2000 cases of thyroid cancer are insignificant. Sure, it sucks if you are one of the people who developed thyroid cancer, but in the big picture, it's a non-event. About 150,000 people die every day.
The proper way for the federal government to assume new powers is by amending the constitution. The modern (post FDR) of doing it is to claim that the constitution is a living document, packed full of emanations and penumbras, and that original intent and historical context are irrelevant.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'
SMM gives the BIOS the power to do anything it wants to the OS.
In the old days, the operating system could ignore the BIOS once it had booted. It handled all traps and interrupts, not the BIOS. You knew that the system was under the complete control of the operating system.
When an SMM event occurs, it runs the BIOS code, not yours.
Do you trust the author of the BIOS?
I think there has been at least one major development in the history of BIOS firmware, System Management Mode (SMM). You may think you have control over your system, that only open source software is running on the CPU, but you may not know that it is also running code from the BIOS in SMM. By design, it is supposed to be transparent to the operating system, except for the cycles it steals. Its use seems to be especially common in laptops. The motherboard designer can put anything they want in there and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. The motherboard can take the CPU away from the operating system whenever it wants to. You get the leftovers.
It required amendments to the federal constitution to make it a federal issue. The federal constitution gives states a lot of freedom in how they conduct elections
At first glance, this proposal is so partisan that it is dead on arrival. It ignores Republican concerns about the methods Democrats use to manipulate elections. Restoration of voting rights to felons is a state issue, not a federal issue. It mandates "no excuse" absentee ballots, which have proven to be a fertile source of fraudulent votes. It ignores the poor quality of voter registration lists.
Are we going to require public disclosure of the source code for the applications, compilers, libraries, operating system, device drivers, VHDL for all of the chips, CAD/CAE tools? How transparent do you want it to be?
I doubt POWER will ever go further in market share on the desktop than it is already because nobody can get a POWER ATX motherboard on the open market. There are no available off-the-shelf chipsets for POWER, no appreciable demand for POWERs outside of Apple.
Businesses buy systems and solutions, not Power ATX motherboards with chrome-plated heatsinks and positronic cache boosters.
When they make me President of IBM, the first thing I'll demand is inexpensive chipsets and reference boards (with free design licensing) for the Taiwan motherboard makers.
Don't hold your breath. Why is it in IBM's interest, or their customer's interest, to promote a flood of cheap, mostly compatible clones with little or no support?
The problem with water, actually one of the problems, is that it isn't a uniform substance. You can have two liters of water that have different masses. This is because of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes that are present in varying amounts depending on where you obtain the water.
If you're writing performance critical code, or just using a new compiler or target, it can be educational to look at the output of "cc -S". Does the assembly code match what you intended to do? Is the optimizer doing stupid things, possibly because of language rules and the way you wrote the code? Sometimes you can learn things about the target architecture by seeing examples of architecture dependent "tricks" in the generated code. The programmer who wrote the code generator probably knows a lot more than you about what is optimal for the target.
Some of the more annoying telemarketers used to do that on purpose. They would setup one dialer to search for "live" numbers, which would be passed on to a second system that made the actual telemarketing calls. You could usually tell this was happening when you got a hangup call, and five minutes later, some sleazy telemarketer was on the line.
The idea is that the landline caller pays for the landline part of the call and the wireless subscriber pays for the wireless part of the call, so the two parties are not being charged twice, they are each paying for a part of the call.
The reason for this is mostly historical. When mobile phones were added to the telephone network, they were given normal telephone numbers. Instead of that number being terminated at a regular telephone, it was routed to a mobile phone base station, where a mobile radio operator would setup the call to the mobile phone subscriber. Later, this was automated, and then replaced with cellular radio hardware. The mobile phone subscriber paid for all air time and for the landline portion of calls that were originated from the mobile phone. The telephone company didn't have to change their billing system. The wireless company charged their subscribers a bill for monthly service, air time, and any charges from the telephone company.
At the time, I was a kid and a space cadet. My grandfather was a ham, and he had a similar attitude towards the great unwashed mob. I got my license when I was a bit older.
If I live long enough to collect social security, I'm going to put a kilowatt on 75 meters and harass all the newbies:-).
The UN has been a disaster area for decades. Occasionally the Security Council does something worthwhile. The General Assembly is mostly a place for various nut-cases to wank in public. Most of the rest of it is a jobs program for bureaucrats.
The Germans did something similar during World War II. They tried to replace all of the normal radios with crippled radios that could only receive broadcasts from the official government radio network. They didn't want their citizens listening to the BBC and other "subversive" sources of information.
I believe this issue previously came up with HP plotters. People were installing "new" ink cartridges in their plotter, only to discover that the cartridge had expired. HP's explanation was that old ink cartridges could cause expensive damage to the plotter by clogging up the ink system with deteriorated ink.
Why? There are no universally agreed standards for file extensions and file content. All I need is some smart-ass virus scanner deleting my experiment data because it doesn't like some of the bit patterns in the data. I've already had a few cases where virus scanning software "found" viruses in files that containing nothing except telemetry data. If my file has a ".DAT" extension, the virus scanner should keep its paws off of it.
It's been done before, many times before, going back to the early days of Ethernet and TCP/IP. There was a company in the 1980s called Excelan that made smart LAN boards. The problem has always been that it usually doesn't work that well. Smart boards are expensive. Smart boards with fast CPUs and lots of memory are really expensive. A new protocol stack has to be created for the main CPU to communicate with the smart board. When you compare the number of cycles required to support the host to smart board protocol with the number of cycles required to do TCP/IP on the main CPU, you often find that the gain is disappointing. It just isn't cost effective and the performance improvement is marginal.
This is kinda a given - you cant go out and patent (or TM) the word Dirt, for example. When a word is part of the lexicon, or is applied to a commonly understood term, then it is un-tm-able.
I don't think so. Look at the P&G product list, for example. They have many registered trademarks that are also common words.
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2000 cases of thyroid cancer are insignificant. Sure, it sucks if you are one of the people who developed thyroid cancer, but in the big picture, it's a non-event. About 150,000 people die every day.
The left is the political wing that supported FDR, Mr. Nationalize Everything, and thinks that "states' rights" is just a codeword for racism.
In the old days, the operating system could ignore the BIOS once it had booted. It handled all traps and interrupts, not the BIOS. You knew that the system was under the complete control of the operating system.
When an SMM event occurs, it runs the BIOS code, not yours. Do you trust the author of the BIOS?
I think there has been at least one major development in the history of BIOS firmware, System Management Mode (SMM). You may think you have control over your system, that only open source software is running on the CPU, but you may not know that it is also running code from the BIOS in SMM. By design, it is supposed to be transparent to the operating system, except for the cycles it steals. Its use seems to be especially common in laptops. The motherboard designer can put anything they want in there and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. The motherboard can take the CPU away from the operating system whenever it wants to. You get the leftovers.
It required amendments to the federal constitution to make it a federal issue. The federal constitution gives states a lot of freedom in how they conduct elections
At first glance, this proposal is so partisan that it is dead on arrival. It ignores Republican concerns about the methods Democrats use to manipulate elections. Restoration of voting rights to felons is a state issue, not a federal issue. It mandates "no excuse" absentee ballots, which have proven to be a fertile source of fraudulent votes. It ignores the poor quality of voter registration lists.
Are we going to require public disclosure of the source code for the applications, compilers, libraries, operating system, device drivers, VHDL for all of the chips, CAD/CAE tools? How transparent do you want it to be?
Businesses buy systems and solutions, not Power ATX motherboards with chrome-plated heatsinks and positronic cache boosters.
When they make me President of IBM, the first thing I'll demand is inexpensive chipsets and reference boards (with free design licensing) for the Taiwan motherboard makers.
Don't hold your breath. Why is it in IBM's interest, or their customer's interest, to promote a flood of cheap, mostly compatible clones with little or no support?
The problem with water, actually one of the problems, is that it isn't a uniform substance. You can have two liters of water that have different masses. This is because of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes that are present in varying amounts depending on where you obtain the water.
If you're writing performance critical code, or just using a new compiler or target, it can be educational to look at the output of "cc -S". Does the assembly code match what you intended to do? Is the optimizer doing stupid things, possibly because of language rules and the way you wrote the code? Sometimes you can learn things about the target architecture by seeing examples of architecture dependent "tricks" in the generated code. The programmer who wrote the code generator probably knows a lot more than you about what is optimal for the target.
char *p = 0; ; ;
p = 0;
if (p == 0)
if (!ptr)
are all valid and portable. The programmer should understand that the compiler will replace 0 with whatever is appropriate for the target system.
I'm used to being ignored when I go shopping.
Some of the more annoying telemarketers used to do that on purpose. They would setup one dialer to search for "live" numbers, which would be passed on to a second system that made the actual telemarketing calls. You could usually tell this was happening when you got a hangup call, and five minutes later, some sleazy telemarketer was on the line.
The reason for this is mostly historical. When mobile phones were added to the telephone network, they were given normal telephone numbers. Instead of that number being terminated at a regular telephone, it was routed to a mobile phone base station, where a mobile radio operator would setup the call to the mobile phone subscriber. Later, this was automated, and then replaced with cellular radio hardware. The mobile phone subscriber paid for all air time and for the landline portion of calls that were originated from the mobile phone. The telephone company didn't have to change their billing system. The wireless company charged their subscribers a bill for monthly service, air time, and any charges from the telephone company.
If I live long enough to collect social security, I'm going to put a kilowatt on 75 meters and harass all the newbies :-).
It's hard to spend "good money" if you're dead.
The UN has been a disaster area for decades. Occasionally the Security Council does something worthwhile. The General Assembly is mostly a place for various nut-cases to wank in public. Most of the rest of it is a jobs program for bureaucrats.
Take a look at their current line of plotters. Pens are obsolete.
The Germans did something similar during World War II. They tried to replace all of the normal radios with crippled radios that could only receive broadcasts from the official government radio network. They didn't want their citizens listening to the BBC and other "subversive" sources of information.
I believe this issue previously came up with HP plotters. People were installing "new" ink cartridges in their plotter, only to discover that the cartridge had expired. HP's explanation was that old ink cartridges could cause expensive damage to the plotter by clogging up the ink system with deteriorated ink.
Why? There are no universally agreed standards for file extensions and file content. All I need is some smart-ass virus scanner deleting my experiment data because it doesn't like some of the bit patterns in the data. I've already had a few cases where virus scanning software "found" viruses in files that containing nothing except telemetry data. If my file has a ".DAT" extension, the virus scanner should keep its paws off of it.
It's been done before, many times before, going back to the early days of Ethernet and TCP/IP. There was a company in the 1980s called Excelan that made smart LAN boards. The problem has always been that it usually doesn't work that well. Smart boards are expensive. Smart boards with fast CPUs and lots of memory are really expensive. A new protocol stack has to be created for the main CPU to communicate with the smart board. When you compare the number of cycles required to support the host to smart board protocol with the number of cycles required to do TCP/IP on the main CPU, you often find that the gain is disappointing. It just isn't cost effective and the performance improvement is marginal.
Trademark laws serve a useful purpose. If I buy an Opteron processor, I can be assured that it is a genuine AMD product, not a cheap Intel knock-off.
I don't think so. Look at the P&G product list, for example. They have many registered trademarks that are also common words.