A really hot cup of coffee out of a commercial device might hit 160.
Coffee is boiling water to which flavoring has been added. It follows that when you order a cup of coffee, you're asking for water which was very recently boiling. You are not ordering water that has been carefully chilled to a specifc temperature far below the boiling point. If you want coffee chilled to the (comparatively) frigid temperature of 160 degrees, then you should ask for that.
Face it, if the old woman had ordered boiling water that had been poured over ground coffee beans, and then casually stuck it between her legs, the court would have held her mentally incompetent, a hazard to herself, and locked her up the county mental ward.
But don't make fun of a poor old lady who got handed a little coffee grenade.
When you make an unwarranted assumption about pizza, and burn the roof of your mouth, everybody laughs. Heck, you laugh at yourself. If you sued the restaurant, the judge would laugh. The moral of this story is not that you shouldn't laugh. It's that you shouldn't go through life making assumptions with no thought to the consequences. Especially when the potential consequences are severe. If something is hot, make sure it is not *really* hot. If something pushes hard, make sure it won't squash you like a bug. Ditto for electricity, liquid fuels, acids, etc. Safely testing assumptions is quick and easy, it just takes mental effort. Nobody ever won a Darwin Award just by being stupid. They won in almost all cases by disregard for consequences.
I mean, what the heck is all this talk about "fair use"? People seem to thing they are born with all these rights... It may seen intuitive to some that when you buy a recording of music, that you're purchasing the right to the underlying sound to use however, wherever and whenever they please. What sense does this make? Where is that written?
Where is it written? Amendment I, United States Constitution:
Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
Most of the States have similar clauses in their own Constitutions. For instance, the California Constitution says:
A law may not restrain or abridge liberty of speech or press.
So even the Beautiful People's Republic of Hollywood has fair use, regardless of what the SDMI wankers say.
GCC is an aggressive 'embrace and extend' language. It puts Microsoft's Java to shame.
This is misleading -- verging on FUD -- as GCC will happily build ANSI-compliant code (AFAIK). Furthermore, most of the extensions can be easily removed to port to other compilers. True, the Linux kernel makes heavy use of extensions and would be difficult to port to something other than GCC, but that's a *very* special case.
Here's some of the extensions I find useful, so you can judge their evilness for yourself:
Varargs macros. (Makes it easy to wrap varargs functions (e.g., printf) in macros.)
Zero-length arrays. (Put one at the end of a struct, and growing the struct becomes trivial.)
Argument type checking for printf/scanf-style functions. (Compiler warns if you read a '%lf' into an 'int *'. Catching this at run time is a royal PITA.)
Maybe *you* want your languages handed down from the mighty and revered standards committee. That's fine, but don't try to keep me from using neat, helpful features.
It's perhaps time to reassess the prudence of setting up what amounts to an obituary thread on this site.
The new (well, comparatively) moderation system has handled this admirably. Just read at a threshold of 1 and you'll skip the worst trolls, except for a few before the moderators have done their work. Of course, moderators should browse at 0 or -1, and use their points carefully.
This obituary is *vastly* better than, for instance, the W. Richard Stevens article. (Damn you trolls! Damn you! May the bubonic fleas of a thousand rabid camels infest your armpits!) Look at that topic to see what trolls can accomplish with inadequate moderation. It's the topic where Tom Christiansen posted the semi-famous "Good Bye, Rich. Good Riddance, Slashdot" rant:
In my nearly two decades of habitation upon the Arpanet and its descendents, never before have I ever had the misfortune to witness so distressing a thread of messages as these. This unspeakably sickening invective against so kind a man, a man whom most of you never even knew, can have no other effect than to boggle the mind, wound the heart, and taint the soul with a nauseous stench....
By comparison, the moderation system has handled the present topic quite well. I had to go out of my way to even see the post that led to this thread. At least, I attribute it to the improved moderation system. I find it hard to believe that the trolls have gone away or reformed themselves.
Please stop pretending this is a 'community' with the kind of maturity these sorts of topics can handle. Have some respect for the dead, Rob.
Give up? Let the trolls *win*? You don't improve discussions by not talking about interesting and controversial things. You improve them by hiding bad posts, and by posting good things yourself. Sure, you'll see idiots posting nasty things, but the solution is to filter out the crap, not for all the good topics and good peope to leave.
... This means that no packets with source addresses of 198.168.1.xxx should EVER be found out on the internet at large, because nobody on the internet at large legitimately owns these addresses. . So if an ISP receives packets from an address in this range, then it is 100% guaranteed to be errant traffic...
99.99% guaranteed anyway. To conserve IP addresses and maximize laziness, upstream providers often use private addresses for internal routers and such. So you likely want to allow ICMP echo replies, TTL exceeded replies, etc. through even when they have non-routable "private" IP addrs. If you don't allow these, pings and traceroutes are somewhat less useful. And if you filter out path MTU-related packets, your connection might break in strange and wonderful ways. Of course, you *do* want to filter for TCP and UDP.
Or maybe I'm full of crap -- I'm not exactly a TCP/IP expert...
Knowing more about the tau neutrino lets you fix some parameters in the Standard Model that have NO APPLICATION in any other field.
Their experiment is *not* an academic exercise of adding a few more digits to an existing measurement. It is the conclusive discovery of a particle whose existence was implied by mathematical symmetries. It's easy to say "yeah, we expected it", but consider that conclusive failure to detect the tau neutrino would have been utterly astonishing, and would have turned all of theoretical physics inside out. If the Standard Model is wrong at high energies, it is also wrong at room temperature, and you would suspect the existence of undiscovered interesting (and useful) phenomena at room temperature.
EVERYTHING that any engineer might put into use is going to be made up of ordinary matter: i.e. protons, neutrons, electrons.
And photons. And whatever it is that causes gravity (which, BTW, is unexplained by the Standard Model). You ignore nuclear engineers, whose work is strongly and directly affected by quarks, gluons, and color charge. Not to mention the people who will be cleaning up after nuke engineers, possibly using particle beam transmuters.
And I'd wager that spacecraft engineers are rather concerned about where cosmic rays come from, what they do when they hit ordinary matter, and how likely they are. When a fully-ionized iron nucleus with the kinetic energy of a rifle bullet shows up, high energy physics suddenly seems rather relevant.
[A chemist's] life is based on what happens near ROOM TEMPERATURE where any contributions of neutrino physics are either ZERO or taken into account by the effective fields that he uses
This conveniently ignores the many uses of radioactive compounds (such as the radioactive tracers used for DNA analysis, metabolism studies, and PET scanners). These compounds are not made in billion-dollar government labs or giant reactors -- they are custom transmuted by privately owned particle accelerators in ordinary office buildings. If that's not good enough for you, how about the manufacture of radioactive cobalt for sterilizing food.
Have you ever heard of gamma ray bursts (GRBs)? Do a web search if you haven't. These things can reach halfway across the universe and ionize the Earth's atmostphere as much as the sun normally does. If we were caught in the beam of a nearby GRB, we'd be toast.
Have you heard of the solar neutrino problem? Neutrino measurements show that either the sun is going out, or that we don't understand basic physics very well. Don't know about you, but I consider Sol pretty relevant to my life.
Finally, much political power rests on mastery of nuclear power. Fast breeder reactors create strife, and military might rests in large part on nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. What do those things have in common? They're all bright neutrino sources. Discovery of a sensitive neutrino detector would give the discovering nation tremendous power. They could monitor the power levels and reaction spectra of the enemy's weapons reactors and thus tell roughly how much plutonium was being produced. And they could track all the world's submarines. A good neutrino detector would change the world as much as ICBMs did. Of course, it is likely impossible, but remember that respectable scientists once pooh-poohed nuclear power the same way.
I'm not saying we'll all put neutrino ovens in the kitchen in five years, but that doesn't mean that the research is worthless and good only for keeping scientists off the streets.
Yeah, you did. Computers are in *everything* these days. Cell phones, PDAs, pagers, games, notebooks, PCs, etc. have all been selling like hotcakes. Demand for consumer electronics has grown across the board, and component suppliers haven't kept up. Capacitors, RAM, and CPUs have particularly constrained supplies.
Try searching Digi-Key for a popular capacitor, like the Panasonic ECU-V1H104KBW, a 0.1 microfarad ceramic chip cap. "Quantity Available: 0 - Check Lead Time". Or try to find surface-mount tantalum capacitors in stock. I just tried >50 popular values, and *nothing* was in stock. The handheld electronics people have sucked them all up (cell phone designers in particular like tantalum caps). This isn't a new phenomenon -- I haven't bothered designing a tantalum cap into a board for at least six months, and the situation is only getting worse.
A few months ago, I had to redesign because a Fairchild *transistor* was unavailable. A few square mm of cheap silicon, and even it had constrained supply. <grumble> I'm starting to get bitter about having to redesign circuits because we can't get a particular part. If I find that a cheap resistor is unavailable, I'm gonna cry.;-)
And just a few days ago, a colleague told me that Atmel AVR processors will be unavailable until the end of the year. It seems one got designed into the PS2. I feel sorry for the poor bastards who bet their products on that device.
I'll second that -- Konrad Zuse's work on electromechanical computers is fascinating. He developed the first stored-program computer in Germany during WWII, with bombs falling and severe shortages of materials. (At one point he "liberated" copper from a public power line for his machine, later realizing that the police/soldiers would have killed him on the spot if they'd caught him.)
I recommend reading his autobiography The Computer - My Life. It's entertaining and informative (unlike many autobiographies).
They contained details of how to dismantle numerous nuclear weapons from U.S. and other nations' arsenals. The information is used by the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST), which is trained to respond to nuclear accidents or terrorism.
If NEST doesn't have *immediate* access to the information they need, bad things will happen, like cities being atomized or poisoned by plutonium. Encryption would add several failure points to the system, such as losing the key. Furthermore, a single bit error in encrypted data can render it all meaningless. When you're sitting next to an active nuke, "access denied" is *not* what you want to see.
On the other hand, secrecy isn't that important. The information probably didn't include full engineering drawings and instructions for building bombs, just diagrams and instructions needed for deactivating them. Besides which the open literature already tells you how to make a nuclear explosive -- obtaining the plutonium, and precision machining the fissionable core and explosive lenses are the hard parts (not to mention synchronized detonation of the conventional explosives and injection of neutrons).
There are all sorts of problems with radio receivers as well.... The bigger problem comes from a powered heterodyne radio receiver. [nice intermodulation discussion snipped]
Heterodyne receivers aren't the only problem. The current-generation of power transistors are rather wideband and can up/down-convert signals. These transistors are found in DC-DC converters, notebook backlight power supplies, hard disk motor drivers, and so forth. Most gadgets larger than a Palm have some sort of switched power circuit in them. The transistors aren't as wideband as those in radio receivers, but they can still cause problems.
This isn't theoretical either. A while back, we had to diagnose an odd problem with a pager system. There were actually two paging transmitters, and two sets of pagers, on different frequencies about 60 kHz apart. Occasionally, one set of pagers would receive something that had been broadcast on *the other frequency*. It turned out to be a computer monitor: the RF from one transmitter was getting into the monitor, being mixed with the ~60 kHz horizontal frequency, and reradiated 60 kHz up and down from the carrier. You could tune the effect by going into the Windows settings and changing the refresh rate. We engineers all thought it was pretty funny. The users, of course, were less amused.
I'll remember to call you next time I need someone to shovel snow off my roof so my solar panels can see the sun.
Not an issue for peak-load-reduction on the hottest summer afternoons. Utilities *hate* high peak loads -- they have to buy expensive equipment that sits idle most of time. Anything that helps with load peaks will have political support on several fronts.
I'm afraid I don't have the numbers at my fingertips, so I cannot check on your claimed 20 year longevity.
I pulled that number out of the air anyway.;-)
However, I do see a Britannica article that points out that one needs 40sq m of solar panels per person per day, even in sunny regions.
Estimates like that assume current-generation appliances and building construction. But most currently deployed household systems are energy hogs:
Much lighting is incandescent bulbs
Warm water is sent down the drain without preheating incoming water
Outgoing air is exhausted without equilibrating with incoming air
Most appliances are woefully inefficient, especially when quiescent (Touch most any small gadget, like a clock/radio or a VCR. It will be warm, wasting a watt or two continuously. A household with the usual complement of clocks, microwaves, VCRs and so forth wastes a few dozen watts 24x7.)
Your use of ICs as an analogy is poor.
Semiconductor fabrication is semiconductor fabrication. Photovoltaics is just another family with unique challenges, like SRAM, DRAM, flash, bipolar, analog, MEMS, etc. The only difference is that people haven't poured billions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-years into PV. If PV does take off, companies will fight to make the most progress, in the same way that Intel and AMD are now fighting to see who can build billion dollar fabs the fastest. If that ever happens (a big if), then PV technology will advance at a breathtaking pace. Judging from the size of the existing energy industry, there will be plenty of money available if PV does snowball. The only question is whether it will get over that hump.
And don't forget that practical PV energy depends on converters (DC-to-DC and DC-to-AC), which in turn depend on power transistor technology. The last few years have seen radical improvements in power transistors. UPSes use the same technology as PV inverters. They used to be expensive and rare -- now you can get one for $89.
Theory is nice, but changing the world needs more than a few nice theoretical numbers.
You mean like the people who are already running on PV electricity? I'm not saying solar power is the wave of the future. It's just that we could go all-solar if we had to. It would be painful, there would be much bitching and moaning, but the human race could do it. The technology is already borderline viable, waiting for an opportunity to grow the market. The alternatives are things like fission reactors (nasty habit of sterilizing cities), or fusion reactors (nobody knows how to make one).
Cell phones put out about 1 W of radio power. In typical circuits, that means about 5 volts of signal. That's more than enough to upset many circuits.
So why not just shield everything? Because shielding is expensive and unreliable. The New Scientist article referred to "Faraday cages", but that's *grossly* inaccurate, since a Faraday cage only provides electrostatic shielding (by surrounding the circuit with metal). Real shielding involves seamless metal enclosures. The important thing is *seamless*. Suppose you have a perfect seamless metal box. It's a perfect Faraday cage and a good radio shield -- cell phones will not interfere with anything inside it. If you cut a narrow 0.1mmX15cm slot in it, it will still be a very good Faraday cage, but it will be a *terrible* shield. Radio waves will "shine" right through, despite the narrowness of the slot.
And in the real world, seams and slots are hard to avoid. If a panel isn't properly screwed down or has the wrong type of gasket, radio waves will go right through. If someone yanks on a shielded cable, the shield can invisibly separate within the connector, and actually end up worse than no shield at all. So you just test the shielding, right?. Wrong! Shielding is almost impossible to test. Short of *laboriously* testing every single box and cable with a signal strength meter, you can't test shielding. I would guess that testing all the shielding in an airplane would take a few hundred hours of a radio engineer's time. Nobody could afford to do that on every plane every few years. Since shielding is *never* perfect after a few years of service, and you can't really test it, it's prudent to ban powerful transmitters in the plane.
I also suspect that the superstructure of the planes act to channel the signal along the length of the plane rather than merely radiating uniformly out from the plane itself.
Absolutely correct. The metal structures of the plane will guide the radio energy to surprising and unpredictable locations. The upshot is that a cell phone in the front of the passenger cabin might send much of its power to an electronics unit at the back of the plane. With radio waves, power doesn't necessarily drop off much with distance, especially in a reflective environment. If you allow a 1 watt transmitter anywhere in the plane, you have to design the plane to withstand 1 watt delievered anywhere.
Sunlight, of course, confers only so much power per square ft.... Photovoltaics are horribly inefficient
To first approximation, the power of sunlight is 1kW/m^2. Assuming a very pessimistic 5% efficiency (10% being realistic, and 20% being optimistic), the electrical power is 50W/m^2.
Powering any significant number of consumers would require way more land than is politically feasible.
Much power is used by single story family dwellings. Assume a typical house has a roof of 10m X 10m. The area is 100m^2. At 50W/m^2, that is 5kW of available power, more than enough to run a respectable air conditioner. Since peak air conditioning load coincides with peak sunlight, it's a winning situation. Electric utilities *love* techniques that reduce peak load.
Electricity from solar panels is a loser.... A physicist friend told me that it took more energy to manufacture photovoltaic cells than they would generate over their expected lifetime.
Let's switch to the realistic 10% efficiency figure. Our hypothetcial 5kW@5% house becomes 10kW@10%. Suppose it only gets 5 hours of sunlight a day (clouds, shade from trees, etc). Over a 20 year lifetime, the total energy output would be 365MW*h (megawatt-hours). At a market price of $70/(MW*h), the total value of generated electricity is $25,000. Do you really think that manufacturing solar panels for a house costs $25,000 *in electricity alone*?! With labor, other materials, profit margin, and installation costs, the retail price would be $50k to $100k! In reality, people are putting in *complete* systems including wiring, inverters, and batteries for $25k, and using that as their sole source of power!
And you ignore that solar panels are expensive for the same reason that computers used to be expensive: poor economy of scale. Thirty years ago, a puny microcontroller cost a hundred dollars. Today you can get a powerful CPU for a hundred dollars. This year alone the world's fabs will make hundreds of square meters of sub-0.25-micron ICs.
When solar *really* takes off (the way cars and microwave ovens and VCRs did), expect tremendous advances in price and performance. Right now it's a chicken & egg problem: PV cells will be cheap if everyone buys them, but no one will buy them because they are expensive. Just like computers and cars, the move toward mass-market will be gradual, and will be lead by people with plenty of disposable money. In retrospect, it's obvious that the telephone and the car had to be winners, but at the time it was not obvious how -- or even if -- they would win. I think solar power is the same way, and that increasing fuel prices and global warming could make solar take off shockingly fast. On the other hand it could fizzle. Such are the dangers of punditry...
True. But liquid water floating in space before any planets formed, and depositing salt crystals, is rather more interesting than molecular gas clouds. Sure they have water -- a few dozen molecules per cubic centimeter. The article was about *liquid* water, and bucketfuls of it, in space And that is pretty amazing.
BTW, Here's the link to CNN's article on the same topic.
To get their number, they added the current best guess of the Solar system's age to a reasonable guess about the crystal's life before that. The important point is that the crystal is very old -- it crystallized from liquid a few hundred million years after the supernova that formed the solar system.
Here's how they figured that out. First of all, it's generally assumed that the solar system was formed from the debris of a supernova. Supernovae are incredibly energetic explosions of huge stars -- by comparison, the core of the sun is an ice cube. The violence and energy creates pretty much every possible atom: iron, zirconium, uranium, and even weirdies like iodine-129.
Second, from laboratory experiments, we know that iodine-129 is radioactive, and that it decays at a certain rate. After a few hundred million years, it will almost all decay into xenon-129. On cosmic time scales, that's fast.
Third, xenon is a "noble gas", in the same family as helium, neon, argon, etc. Noble gases are very chemically stable: except for a few exotic compounds, they don't form molecules with other atoms. Therefore they are very flighty, and diffuse right out of liquids. (Helium is so diffusive that it can be separated from other gases by diffusing it through solid metal!) So if you find xenon atoms inside a crystal, they had to be put there *after* the crystal became solid.
Well, they found xenon-129 inside their meteorite salt crystal. Putting the above theorems together, they deduced that there was *liquid water* present shortly (shortly in a cosmic sense) after the supernova that formed the solar system (the think the crystal formed in water solution).
Further evidence of the great age of the salt crystal is its purple color. It probably started off as a colorless, translucent crystal, just like everyday table salt. But over time, radiation knocks atoms out of the crystal lattice, leaving "defects" that have color. It's also seen here on Earth, in salt crystals that have been buried without recrystallizing for enormous periods of time.
I'm not sure I buy their hypothesis that the crystal was deposited by water. It is possible to melt salt by itself at reasonable temperatures. Of course, IANAG (I am not a geologist). And even if it wasn't water, the crystal is still fabulously old.
Assuming it was deposited by liquid water, it's a wonderful discovery. It means that life could possibly exist between the stars, without need for a stable system of planets, since all known life requires liquid water. And supernovae are fairly common through the universe, so there's a lot of possible life out there. I'm sure the science fiction writers are already thinking up how to work this into a story...
I'm for the HTML based plan like ATVEF, since it has all the advantages of an established standard. Plenty of creation tools, few intellectual property issues, and plenty of people that know how to code it.
Those proposing new display engines (usually based on Java) point to the limitations of HTML and XML as unsuitable for use on television.
HTML/XML is also more accessible to people with vision and cognitive disorders, since it's basically text that the client can interpret however they will. Pardon my language, but how the *fuck* do they expect to do large fonts, alternate colors, and speech synthesis on *Java*. If they put in all the hooks to do this well, they'll end up with the OS/360 of content development.
Plus, you can do Babelfish-style translation of the content with HTML/XML. Again pardon my language, but how the *fuck* is anybody supposed to translate Java bytecodes from English to Spanish. Sure, English is used a lot all over the world, but I imagine Hollywood still gets significant revenues from dubbing movies and TV programs into other languages. With Java, they have to translate the source and recompile for every language. Even if they wanted to bear the expense, the configuration management issues are formidable.
And how can Java be indexed by the search engines? Much of any media company's value is in their archives. By using Java, they lock their product up where people can't find it to buy. Java either costs sales, or you have to pay to recreate the information in a form that *is* indexable. In other words, they've gotta have a web page (or the equivalent) replicating the content.
Instead of using pure Java, I think they ought to use an HTML/Java combination. First, they would extend and/or clarify HTML so that it rendered consistently (standard table behavior and standard font sizes). The biggest problem with HTML is that basic things like tables are wildly different across existing browsers. Simply codifying how tables, images, fonts, and styles display for the TV Browser Standard would be the most important step. Most stuff, like National Geographic supplemental information and football player stats, would be well-handled by HTML.
They would use Java plug-ins for the truly unusual stuff. For instance, the zoomable-spinnable-interactive-3D-instant-sports-r eplay would be Java.
(Does this remind anybody else of the "Would you like to know more?" bits from the Starship Troopers movie?)
Researchers at the University of Texas are suing McAfee and Symantec, noted anti-computer-virus companies, for restraint of trade and industrial sabotage. "We're getting horrible yields at all our domestic fabs because of those bastards," said chemist Angela M. Belcher of the University of Texas at Austin. "It just isn't fair for them to blatently interfere with our manufacturing process like this. If it doesn't stop, we'll have to take matters into our own hands, and design nanites that turn their CEO's brains into cheerios!"
Or they could discuss their requirements publicly so that everyone has the same access to the information.
That would be simple, and arguably OK. But that won't happen. To avoid the slightest hint of collusion, there will have to be
Lawyers reviewing everything
Notarizations, attestations, signatures, and endless paperwork
Two separate, nominally independent organizations for handling the paperwork. One will handle OS-to-Office communication, and the other will handle Office-to-OS communication.
No personal contact. Designers who formerly worked across the hall from each other won't be able to go out to lunch together without a lawyer present.
All work with external business partners will be impacted similarly.
Helpful Usenet postings might even be banned, unless they can guarantee full propagation. (Good luck there!) Employees will be fired, fined, or imprisoned for accidentally talking to the wrong person. It is absurd to make professionals work in that environment.
The DoJ and the court are simply ignorant of the practical ramifications their decisions will have. In fact, they think they know so much about engineering organizations that they don't even need to listen to Microsoft's outside witnesses. Imagine trying to break Linux development up into the Kernel-Mode Division and the Userland Division, with an insulation layer of attorneys and judges in between, and without allowing Linus Torvalds or Bill Joy to speak. Thirty-seven hackers would be found dead the next day from laughter. But that's what the DoJ/court proposed for Microsoft, with a straight face. And they truly, sincerely think it is OK. They're so far off in their own imaginary world that Jesus Christ himself couldn't find them with a telescope.
Office/OS "collusion" didn't even break the law. What broke the law was the discriminatory, anti-competitive contracts. Simply making Microsoft offer the same terms to all customers (e.g., $300/MS-Office for quantity 1, $270/MS-Office for quantity 100, etc.) would have eliminated the bulk of their anticompetitive behavior. Making them publish APIs for advertised features would have eliminated most of the rest.
I think it's a bad precedent, and people are happy just because Microsoft is being shit on. But free speech includes the right *not* to speak, to keep trade secrets and confidences. When the attorney for the United States decides that you've been "anti-competitive" by not publishing something, you'll change your tune.
Try to remember that this is not a negotiation of some kind. Microsoft is being punished.
It's *not* punishment. It is a remedy for behavior detrimental to consumers. Punishment means fines, or imprisonment of corporate officers, not modifying business practices.
2) The 2 NewCo. may not recombine, enter into Joint Ventures, provide APIs to each other that are not available to other ISVs.. or basically collude.
Suppose OfficeCo needs a new type of interprocess communication, to better support object embedding (just as an example). How're they supposed to do this without "colluding" with OSCo? Lots of paperwork, laywers, and disclosures, that's how.
This is supposed to make better products at better prices?
Microsoft shall disclose to ISVs, IHVs, and OEMs in a Timely Manner, in whatever media Microsoft disseminates such information to its own personnel, all APIs
<snort> Has anybody tried getting useful information from the MSDN Knowledge Base? Cramming every available document and function header in there will make matters worse, not better. Especially since, in many cases, the specification consists of "what that piece of code does".
5) Microsoft shall not take any action that it knows will interfere with or degrade the performance of any non-Microsoft Middleware when interoperating with any Windows Operating System Product
Since when were non-backwards-compatible interfaces in Microsoft products *intentional*? Judge Jackson is attributing conditions to villainy that result simply from stupidity.
6) MS has to create an internal position to monitor antitrust compliance within the company
With the fall of the USSR, the free world's bureaucrats have gotten lazy and out of shape. The MSFT breakup is really a DoD project to mainain a cadre of trained bureaucrats.
I have no idea where you're getting this 1.5k ohms as body resistance
1.5 kohm sounds about right. That's *body* resistance, measured with a good connection to internal fluids. Of course, most of us don't implant electrodes to measure this.;-) You were measuring *skin* resistance, which depends on many things, including saltiness, moistness, skin thickness, and skin composition. With small electrodes on dry skin, it measures anywhere from 100 kohm to >100 Mohm.
Try repeating your measurements, but with reduced skin resistance. Make each electrode a big wire, one of which is squeezed in each hand. And drench the contacting skin with salt water. I just did this and got 20 kohm. And the skin is *still* a significant impediment to current. So a 1.5 kohm body resistance is reasonable.
... 60Hz will penetrate the skin more than straight DC along the surface...
Nope. The skin effect (unrelated to human skin, BTW) is mostly negligible at 60 Hz. At 60 Hz, it's only important for huge generators dealing with thousands of amps of current.
"Put your arm in it!" When I did so I didn't feel anything at first... all the muscles in my arm (fingers, wrist, forearm, all of them) started to flex and unflex because of the current flow.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. It's things like this that earn Darwin Awards. A portion of the current was certainly flowing through your heart. It just wasn't enough to cause immediate cardiac arrest. And this is the most dangerous situation possible, because your heart may have been silently damaged. Plenty of people have gotten shocked, counted their blessings for not being killed, gone home at the end of the work day, and quietly died in their sleep from delayed heart failure. A quick trip to the friendly emergency room cariologist will show any subtle injury to the heart -- the heart's electrical waveform usually changes significantly when it is seriously injured (AFIK).
"Hmmm", says the Bastard Operator from Hell. "It looks like I need to help this poor soul"
Get a spare power cord, cut the "computer" end off, and strip the wires about 1 cm. There will be three wires: a green one, a white one, and a black one. This is your new power cord.
In the middle of the existing cord, cut off about 10 cm of the jacket.
In the unjacketed section, strip about 1 cm of insulation off each wire.
Connect the wires of the new cord to the existing power cord (matching colors), and solder them in place. Be sure to use an ungrounded, isolated soldering iron.
Plug the UPS into the wall.
Plug the spare cord into the UPS.
Unplug the existing cord from the wall.
You're done! Sit back and enjoy your uptime!
You may notice some sparking and/or electrocution. This is normal, although you may wish to leave the work to a licensed electrician if you have an aversion to discorporation.
If in a given instance, they can be coerced by such tactics into removing the account they find so offensive, then the message sent is "blackmail us and we'll cave."
A clarification: it isn't blackmail. It is extortion -- the threat or use of illegal methods to obtain desired behavior.
In this case, the DOSer is restraining lawful free speech, by obstructing the instrument of speech. In the U.S. at least, this violates the constitution and statutes. And many U.S. states have their own laws protecting free speech, so it's illegal on more than one level. It's no different than threatening to blow up a newspaper's presses if they accept certain advertisements.
IANAL, so I'll throw out some legal questions. First, by suspending the account is the ISP colluding with the criminal in a restraint of speech and/or trade? Second, is the ISP therefore a criminal conspirator in the restraint of speech/trade violation? Third, do the ISPs actions make it liable/culpable under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization act (RICO). I'm no expert, but I've heard that RICO is a powerful and flexible law, which can be applied under a variety of circumstances. They used it against Martin Luther King, Jr., of all people, so using it for a clear violation of law should be easy.
1) See if Hemos and Commander Taco are secretly plotting to buy openCola with the windfall profits they accrued from selling Hemos' sister to the Sultan of Brunei;
Or this little gem in the boilerplate:
WARRANTIES OF TITLE, NONINFRINGEMENT OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND RIGHT ABOUT NOW, THE FUNK SOULBROTHER, CHECK IT OUT, THE FUNK SOUL BROTHER. NO ADVICE OR INFORMATION GIVEN BY STEELBRIDGE SHALL CREATE ANY WARRANTY AND IF YOU BELIEVE THAT YOU'RE ABOUT AS DUMB AS A BAG OF HAMMERS.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of openCOLA! It could quench the thirstiest finite-element analysis researcher!
If it doesn't compile, then it isn't source code. That's kinda the definition of source code. The whole point of the GPL is so the user can recompile the program. If they leave out anything (other than standard compilers, header files, and so forth), then they're violating the GPL.
WRT the second point, of course the GPL doesn't affect all the company's sources. Just the sources for binaries derived from GPLed code.
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Coffee is boiling water to which flavoring has been added. It follows that when you order a cup of coffee, you're asking for water which was very recently boiling. You are not ordering water that has been carefully chilled to a specifc temperature far below the boiling point. If you want coffee chilled to the (comparatively) frigid temperature of 160 degrees, then you should ask for that.
Face it, if the old woman had ordered boiling water that had been poured over ground coffee beans, and then casually stuck it between her legs, the court would have held her mentally incompetent, a hazard to herself, and locked her up the county mental ward.
When you make an unwarranted assumption about pizza, and burn the roof of your mouth, everybody laughs. Heck, you laugh at yourself. If you sued the restaurant, the judge would laugh. The moral of this story is not that you shouldn't laugh. It's that you shouldn't go through life making assumptions with no thought to the consequences. Especially when the potential consequences are severe. If something is hot, make sure it is not *really* hot. If something pushes hard, make sure it won't squash you like a bug. Ditto for electricity, liquid fuels, acids, etc. Safely testing assumptions is quick and easy, it just takes mental effort. Nobody ever won a Darwin Award just by being stupid. They won in almost all cases by disregard for consequences.
Where is it written? Amendment I, United States Constitution:
Most of the States have similar clauses in their own Constitutions. For instance, the California Constitution says:
So even the Beautiful People's Republic of Hollywood has fair use, regardless of what the SDMI wankers say.This is misleading -- verging on FUD -- as GCC will happily build ANSI-compliant code (AFAIK). Furthermore, most of the extensions can be easily removed to port to other compilers. True, the Linux kernel makes heavy use of extensions and would be difficult to port to something other than GCC, but that's a *very* special case.
Here's some of the extensions I find useful, so you can judge their evilness for yourself:
Maybe *you* want your languages handed down from the mighty and revered standards committee. That's fine, but don't try to keep me from using neat, helpful features.
99.99% guaranteed anyway. To conserve IP addresses and maximize laziness, upstream providers often use private addresses for internal routers and such. So you likely want to allow ICMP echo replies, TTL exceeded replies, etc. through even when they have non-routable "private" IP addrs. If you don't allow these, pings and traceroutes are somewhat less useful. And if you filter out path MTU-related packets, your connection might break in strange and wonderful ways. Of course, you *do* want to filter for TCP and UDP.
Or maybe I'm full of crap -- I'm not exactly a TCP/IP expert...
Their experiment is *not* an academic exercise of adding a few more digits to an existing measurement. It is the conclusive discovery of a particle whose existence was implied by mathematical symmetries. It's easy to say "yeah, we expected it", but consider that conclusive failure to detect the tau neutrino would have been utterly astonishing, and would have turned all of theoretical physics inside out. If the Standard Model is wrong at high energies, it is also wrong at room temperature, and you would suspect the existence of undiscovered interesting (and useful) phenomena at room temperature.
And photons. And whatever it is that causes gravity (which, BTW, is unexplained by the Standard Model). You ignore nuclear engineers, whose work is strongly and directly affected by quarks, gluons, and color charge. Not to mention the people who will be cleaning up after nuke engineers, possibly using particle beam transmuters.
And I'd wager that spacecraft engineers are rather concerned about where cosmic rays come from, what they do when they hit ordinary matter, and how likely they are. When a fully-ionized iron nucleus with the kinetic energy of a rifle bullet shows up, high energy physics suddenly seems rather relevant.
This conveniently ignores the many uses of radioactive compounds (such as the radioactive tracers used for DNA analysis, metabolism studies, and PET scanners). These compounds are not made in billion-dollar government labs or giant reactors -- they are custom transmuted by privately owned particle accelerators in ordinary office buildings. If that's not good enough for you, how about the manufacture of radioactive cobalt for sterilizing food.
Have you ever heard of gamma ray bursts (GRBs)? Do a web search if you haven't. These things can reach halfway across the universe and ionize the Earth's atmostphere as much as the sun normally does. If we were caught in the beam of a nearby GRB, we'd be toast.
Have you heard of the solar neutrino problem? Neutrino measurements show that either the sun is going out, or that we don't understand basic physics very well. Don't know about you, but I consider Sol pretty relevant to my life.
Finally, much political power rests on mastery of nuclear power. Fast breeder reactors create strife, and military might rests in large part on nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. What do those things have in common? They're all bright neutrino sources. Discovery of a sensitive neutrino detector would give the discovering nation tremendous power. They could monitor the power levels and reaction spectra of the enemy's weapons reactors and thus tell roughly how much plutonium was being produced. And they could track all the world's submarines. A good neutrino detector would change the world as much as ICBMs did. Of course, it is likely impossible, but remember that respectable scientists once pooh-poohed nuclear power the same way.
I'm not saying we'll all put neutrino ovens in the kitchen in five years, but that doesn't mean that the research is worthless and good only for keeping scientists off the streets.
Yeah, you did. Computers are in *everything* these days. Cell phones, PDAs, pagers, games, notebooks, PCs, etc. have all been selling like hotcakes. Demand for consumer electronics has grown across the board, and component suppliers haven't kept up. Capacitors, RAM, and CPUs have particularly constrained supplies.
Try searching Digi-Key for a popular capacitor, like the Panasonic ECU-V1H104KBW, a 0.1 microfarad ceramic chip cap. "Quantity Available: 0 - Check Lead Time". Or try to find surface-mount tantalum capacitors in stock. I just tried >50 popular values, and *nothing* was in stock. The handheld electronics people have sucked them all up (cell phone designers in particular like tantalum caps). This isn't a new phenomenon -- I haven't bothered designing a tantalum cap into a board for at least six months, and the situation is only getting worse.
A few months ago, I had to redesign because a Fairchild *transistor* was unavailable. A few square mm of cheap silicon, and even it had constrained supply. <grumble> I'm starting to get bitter about having to redesign circuits because we can't get a particular part. If I find that a cheap resistor is unavailable, I'm gonna cry. ;-)
And just a few days ago, a colleague told me that Atmel AVR processors will be unavailable until the end of the year. It seems one got designed into the PS2. I feel sorry for the poor bastards who bet their products on that device.
I'll second that -- Konrad Zuse's work on electromechanical computers is fascinating. He developed the first stored-program computer in Germany during WWII, with bombs falling and severe shortages of materials. (At one point he "liberated" copper from a public power line for his machine, later realizing that the police/soldiers would have killed him on the spot if they'd caught him.)
I recommend reading his autobiography The Computer - My Life . It's entertaining and informative (unlike many autobiographies).
To quote from CNN:
If NEST doesn't have *immediate* access to the information they need, bad things will happen, like cities being atomized or poisoned by plutonium. Encryption would add several failure points to the system, such as losing the key. Furthermore, a single bit error in encrypted data can render it all meaningless. When you're sitting next to an active nuke, "access denied" is *not* what you want to see.
On the other hand, secrecy isn't that important. The information probably didn't include full engineering drawings and instructions for building bombs, just diagrams and instructions needed for deactivating them. Besides which the open literature already tells you how to make a nuclear explosive -- obtaining the plutonium, and precision machining the fissionable core and explosive lenses are the hard parts (not to mention synchronized detonation of the conventional explosives and injection of neutrons).
There are all sorts of problems with radio receivers as well. ... The bigger problem comes from a powered heterodyne radio receiver. [nice intermodulation discussion snipped]
Heterodyne receivers aren't the only problem. The current-generation of power transistors are rather wideband and can up/down-convert signals. These transistors are found in DC-DC converters, notebook backlight power supplies, hard disk motor drivers, and so forth. Most gadgets larger than a Palm have some sort of switched power circuit in them. The transistors aren't as wideband as those in radio receivers, but they can still cause problems.
This isn't theoretical either. A while back, we had to diagnose an odd problem with a pager system. There were actually two paging transmitters, and two sets of pagers, on different frequencies about 60 kHz apart. Occasionally, one set of pagers would receive something that had been broadcast on *the other frequency*. It turned out to be a computer monitor: the RF from one transmitter was getting into the monitor, being mixed with the ~60 kHz horizontal frequency, and reradiated 60 kHz up and down from the carrier. You could tune the effect by going into the Windows settings and changing the refresh rate. We engineers all thought it was pretty funny. The users, of course, were less amused.
Not an issue for peak-load-reduction on the hottest summer afternoons. Utilities *hate* high peak loads -- they have to buy expensive equipment that sits idle most of time. Anything that helps with load peaks will have political support on several fronts.
I pulled that number out of the air anyway. ;-)
Estimates like that assume current-generation appliances and building construction. But most currently deployed household systems are energy hogs:
Semiconductor fabrication is semiconductor fabrication. Photovoltaics is just another family with unique challenges, like SRAM, DRAM, flash, bipolar, analog, MEMS, etc. The only difference is that people haven't poured billions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-years into PV. If PV does take off, companies will fight to make the most progress, in the same way that Intel and AMD are now fighting to see who can build billion dollar fabs the fastest. If that ever happens (a big if), then PV technology will advance at a breathtaking pace. Judging from the size of the existing energy industry, there will be plenty of money available if PV does snowball. The only question is whether it will get over that hump.
And don't forget that practical PV energy depends on converters (DC-to-DC and DC-to-AC), which in turn depend on power transistor technology. The last few years have seen radical improvements in power transistors. UPSes use the same technology as PV inverters. They used to be expensive and rare -- now you can get one for $89.
You mean like the people who are already running on PV electricity? I'm not saying solar power is the wave of the future. It's just that we could go all-solar if we had to. It would be painful, there would be much bitching and moaning, but the human race could do it. The technology is already borderline viable, waiting for an opportunity to grow the market. The alternatives are things like fission reactors (nasty habit of sterilizing cities), or fusion reactors (nobody knows how to make one).
Cell phones put out about 1 W of radio power. In typical circuits, that means about 5 volts of signal. That's more than enough to upset many circuits.
So why not just shield everything? Because shielding is expensive and unreliable. The New Scientist article referred to "Faraday cages", but that's *grossly* inaccurate, since a Faraday cage only provides electrostatic shielding (by surrounding the circuit with metal). Real shielding involves seamless metal enclosures. The important thing is *seamless*. Suppose you have a perfect seamless metal box. It's a perfect Faraday cage and a good radio shield -- cell phones will not interfere with anything inside it. If you cut a narrow 0.1mmX15cm slot in it, it will still be a very good Faraday cage, but it will be a *terrible* shield. Radio waves will "shine" right through, despite the narrowness of the slot.
And in the real world, seams and slots are hard to avoid. If a panel isn't properly screwed down or has the wrong type of gasket, radio waves will go right through. If someone yanks on a shielded cable, the shield can invisibly separate within the connector, and actually end up worse than no shield at all. So you just test the shielding, right?. Wrong! Shielding is almost impossible to test. Short of *laboriously* testing every single box and cable with a signal strength meter, you can't test shielding. I would guess that testing all the shielding in an airplane would take a few hundred hours of a radio engineer's time. Nobody could afford to do that on every plane every few years. Since shielding is *never* perfect after a few years of service, and you can't really test it, it's prudent to ban powerful transmitters in the plane.
Absolutely correct. The metal structures of the plane will guide the radio energy to surprising and unpredictable locations. The upshot is that a cell phone in the front of the passenger cabin might send much of its power to an electronics unit at the back of the plane. With radio waves, power doesn't necessarily drop off much with distance, especially in a reflective environment. If you allow a 1 watt transmitter anywhere in the plane, you have to design the plane to withstand 1 watt delievered anywhere.
To first approximation, the power of sunlight is 1kW/m^2. Assuming a very pessimistic 5% efficiency (10% being realistic, and 20% being optimistic), the electrical power is 50W/m^2.
Much power is used by single story family dwellings. Assume a typical house has a roof of 10m X 10m. The area is 100m^2. At 50W/m^2, that is 5kW of available power, more than enough to run a respectable air conditioner. Since peak air conditioning load coincides with peak sunlight, it's a winning situation. Electric utilities *love* techniques that reduce peak load.
Let's switch to the realistic 10% efficiency figure. Our hypothetcial 5kW@5% house becomes 10kW@10%. Suppose it only gets 5 hours of sunlight a day (clouds, shade from trees, etc). Over a 20 year lifetime, the total energy output would be 365MW*h (megawatt-hours). At a market price of $70/(MW*h), the total value of generated electricity is $25,000. Do you really think that manufacturing solar panels for a house costs $25,000 *in electricity alone*?! With labor, other materials, profit margin, and installation costs, the retail price would be $50k to $100k! In reality, people are putting in *complete* systems including wiring, inverters, and batteries for $25k, and using that as their sole source of power!
And you ignore that solar panels are expensive for the same reason that computers used to be expensive: poor economy of scale. Thirty years ago, a puny microcontroller cost a hundred dollars. Today you can get a powerful CPU for a hundred dollars. This year alone the world's fabs will make hundreds of square meters of sub-0.25-micron ICs.
When solar *really* takes off (the way cars and microwave ovens and VCRs did), expect tremendous advances in price and performance. Right now it's a chicken & egg problem: PV cells will be cheap if everyone buys them, but no one will buy them because they are expensive. Just like computers and cars, the move toward mass-market will be gradual, and will be lead by people with plenty of disposable money. In retrospect, it's obvious that the telephone and the car had to be winners, but at the time it was not obvious how -- or even if -- they would win. I think solar power is the same way, and that increasing fuel prices and global warming could make solar take off shockingly fast. On the other hand it could fizzle. Such are the dangers of punditry...
True. But liquid water floating in space before any planets formed, and depositing salt crystals, is rather more interesting than molecular gas clouds. Sure they have water -- a few dozen molecules per cubic centimeter. The article was about *liquid* water, and bucketfuls of it, in space And that is pretty amazing.
BTW, Here's the link to CNN's article on the same topic.
To get their number, they added the current best guess of the Solar system's age to a reasonable guess about the crystal's life before that. The important point is that the crystal is very old -- it crystallized from liquid a few hundred million years after the supernova that formed the solar system.
Here's how they figured that out. First of all, it's generally assumed that the solar system was formed from the debris of a supernova. Supernovae are incredibly energetic explosions of huge stars -- by comparison, the core of the sun is an ice cube. The violence and energy creates pretty much every possible atom: iron, zirconium, uranium, and even weirdies like iodine-129.
Second, from laboratory experiments, we know that iodine-129 is radioactive, and that it decays at a certain rate. After a few hundred million years, it will almost all decay into xenon-129. On cosmic time scales, that's fast.
Third, xenon is a "noble gas", in the same family as helium, neon, argon, etc. Noble gases are very chemically stable: except for a few exotic compounds, they don't form molecules with other atoms. Therefore they are very flighty, and diffuse right out of liquids. (Helium is so diffusive that it can be separated from other gases by diffusing it through solid metal!) So if you find xenon atoms inside a crystal, they had to be put there *after* the crystal became solid.
Well, they found xenon-129 inside their meteorite salt crystal. Putting the above theorems together, they deduced that there was *liquid water* present shortly (shortly in a cosmic sense) after the supernova that formed the solar system (the think the crystal formed in water solution).
Further evidence of the great age of the salt crystal is its purple color. It probably started off as a colorless, translucent crystal, just like everyday table salt. But over time, radiation knocks atoms out of the crystal lattice, leaving "defects" that have color. It's also seen here on Earth, in salt crystals that have been buried without recrystallizing for enormous periods of time.
I'm not sure I buy their hypothesis that the crystal was deposited by water. It is possible to melt salt by itself at reasonable temperatures. Of course, IANAG (I am not a geologist). And even if it wasn't water, the crystal is still fabulously old.
Assuming it was deposited by liquid water, it's a wonderful discovery. It means that life could possibly exist between the stars, without need for a stable system of planets, since all known life requires liquid water. And supernovae are fairly common through the universe, so there's a lot of possible life out there. I'm sure the science fiction writers are already thinking up how to work this into a story...
HTML/XML is also more accessible to people with vision and cognitive disorders, since it's basically text that the client can interpret however they will. Pardon my language, but how the *fuck* do they expect to do large fonts, alternate colors, and speech synthesis on *Java*. If they put in all the hooks to do this well, they'll end up with the OS/360 of content development.
Plus, you can do Babelfish-style translation of the content with HTML/XML. Again pardon my language, but how the *fuck* is anybody supposed to translate Java bytecodes from English to Spanish. Sure, English is used a lot all over the world, but I imagine Hollywood still gets significant revenues from dubbing movies and TV programs into other languages. With Java, they have to translate the source and recompile for every language. Even if they wanted to bear the expense, the configuration management issues are formidable.
And how can Java be indexed by the search engines? Much of any media company's value is in their archives. By using Java, they lock their product up where people can't find it to buy. Java either costs sales, or you have to pay to recreate the information in a form that *is* indexable. In other words, they've gotta have a web page (or the equivalent) replicating the content.
Instead of using pure Java, I think they ought to use an HTML/Java combination. First, they would extend and/or clarify HTML so that it rendered consistently (standard table behavior and standard font sizes). The biggest problem with HTML is that basic things like tables are wildly different across existing browsers. Simply codifying how tables, images, fonts, and styles display for the TV Browser Standard would be the most important step. Most stuff, like National Geographic supplemental information and football player stats, would be well-handled by HTML.
They would use Java plug-ins for the truly unusual stuff. For instance, the zoomable-spinnable-interactive-3D-instant-sports-r eplay would be Java.
(Does this remind anybody else of the "Would you like to know more?" bits from the Starship Troopers movie?)
(June 8, 2000. Associated Press.)
Researchers at the University of Texas are suing McAfee and Symantec, noted anti-computer-virus companies, for restraint of trade and industrial sabotage. "We're getting horrible yields at all our domestic fabs because of those bastards," said chemist Angela M. Belcher of the University of Texas at Austin. "It just isn't fair for them to blatently interfere with our manufacturing process like this. If it doesn't stop, we'll have to take matters into our own hands, and design nanites that turn their CEO's brains into cheerios!"
McAfee and Symantec were unavailable for comment.
That would be simple, and arguably OK. But that won't happen. To avoid the slightest hint of collusion, there will have to be
Helpful Usenet postings might even be banned, unless they can guarantee full propagation. (Good luck there!) Employees will be fired, fined, or imprisoned for accidentally talking to the wrong person. It is absurd to make professionals work in that environment.
The DoJ and the court are simply ignorant of the practical ramifications their decisions will have. In fact, they think they know so much about engineering organizations that they don't even need to listen to Microsoft's outside witnesses. Imagine trying to break Linux development up into the Kernel-Mode Division and the Userland Division, with an insulation layer of attorneys and judges in between, and without allowing Linus Torvalds or Bill Joy to speak. Thirty-seven hackers would be found dead the next day from laughter. But that's what the DoJ/court proposed for Microsoft, with a straight face. And they truly, sincerely think it is OK. They're so far off in their own imaginary world that Jesus Christ himself couldn't find them with a telescope.
Office/OS "collusion" didn't even break the law. What broke the law was the discriminatory, anti-competitive contracts. Simply making Microsoft offer the same terms to all customers (e.g., $300/MS-Office for quantity 1, $270/MS-Office for quantity 100, etc.) would have eliminated the bulk of their anticompetitive behavior. Making them publish APIs for advertised features would have eliminated most of the rest.
I think it's a bad precedent, and people are happy just because Microsoft is being shit on. But free speech includes the right *not* to speak, to keep trade secrets and confidences. When the attorney for the United States decides that you've been "anti-competitive" by not publishing something, you'll change your tune.
It's *not* punishment. It is a remedy for behavior detrimental to consumers. Punishment means fines, or imprisonment of corporate officers, not modifying business practices.
2) The 2 NewCo. may not recombine, enter into Joint Ventures, provide APIs to each other that are not available to other ISVs.. or basically collude.
Suppose OfficeCo needs a new type of interprocess communication, to better support object embedding (just as an example). How're they supposed to do this without "colluding" with OSCo? Lots of paperwork, laywers, and disclosures, that's how.
This is supposed to make better products at better prices?
Microsoft shall disclose to ISVs, IHVs, and OEMs in a Timely Manner, in whatever media Microsoft disseminates such information to its own personnel, all APIs
<snort> Has anybody tried getting useful information from the MSDN Knowledge Base? Cramming every available document and function header in there will make matters worse, not better. Especially since, in many cases, the specification consists of "what that piece of code does".
5) Microsoft shall not take any action that it knows will interfere with or degrade the performance of any non-Microsoft Middleware when interoperating with any Windows Operating System Product
Since when were non-backwards-compatible interfaces in Microsoft products *intentional*? Judge Jackson is attributing conditions to villainy that result simply from stupidity.
6) MS has to create an internal position to monitor antitrust compliance within the company
With the fall of the USSR, the free world's bureaucrats have gotten lazy and out of shape. The MSFT breakup is really a DoD project to mainain a cadre of trained bureaucrats.
I have no idea where you're getting this 1.5k ohms as body resistance
1.5 kohm sounds about right. That's *body* resistance, measured with a good connection to internal fluids. Of course, most of us don't implant electrodes to measure this. ;-) You were measuring *skin* resistance, which depends on many things, including saltiness, moistness, skin thickness, and skin composition. With small electrodes on dry skin, it measures anywhere from 100 kohm to >100 Mohm.
Try repeating your measurements, but with reduced skin resistance. Make each electrode a big wire, one of which is squeezed in each hand. And drench the contacting skin with salt water. I just did this and got 20 kohm. And the skin is *still* a significant impediment to current. So a 1.5 kohm body resistance is reasonable.
Nope. The skin effect (unrelated to human skin, BTW) is mostly negligible at 60 Hz. At 60 Hz, it's only important for huge generators dealing with thousands of amps of current.
"Put your arm in it!" When I did so I didn't feel anything at first ... all the muscles in my arm (fingers, wrist, forearm, all of them) started to flex and unflex because of the current flow.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. It's things like this that earn Darwin Awards. A portion of the current was certainly flowing through your heart. It just wasn't enough to cause immediate cardiac arrest. And this is the most dangerous situation possible, because your heart may have been silently damaged. Plenty of people have gotten shocked, counted their blessings for not being killed, gone home at the end of the work day, and quietly died in their sleep from delayed heart failure. A quick trip to the friendly emergency room cariologist will show any subtle injury to the heart -- the heart's electrical waveform usually changes significantly when it is seriously injured (AFIK).
"Hmmm", says the Bastard Operator from Hell. "It looks like I need to help this poor soul"
You may notice some sparking and/or electrocution. This is normal, although you may wish to leave the work to a licensed electrician if you have an aversion to discorporation.
A clarification: it isn't blackmail. It is extortion -- the threat or use of illegal methods to obtain desired behavior.
In this case, the DOSer is restraining lawful free speech, by obstructing the instrument of speech. In the U.S. at least, this violates the constitution and statutes. And many U.S. states have their own laws protecting free speech, so it's illegal on more than one level. It's no different than threatening to blow up a newspaper's presses if they accept certain advertisements.
IANAL, so I'll throw out some legal questions. First, by suspending the account is the ISP colluding with the criminal in a restraint of speech and/or trade? Second, is the ISP therefore a criminal conspirator in the restraint of speech/trade violation? Third, do the ISPs actions make it liable/culpable under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization act (RICO). I'm no expert, but I've heard that RICO is a powerful and flexible law, which can be applied under a variety of circumstances. They used it against Martin Luther King, Jr., of all people, so using it for a clear violation of law should be easy.
To quote
Or this little gem in the boilerplate:
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of openCOLA! It could quench the thirstiest finite-element analysis researcher!
If it doesn't compile, then it isn't source code. That's kinda the definition of source code. The whole point of the GPL is so the user can recompile the program. If they leave out anything (other than standard compilers, header files, and so forth), then they're violating the GPL.
WRT the second point, of course the GPL doesn't affect all the company's sources. Just the sources for binaries derived from GPLed code.