. You need exotic matter to create the gravitational repulsion needed to distort spacetime in this unusual way. Other schemes for warp drives have been proposed, which allegedly overcame this obstacle, but they have their own drawbacks. ... [I]n fact, Ken Olum and others have proved that any type of warp drive [requires negative energy].
...
There are limits to the lifetime of any given amount of negative energy. For wormholes and warp drives these limits imply that such structures must either be very small, or else the region of negative energy must be extremely thin
Warp drives, if anything, are worse. To travel at 10 times lightspeed (a mere Star Trek Warp Factor 2) the thickness of the bubble's wall must be 10^-32 metres. If the starship is 200 yards (200m) long, the energy required to make the bubble has to be 10 billion times the mass of the known universe.
Engage.
A lot of people in this thread are completely misunderstanding the legislation. It's 70 years period. Not 70 years post-mortem. And this applies to the actual recording, not to the composition (which, as has been already mentioned, is life+70). The difference between the two is huge.
I've generally thought of hardcore in terms of depth and not breadth. A hardcore gamer is the guy who goes around and gets every item in an RPG. Then, because he wants to squeeze more out of the game, he does it again without magic. Hardore gamers are the speedrunners, the sequence breakers, and the level characters. They try to squeeze out every drop of fun that they can, generally leading the rest of us to go "really?"
Next thing you know, they're going to patent patenting. Actually, even better: they'll patent patents. At least then maybe the American government will review the law.
This is probably under one of Microsoft's "Permissive" Licenses, which is a shame, but still, this is way better than WebKit.
Microsoft: 1, Apple: 23
He got Judge Snyder, so I can't imagine he'll lose.
(seriously, the judge's name is Snyder.)
Honestly, I've never, EVER found them to be worth a grain of salt. When installing a product (Norton 2005 I think), it refused to activate itself. So I looked on the website. I tried everything they offered, like their "Complete Removal Tool" to do a clean reinstall, and nothing worked. So I finally broke down and went onto their online support. Their advice was EXACTLY the same as the advice I'd already been given by their website. They (plural!) couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that I had already tried everything.
I had to reinstall Windows twice to get it to work.
This is true - space-based solar power is indeed a very good (though not nearly perfect!) solution to energy needs. It also neatly solves energy locality problems - just install a receiver wherever you want, ideally. (probably not in the first version of the technology)
The downside is that importing energy from space upsets Earth's balance - but hopefully the new energy can be used to help remove some of the uneeded, less useful energy (atmospheric thermal energy, I'm looking at you).
But the potential is enormous. Coating the sunny side of the moon with solar arrays would provide something like 20 TW of power if I recall correctly - several times the total energy consumption of the Earth today.
Stuff you can tell me:
The big nonos are the ending and any major plot twists. Also, subplots should count as full-on plots within themselves - they may be relatively minor, but don't give me the endings or twists to those either.
The best spoilers are the ones that leave me wondering when and how (even if) they are happen - these have to be very vague, and just pique enough interest. As I said, betrayals are always good. But some other good ones include a pacifist character killing someone intentionally, or someone doing something else totally unexpectedly. This is the sort of thing that keeps me reading/playing/watching.
Haven't you seen the ads? Mac OS X doesn't get viruses. This story is a complete fabrication, bankrolled by Microsoft, created to instil fear in The Perfect Operating System. Please link real stories next time.
Seriously. Make a new user & group. Chown a binary to that user & group. chmod ug+s the binary. Ensure you have execution permissions. Run it. That pretty much satisfies everything in the patent - the program has a limited set of permissions associated with it that can be loaded on a per-program basis every time it executes.
I would like to apologize to everyone involved for being so judgmental, even though I never actually commented on the topic or said anything to anyone. I think I jumped to conclusions too (although the "people are stupid" doctrine continues to perform well).
If you RTFP (Read The F***ing Patent) (TM and Copyright (C) 2008 "coppro"), then you would see that it requires a "viewing surface", limiting the patent to a 2-D desktop environment. Also, my interpretation is that things can't hang in the middle, but I'm not nearly as sure about that (it's patent language, and the diagrams aren't loading).
I disagree. The video game has a double-layered fourth wall, from a narrative point of view. While it's true that the character does act according to the player's actions, there are two very definite fourth walls visible. The first is the existence of the game period, and is broken when a character instructs you to, say, press the A button, but as if it were a part of natural speech. The character's speech acknowledges the video game, but only in the sense to convey information to the player. The other manner is when the characters actually break the fourth wall (such as in Super Paper Mario, when the player is addressed as "Hey, you! Yeah, you, in front of the TV!" (quote is from memory)).
The topic is misleading; the decision made was that Bell was not unfairly discriminating aganist wholesale providers (like Teksavvy) versus their own customers. The CRTC has not yet reached a decision about the whole issue of traffic shaping in general (though they did find that Bell had enough justification to implement it against their wholesalers so as not to discriminate against direct customers). Michael Geist explains it better.
I don't know about everyone else here, but from reading TFOP, it looks like he's working for a housing developer trying to build a house that can be controlled from the client's phone (it's not clear whether they are building for a specific client or attempting to sell, but it's irrelevant). As such, the iPhone (or iPod Touch) is the worst possible platform, as the idea is clearly to provide a specific application for one client, and Apple's distribution methods simply do not allow for it. A web-based interface is surely the best, as the client then doesn't need to buy a specific phone, but I would in the near future recommend Android from a moral standpoint, to try and support it and help kick Apple's dominance (which is stupid).
I'm a self-trained coder, and while I can Hello, World in many languages, I can't do Perl -> SQL. Perl I can do, SQL I can do, but I've never done both together. That's just how things are.
Seriously. Read The Science of Discworld and, in particular, it's sequels (all co-authored Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart in addition to Pratchett). They (particularly #2) touch upon this subject.
The only way to invoke the notwithstanding clause is through Parliament (or in a provincial case, the Legislature). The big problem with this treaty is that by signing the treaty they can effectively bypass Parliament. They cannot invoke the notwithstanding clause without passing it through the regular channels of legislation.
Does the location really matter? This sort of business ethic is all too common (see today's posting about TJX for details).
Paragraph 1 of the Charter says that The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. and Paragraph 8 says that Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure. This is definitely unreasonable search and seizure, and there's no way you can justify searching private devices without cause for copyright infringement. Also note that this paragraph says "everyone", not "every citizen of Canada".
1. Add powerful new hardware (*COMPLETE*) /. effect.
2. Design/steal software to automatically mirror all linked pages.
3. Hijack linked DNS entries so as to prevent slowdown due to
4. ???
5. Profit!
Failure to communicate! #include <limits>
But that's the fundamental flaw in belief - if Microsoft takes the right approach and is really going to throw anything and everything out the window, they stand to make a massive gain.
.NET framework (which works for many different languages, such as C#). Fundamentally, Microsoft has much less of a xenophobic policy than Apple.
Example: Microsoft has better system APIs than does Apple. For an application on a Mac (with an Apple library), your choices are pretty much either Carbon or Cocoa. Cocoa only works with Objective-C code (see the recent article about them having to port Photoshop from C++ to Objective-C. This should not every happen). But Apple has chosen to make Carbon not available for 64-bit apps. Microsoft provides the C API, a C++ wrapper, and the
Microsoft has the ability to make a platform that's much more friendly to developers and users alike. They have the ability to make a secure platform, and to address flaws that have existed in the design since its inception. If the seize the opportunity and truly redesign their system, they have the ability to beat Apple at this, and also to make a platform that is appealing to Linux users. If Microsoft produces a good operating system that is useable, good to develop on, and not overly costly, I will likely dual boot because I would like it. Apple would have to fundamentally overhaul their business methods before I would enjoy using a Mac (disclaimer: I do not use many of the things that are advertised for Macs on any platform. I use the command-line almost exclusively).
Microsoft is currently experiencing a powerful internal conflict between the status quo and new technologies. People deride them for making attempts like OOXML and the open source covenants because they don't mean anything, but I don't think that's it. Many of the newer and younger programmers, developers, and researchers have used or contributed to open source. The traditional corporate hierarchy, though (read: Ballmer), have their own opinions. So we get compromises that look like half-hearted attempts at embracing new technologies. Microsoft will soon have to swing one way, and I desperately hope that it will be towards openness. IBM knows how to unite a proprietary business with an open perspective. Apple is a bit unsure, but thinks they do. Microsoft doesn't, but wants to. If they actually figure it out, they will regain their position of superiority.