Go check your history books. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms isn't even a quarter of a century old. It was enacted in 1982. Originally, Trudeau and the federal government wished to unilaterally approve this legislation (i.e. without the consent of the provinces). However, negotiations with the provinces eventually occured and in 1982, with the consent of 9 provinces (minus Quebec), the Canada Act became law. Thus, we now had a document outlining our rights and freedoms - and we also had a pissed off province in Quebec.
For the rest of us in Canada, I think we've generally accepted the farmer's story that the seed blew onto his property because that's the last we heard of the story. Anyways, disregarding what specifically happened in this case, what would the Canadian law say if GM seed accidentally blew onto your field and grew, without your knowledge and without your intent?
I taped that BBC interview and they had included the feeds in their little piece. Most of the footage seemed to be from an airplane looking at an acute angle downwards at road traffic like trucks - perhaps it was from a satellite but the camera seemed to move laterally in both directions. I've never seen a satellite feed but the shots seemed to come from a shaky airplane than a satellite in orbit. I have to admit I'm skeptical that these are true feeds. I honestly think it's misinformation. The quality of the footage was much better than the public ever sees in those press conferences, as if they were begging for the "enemy" to use the feeds. In fact, it seemed much better than the footage from helicopters during police chases. On second thought...maybe this is high quality military grade stuff:-)
I think the release of the Clawhammer shows the great divide between Intel and AMD's philosophies widening. Mind you, Intel's strategy isn't entirely bad, although it seems highly inefficient at first glance. Intel will happily fire back when the Clawhammer is released. What will they do? Quickly ramp up the clock speed towards 3.4-4GHz. I wouldn't be surprised if they also enable hyperthreading on "consumer" P4s. And, they'll increase the memory bandwidth of the P4 platform by releasing dual-channel DDR chipsets. As for AMD, this looks like one great chip. If AMD plays its cards right, I think it would REALLY make a splash in the server/enterprise market. Whereas, Intel can stay neck and neck with AMD on the consumer end, we've seen how great AMD's SMP platform is. Imagine a 4-way AMD hammer computer:-)
This was the pre-DSL era. Everybody and their brother was supposed to be searching for this very thing - broadband-type bandwidth over standard old telephone lines. These investors wanted to believe in this magic box. When people actually want to believe in something, it becomes orders of magnitude easier to convince them of it. Even so, this guy went to great lengths to convince them. I'm sure there are other, smaller investors that were swindled from shadier, less-convincing con-men using this very same theme.
I have a feeling this latest court battle has its roots further back. Mike Myers went through a terrible time when the plans for the movie based on his SNL character Dieter, fell through. Universal Studios and Mike Myers were involved in a fierce lawsuit-counterlawsuit battle. It got to the point where Mike Myers hid out in Toronto (his "home" city), and resorted to wearing disguises when going about his business. The reason for this was that Universal had hired some private detectives to essentially make Myers' life horrible to live.
The suit ended in a settlement in which Myers agreed to make a movie for Universal and Dreamworks would get a cut of the profit. Dreamworks entered the picture becase Spielberg and Katzenberg helped broker the deal between Myers and Universal. Today, we have MGM issuing a cease & desist to Goldmember. Well, MGM and Universal have had close ties before and have often collaborated in projects. I wouldn't be surprised if some people at Universal are still quite upset with Myers and are trying to make every thing he does quite difficult.
OK well thanks for at least being rational about this. I thought you were beginning to bite my head off about this. Now, while ozone depletion is slowing to the point where there is talk of the hole closing, you have to realize why. Many countries around the world signed the Montreal Protocol which was a ban on CFCs - the leading cause of ozone depletion as speculated by scientists and perhaps proven so with the recent evidence you've provided
At this time, it looks like people did have an impact on at least the depletion of the ozone layer which is a contributing factor to global warming. And if us mere mortals can have an impact on the presence of the ozone layer, I'd say that given the evidence we shoule err on the side of caution: that is, accept the argument that humans do contribute to global warming.
I think the biggest problem from the environmentalists side, is the term "global warming". While it's true that the average temp. is getting warmer, as somebody has already pointed out, large dips in temperature and spikes in temperature are more characteristic of "global warming" and it should probably be called "climate volatility".
They are not completely unrelated although I should have done a better job at stating that ozone depletion is in fact another issue than the greenhouse effect.
Ozone depletion allows in more U.V. rays. The earth reflects back less energy into space, and thus the overall temperature rises.
With the greenhouse effect, much of the energy that the earth radiates into space is prevented from doing so, trapping in this heat.
So before you go mouthing off about this, maybe you should think logically about the two problems which are quite related.
Do yourself a favour and read Billions and Billions by Carl Sagan. In there, he talks about global warming in great depth and you'll understand then, why you cannot just disperse fine particulate matter (or even ozone) into the upper atmosphere to fix the problem. The real solution is to get our damn greenhouse emissions in order...then let the earth heal itself. But seriously, read this book...
I just got over reading Billions and Billions by Carl Sagan and in it he talks in great depth about global warming. The scary facts of the matter are that:
1) Even if we stopped production and useage of all greenhouse-effect causing gases, these gases would remain in the upper atmosphere doing harm for a little over a century.
2) If at sea level, wholly intact, the ozone layer is about 3 mm thick or just slightly thicker than one's finger nail. That puts things into perspective - there isn't much there to begin with and we're totally fscking with what's there!
3) There was a key "Conservative" in the U.S. (I'm assuming Republican...I'm not American) during some environmental negotiation who was of the opinion that we should all just wear hats to cover us from the extra U.V. rays. - that was his stated recommendation on the issue. Unfortunately, it was beyond their capability of comprehension that the phytoplankton at the very bottom of our fragile food chain cannot wear "hats". But regardless of party-lines, no politician wants to do anything about the issue because it takes much longer than a political term for the rewards of any proactive efforts to be reaped.
We can only point fingers at someone else for so long. It's time for us individuals to take small but significant steps to better our environment. I mean, do you really need a Ford Navigator to drive to and from work through bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic? Is it too much to buy things in bulk where practical (which would save packaging material and the energy wasted on recycling/throwing-out the packaging material)? Is it too much to get off our lazy a$$es and walk to the local mall or store when we're only going to shop for a few things?
We've really got to start accepting responsibility for our actions because everyone knows the politicians aren't going to do a damn thing until its way too late...and trust me, we're almost there!
Let's see...
In a thousand years when mankind is capable of unfreezing these carcasses and reviving them back into living people, what will honestly be their reason for doing so?
They'll look back in their history "books" and see that our generation was characterized by people who over-consumed, over-polluted, intellectually under-performed (for the most part), and was also characterized by many people who become more excited by the entrance music of some WWF wrestler than by fantastic scientific discoveries that accomplish real work and have practical applications.
Right...I'm sure they'll be quick to unfreeze the carcasses circa 20th century - early 21st century:)
You know, I thought this was a dumb idea. But my friend signed up for an @Home account and kept getting spammed from their weekly newsletter that he did not want. There was definitely an unsubscribe e-mail address provided in the e-mail, but he did not ask for the weekly e-mail, and upon signing up for @Home he was not told he would receive it (in fact, he signed up with the cable company for Internet access before they provided the @Home-portion of the service). So what he did is he would send his cable company 10 e-mails for every e-mail they sent him. Weeks went by, but eventually one day he received an e-mail back telling him to stop spamming them and that all he had to do was e-mail the unsubscribe address and he would be removed from their mailing list. So...he kept sending them the mail, replying 25 times to the non-spam "stop spamming us" e-mail request by the cable co. A week later, he stopped receiving the weekly newsletter - without having to go through the unsubscribe process. He now uses this technique on every piece of spam he gets and there has been a noticeable drop (dramatic in fact) in the amount of spam he receives. I'm sure it has provided some other spammers with proof of the existence of his e-mail address (they sometimes send out mail to whole domains, using words from the dictionary as the user@ parts of the e-mail address...when you reply back they know the e-mail exists and then can add you to a spam list). But all in all, I'd say this has got to be the best way of getting the attention of big-name spammers. If the support@amazon.com address received 10 e-mails from 100,000 customers who also happen to read Slashdot and don't like the newsletter...well, you can bet they'd be pretty pissed (they'd probably have to go through all 100,000 just to make sure there were no genuine support e-mails...now that would be a bummer).
Finally a good explanation for the technoluddites
on
RIAA CEO Speaks
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· Score: 1
Finally an excellent interpretation of the matter made simple enough for the the technoluddites.
Now if only judges would think in this sort of rational, straight-forward thinking, they wouldn't get so "confused".
I'm not claiming to be a kernel expert, but forking the kernel so that there would be kernels specialized for specific applications only seems logical. A builder doesn't go around hammering everything in site because the hammer obviously isn't the correct tool in every situation. It's great for pounding nails into 2x4s, but isn't so good when it comes to painting walls.
Specialized kernels are good, so long as the support behind all of these kernels remains great enough. I don't think I need to point out the possible pitfalls of forking the kernel and thus, effectively forking the developers behind the kernel into two or more camps. But at some point, the linux kernel that runs on a 386 should be different than the one that runs on the XYZ super computer, just because it can take full advantage of all the wonderful scaleability that the XYZ super computer offers.
Anyway, as I said I'm not an expert but this just seems logical.
The RIAA is like that kid in class that always got bullied but would cry and run to the teacher each and every time to get nowhere, instead of the smarter kid who would punch the living daylights out of the bully by giving it a taste of its own medecine. The RIAA wants loot and you can only get that in civil court by whining to the authorities about the big bad monster that's stealing from you.
That would be against the DMCA. According to the DMCA, all border crossings to Canada are considered devices allowing people to get around copyright protections and thus, are illegal.
Let's cut him some slack. Until this thread, I didn't know that MP3 wasn't a true "open" standard. There's a general misconception out there that MP3 is a truly open standard and not proprietary in any way.
Now that I've read up on the proposed Vorbis standard, I hope they succeed although it stands just as much chance of surviving as the SDMI standard.
You think SDMI-related devices are going to be banned? I see this as a lame attempt by the RIAA to push their standard into the limelight. All the mainstream media will be touting the *new* SDMI standard for music which *all* the major labels will be supporting and which is better than MP3 because it provides smaller files while providing better quality...
I bought a Palm because I wanted the coolest organizer. If I want word or Excel, I'll buy a laptop. They're only a few hundred dollars more than PocketPCs here in Toronto anyways...plus they suit the task or word processing much better since it has a keyboard a nice big screen.
Slashdot Mirror
Go check your history books. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms isn't even a quarter of a century old. It was enacted in 1982. Originally, Trudeau and the federal government wished to unilaterally approve this legislation (i.e. without the consent of the provinces). However, negotiations with the provinces eventually occured and in 1982, with the consent of 9 provinces (minus Quebec), the Canada Act became law. Thus, we now had a document outlining our rights and freedoms - and we also had a pissed off province in Quebec.
The solution is easy. You change your legal name to something so long and complex it causes a buffer overflow in the advertising software:-)
For the rest of us in Canada, I think we've generally accepted the farmer's story that the seed blew onto his property because that's the last we heard of the story. Anyways, disregarding what specifically happened in this case, what would the Canadian law say if GM seed accidentally blew onto your field and grew, without your knowledge and without your intent?
This is the news release that Slashdot actually gets paid for by Nvidia.
Let me clarify the lateral movement. It didn't seem like intended movement by a camera operator but unintended jitter.
I taped that BBC interview and they had included the feeds in their little piece. Most of the footage seemed to be from an airplane looking at an acute angle downwards at road traffic like trucks - perhaps it was from a satellite but the camera seemed to move laterally in both directions. I've never seen a satellite feed but the shots seemed to come from a shaky airplane than a satellite in orbit. I have to admit I'm skeptical that these are true feeds. I honestly think it's misinformation. The quality of the footage was much better than the public ever sees in those press conferences, as if they were begging for the "enemy" to use the feeds. In fact, it seemed much better than the footage from helicopters during police chases. On second thought...maybe this is high quality military grade stuff:-)
For some of us the cap is on the download too. 5GB per month at that.
I think the release of the Clawhammer shows the great divide between Intel and AMD's philosophies widening. Mind you, Intel's strategy isn't entirely bad, although it seems highly inefficient at first glance. Intel will happily fire back when the Clawhammer is released. What will they do? Quickly ramp up the clock speed towards 3.4-4GHz. I wouldn't be surprised if they also enable hyperthreading on "consumer" P4s. And, they'll increase the memory bandwidth of the P4 platform by releasing dual-channel DDR chipsets. As for AMD, this looks like one great chip. If AMD plays its cards right, I think it would REALLY make a splash in the server/enterprise market. Whereas, Intel can stay neck and neck with AMD on the consumer end, we've seen how great AMD's SMP platform is. Imagine a 4-way AMD hammer computer:-)
This was the pre-DSL era. Everybody and their brother was supposed to be searching for this very thing - broadband-type bandwidth over standard old telephone lines. These investors wanted to believe in this magic box. When people actually want to believe in something, it becomes orders of magnitude easier to convince them of it. Even so, this guy went to great lengths to convince them. I'm sure there are other, smaller investors that were swindled from shadier, less-convincing con-men using this very same theme.
The suit ended in a settlement in which Myers agreed to make a movie for Universal and Dreamworks would get a cut of the profit. Dreamworks entered the picture becase Spielberg and Katzenberg helped broker the deal between Myers and Universal. Today, we have MGM issuing a cease & desist to Goldmember. Well, MGM and Universal have had close ties before and have often collaborated in projects. I wouldn't be surprised if some people at Universal are still quite upset with Myers and are trying to make every thing he does quite difficult.
nt
At this time, it looks like people did have an impact on at least the depletion of the ozone layer which is a contributing factor to global warming. And if us mere mortals can have an impact on the presence of the ozone layer, I'd say that given the evidence we shoule err on the side of caution: that is, accept the argument that humans do contribute to global warming.
I think the biggest problem from the environmentalists side, is the term "global warming". While it's true that the average temp. is getting warmer, as somebody has already pointed out, large dips in temperature and spikes in temperature are more characteristic of "global warming" and it should probably be called "climate volatility".
They are not completely unrelated although I should have done a better job at stating that ozone depletion is in fact another issue than the greenhouse effect. Ozone depletion allows in more U.V. rays. The earth reflects back less energy into space, and thus the overall temperature rises. With the greenhouse effect, much of the energy that the earth radiates into space is prevented from doing so, trapping in this heat. So before you go mouthing off about this, maybe you should think logically about the two problems which are quite related.
Do yourself a favour and read Billions and Billions by Carl Sagan. In there, he talks about global warming in great depth and you'll understand then, why you cannot just disperse fine particulate matter (or even ozone) into the upper atmosphere to fix the problem. The real solution is to get our damn greenhouse emissions in order...then let the earth heal itself. But seriously, read this book...
1) Even if we stopped production and useage of all greenhouse-effect causing gases, these gases would remain in the upper atmosphere doing harm for a little over a century.
2) If at sea level, wholly intact, the ozone layer is about 3 mm thick or just slightly thicker than one's finger nail. That puts things into perspective - there isn't much there to begin with and we're totally fscking with what's there!
3) There was a key "Conservative" in the U.S. (I'm assuming Republican...I'm not American) during some environmental negotiation who was of the opinion that we should all just wear hats to cover us from the extra U.V. rays. - that was his stated recommendation on the issue. Unfortunately, it was beyond their capability of comprehension that the phytoplankton at the very bottom of our fragile food chain cannot wear "hats". But regardless of party-lines, no politician wants to do anything about the issue because it takes much longer than a political term for the rewards of any proactive efforts to be reaped.
We can only point fingers at someone else for so long. It's time for us individuals to take small but significant steps to better our environment. I mean, do you really need a Ford Navigator to drive to and from work through bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic? Is it too much to buy things in bulk where practical (which would save packaging material and the energy wasted on recycling/throwing-out the packaging material)? Is it too much to get off our lazy a$$es and walk to the local mall or store when we're only going to shop for a few things?
We've really got to start accepting responsibility for our actions because everyone knows the politicians aren't going to do a damn thing until its way too late...and trust me, we're almost there!
Let's see... In a thousand years when mankind is capable of unfreezing these carcasses and reviving them back into living people, what will honestly be their reason for doing so? They'll look back in their history "books" and see that our generation was characterized by people who over-consumed, over-polluted, intellectually under-performed (for the most part), and was also characterized by many people who become more excited by the entrance music of some WWF wrestler than by fantastic scientific discoveries that accomplish real work and have practical applications. Right...I'm sure they'll be quick to unfreeze the carcasses circa 20th century - early 21st century:)
You know, I thought this was a dumb idea. But my friend signed up for an @Home account and kept getting spammed from their weekly newsletter that he did not want. There was definitely an unsubscribe e-mail address provided in the e-mail, but he did not ask for the weekly e-mail, and upon signing up for @Home he was not told he would receive it (in fact, he signed up with the cable company for Internet access before they provided the @Home-portion of the service). So what he did is he would send his cable company 10 e-mails for every e-mail they sent him. Weeks went by, but eventually one day he received an e-mail back telling him to stop spamming them and that all he had to do was e-mail the unsubscribe address and he would be removed from their mailing list. So...he kept sending them the mail, replying 25 times to the non-spam "stop spamming us" e-mail request by the cable co. A week later, he stopped receiving the weekly newsletter - without having to go through the unsubscribe process. He now uses this technique on every piece of spam he gets and there has been a noticeable drop (dramatic in fact) in the amount of spam he receives. I'm sure it has provided some other spammers with proof of the existence of his e-mail address (they sometimes send out mail to whole domains, using words from the dictionary as the user@ parts of the e-mail address...when you reply back they know the e-mail exists and then can add you to a spam list). But all in all, I'd say this has got to be the best way of getting the attention of big-name spammers. If the support@amazon.com address received 10 e-mails from 100,000 customers who also happen to read Slashdot and don't like the newsletter...well, you can bet they'd be pretty pissed (they'd probably have to go through all 100,000 just to make sure there were no genuine support e-mails...now that would be a bummer).
Finally an excellent interpretation of the matter made simple enough for the the technoluddites.
Now if only judges would think in this sort of rational, straight-forward thinking, they wouldn't get so "confused".
I'm not claiming to be a kernel expert, but forking the kernel so that there would be kernels specialized for specific applications only seems logical. A builder doesn't go around hammering everything in site because the hammer obviously isn't the correct tool in every situation. It's great for pounding nails into 2x4s, but isn't so good when it comes to painting walls.
Specialized kernels are good, so long as the support behind all of these kernels remains great enough. I don't think I need to point out the possible pitfalls of forking the kernel and thus, effectively forking the developers behind the kernel into two or more camps. But at some point, the linux kernel that runs on a 386 should be different than the one that runs on the XYZ super computer, just because it can take full advantage of all the wonderful scaleability that the XYZ super computer offers.
Anyway, as I said I'm not an expert but this just seems logical.
The RIAA is like that kid in class that always got bullied but would cry and run to the teacher each and every time to get nowhere, instead of the smarter kid who would punch the living daylights out of the bully by giving it a taste of its own medecine. The RIAA wants loot and you can only get that in civil court by whining to the authorities about the big bad monster that's stealing from you.
That would be against the DMCA. According to the DMCA, all border crossings to Canada are considered devices allowing people to get around copyright protections and thus, are illegal.
Let's cut him some slack. Until this thread, I didn't know that MP3 wasn't a true "open" standard. There's a general misconception out there that MP3 is a truly open standard and not proprietary in any way. Now that I've read up on the proposed Vorbis standard, I hope they succeed although it stands just as much chance of surviving as the SDMI standard.
Did security guards escort you out off the premises? I'm sure you really pissed off those executives:)
You think SDMI-related devices are going to be banned? I see this as a lame attempt by the RIAA to push their standard into the limelight. All the mainstream media will be touting the *new* SDMI standard for music which *all* the major labels will be supporting and which is better than MP3 because it provides smaller files while providing better quality...
I bought a Palm because I wanted the coolest organizer. If I want word or Excel, I'll buy a laptop. They're only a few hundred dollars more than PocketPCs here in Toronto anyways...plus they suit the task or word processing much better since it has a keyboard a nice big screen.
PocketPC does a bunch of features OK.
Palm does very little features, very well.
That's how I see it.