I BELIEVE if you are using your phone as a modem to (for example) call some other ISP then I think you are correct, but of course you use up your "minutes" then.
On the other hand, if you have any kind of phone plan with them, for an extra $19/month you can ALSO get unlimited wireless internet from them. With T-Mobile (at least when I got it) it's only "fast dial-up" speed (true 56k), but they seemed (again, when I first checked) to have a lot more ubiquitous coverage than, say, Sprint or Verizon's faster offerings. In my case, I opted for better coverage rather than faster speeds in a more limited area. I just have a nice bare-bones Motorola V-188, the USB cable is a "normal" size mini-USB (as used by most MP3 players). (Wish I could figure out why I can't get it to use my custom MP3's as "ringtones" but that's not exactly an important feature for me.
Been pretty happy with it so far, and it's working fine on my two Linux laptops, so I imagine it can be made to work the same way for Mac OSX.
Why, a "toxin" is any vague, mysterious, ill-defined "bad thing" that whatever magic water, magnets, or pseudo-religious ritual-for-hire that the peddler is selling is supposed to make go away, of course.
Seriously, I think "toxin", "detoxify", and other variations of the word used outside of an actual poison-studying-scientist publication is pretty much an automatic sign that the writer/speaker/salesdrone is blowing smoke.
(In fairness, TFA actually IS about poison-studying-scientists though...)
The gold nanoparticles are just there as a non-reactive substance to stick any one of a variety of tailored sugar molecules which is known to react with a particular substance. The article doesn't look like it specifically says, but I assume what happens is that when the sugar reacts in the presence of whatever-bad-thing-you-want-to-detect, it dissolves off of the tiny gold particles, which then precipitate out of the solution so you can see them.
This whole case makes me feel violated. Not only is it a patent-troll case, but it's one that makes me side with Microsoft on something. I feel so unclean...
Ah, but you see, your car and radio are REAL property, which is boring and nobody cares to throw money at politicians about REAL property any more.
"Copies of software" are Intellectual property, though, which government officials know (because highly-paid advocates/lobbyists/sleazy bastards tell them so constantly) is much more important.
(Sniff, sniff....that's funny, I think I smell sarcasm...)
Odd - unless they've changed it in the last year, I'd been using Konqueror to get onto it just fine...
It's possible many of them just SAY the site "only works with IE" because that's all they test on, but if you ignore the message in some cases you may be able to get in anyway...
Unlike the "canned" software packages, Linux is one of the environments where everything is modular. There is no just plain "webcam software" for Linux that I know of.
On the other hand, there are a lot of components that you can put together to do things with webcams. It depends on what exactly you mean. Do you mean a camera to show your face while you're "chatting" with someone? Or a fixed room-monitor cam that people can get snapshots from off of a website? Or something to stick in a window to do time-lapse movies with? Or are you just looking for drivers? I know I've seen software components that can do each of those things...
If your company is treating you this way it is for one of two reasons: 1) they don't trust you or 2) they feel compelled to behave in a detrimental manner because a manager with either too much or too little authority thinks it's their job.
Or 3)Maybe it really IS their job, even if it's stupid...
I think in many cases someone sequestered (either by necessity or just by circumstance and/or arrogance) from "real world" considerations talked to someone with some sort of risk-management expertise, who looked at industry statistics and had to ask the original policy-makers "Okay, how much risk are you willing to take that an employee who gives notice might do something bad on the way out?", and was given the answer "none at all, why would we take risks like that?". And thus the "zero-tolerance" policy gets enshrined in the Holy Binder of Company Law and everybody has to abide by it, even while they know it's stupid.
And sometimes that's still better than having no defined policies or consistent practices at all...
I like to think of governments as particularly firmly established and powerful insurance companies.
Basically, a government collects insurance premiums (taxes), pays its employees and executives (senior government officials) with both money and perks, enacts programs to help prevent the need to pay out on claims (e.g. law enforcement, safety departments, education to hopefully provide employable skills, etc.), and pays out to victims of certain types of misfortune (either directly in the form of monetary aid or with other support paid for with tax money.)
As you point out, though, the difference between a government and, say Lloyd's of London or Allstate or whoever is that governments can compel the purchase of their products with armed force. (Don't believe me? Try refusing to pay your taxes...)
The only real differences between different governments are how quickly the guns come out when they want to offer a new "product" ("Democratic" governments are kind of like public companies in that the shareholders often get to vote on new programs [though all kinds of shenanigans can be performed by government authorities to sway the vote or work around a vote that doesn't go the way they want] first, and are then asked more or less politely to participate a few times before the guns come out. Despotic governments break out the guns as part of the planning of the new "product"), what kinds of situations they cover (e.g. degree of health-care provided, how much education is subsidized, etc) and how well they cover them, and what proportion of the premiums gets skimmed off to pay for the salaries, bonuses, and perks of the government officials and employees.
MySQL's attitude seems to be a little different from EV1's.
EV1 directly funded The SCO Group and was explicitly supporting SCO's wild "Intellectual Property" claims - even to the extent of, afterwards, paying for advertisements in "Linux Journal" claiming to be "IP Compliant".
MySQL, on the other hand, has not paid SCO anything and is at least claiming that they were more interested in supporting existing and new users of MySQL who happen to be on SCO's platform right now.
Can't say that I'm actually happy seeing ANYONE giving any kind of support to The SCO Group right now, but this does seem substantially different from EV1's behavior.
Money isn't, and should never be, the only motivator, but unwillingness to commit money to improve things for a work group is the surest sign that management doesn't give a damn.
I think that money is to employee satisfaction what penis size is to sexual prowess. It is important that there be enough, but once you reach that point it is more useful to focus on making the situation more enjoyable in other ways than to simply have "more" (although "more" is generally also appreciated somewhat). And even if there ISN'T "enough", if you are REALLY GOOD in other ways you can make up for it. Or so I've heard.
I'll add a vote for this, at least on a "try it out and see how it works for you" basis - my experience with it is limited at this point but I like what I see so far.
I've just started using Citadel as an SMTP/IMAP server to see how it works. It was pretty easy to compile and get running, and seems to work painlessly with Thunderbird. I haven't tried calendars in it yet, but that's "soon" on my list, once I've had time to find the documentation on it.
I had a problem getting webcit to run properly, but I haven't really had time to dig into that yet. Probably just something stupid I've done on my end.
[...]but when a game allows a player to virtually commit sexual assault and murder, as a society we must do what we can to protect our children[...]
(insert "warming up" sound effects here.) "I raped and then strangled the puppy. Then I used the puppy's dead body to bludgeon a little old lady to death. After that, I walked across the street and flung both bodies on somebody's lawn."
There. I have "virtually" committed bestiality, animal cruelty, elder abuse, murder, jaywalking, trespassing, and littering, using technology that is readily available to children, with no more effort than it takes to post to Slashdot(tm)!
How many more will have to suffer before computer keyboards are outlawed for minors?!?!? WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN???
While I strongly agree that the patent process here (like many other places - patents in this area often remind of me of software patents) is being horribly abused, there ARE some potential non-obvious uses for gene sequences besides making proteins.
Antisense RNA therapy, for example (put simply, it's a way of performing a denial-of-service attack against the expression of a particular gene - handy if the gene in question is one that causes, say, growth of a cancerous tumor.)
Welcome to the broken state of the USPTO (and, most likely, patent offices in other nations as well).
In fairness, I'm TOLD that what's being patented isn't really the gene itself, but specific uses of the gene (e.g. "use of human gene sequence [whatever] to detect expression of cancer-related gene [whatever]", to pull a conceivably representative description out of a random orifice).
On the other hand, I'm also told that many of these "specific" uses amount to 'using the gene to discover other genes' in some vague fashion.
So it's not at all like patenting the speed of light. But it IS like patenting "using the known speed of light to determine the distance between two objects" (for example). Should be obvious to someone "in the field" but the USPTO doesn't bother to really check on or enforce that it would seem.
I don't personally know much about the format, but it may be the new "binary key" is unique to the new "Microsoft Office 'Open' XML format", which is DIFFERENT from the MS Office 2003 XML formats...
Many of them, I think, are missing because of their dependency on (non-open-source) Java, which is not included. (In other words, Eclipse itself is OSS, but since it relies of non-OSS Java, they leave it out too.)
I have no idea about the bitstream vera fonts, though - that makes no sense to me at all, since I was sure they were distributed as open source...
Slashdot Mirror
I BELIEVE if you are using your phone as a modem to (for example) call some other ISP then I think you are correct, but of course you use up your "minutes" then.
On the other hand, if you have any kind of phone plan with them, for an extra $19/month you can ALSO get unlimited wireless internet from them. With T-Mobile (at least when I got it) it's only "fast dial-up" speed (true 56k), but they seemed (again, when I first checked) to have a lot more ubiquitous coverage than, say, Sprint or Verizon's faster offerings. In my case, I opted for better coverage rather than faster speeds in a more limited area. I just have a nice bare-bones Motorola V-188, the USB cable is a "normal" size mini-USB (as used by most MP3 players). (Wish I could figure out why I can't get it to use my custom MP3's as "ringtones" but that's not exactly an important feature for me.
Been pretty happy with it so far, and it's working fine on my two Linux laptops, so I imagine it can be made to work the same way for Mac OSX.
What's the difference between the last two?
Really, the question is more one of what's the difference between ANY of those three?
And the answer is simply that, in the order they are listed, they go from "least dishonest" to "most dishonest"...
Why, a "toxin" is any vague, mysterious, ill-defined "bad thing" that whatever magic water, magnets, or pseudo-religious ritual-for-hire that the peddler is selling is supposed to make go away, of course.
Seriously, I think "toxin", "detoxify", and other variations of the word used outside of an actual poison-studying-scientist publication is pretty much an automatic sign that the writer/speaker/salesdrone is blowing smoke.
(In fairness, TFA actually IS about poison-studying-scientists though...)
The gold nanoparticles are just there as a non-reactive substance to stick any one of a variety of tailored sugar molecules which is known to react with a particular substance. The article doesn't look like it specifically says, but I assume what happens is that when the sugar reacts in the presence of whatever-bad-thing-you-want-to-detect, it dissolves off of the tiny gold particles, which then precipitate out of the solution so you can see them.
This whole case makes me feel violated. Not only is it a patent-troll case, but it's one that makes me side with Microsoft on something. I feel so unclean...
So, the device vibrates. Now alerted to the fact that they are boring and/or annoying their audience, what do they do now?
"Smoothly wrap up the conversation and move on" strikes me as the sort of social talent that people who need this device aren't likely to have.
("So I thought it was really COOL that if pv=nRT then therefore [buzz, buzz] DAMMIT THIS IS *TOO* INTERESTING!!!!")
I was WONDERING why sendmail wouldn't display my .png files properly...
Ah, but you see, your car and radio are REAL property, which is boring and nobody cares to throw money at politicians about REAL property any more.
"Copies of software" are Intellectual property, though, which government officials know (because highly-paid advocates/lobbyists/sleazy bastards tell them so constantly) is much more important.
(Sniff, sniff....that's funny, I think I smell sarcasm...)
Jeez, science-types.
Can't they just call it "checking to make sure your noodles aren't a funny color" like everyone else?
Odd - unless they've changed it in the last year, I'd been using Konqueror to get onto it just fine...
It's possible many of them just SAY the site "only works with IE" because that's all they test on, but if you ignore the message in some cases you may be able to get in anyway...
Unlike the "canned" software packages, Linux is one of the environments where everything is modular. There is no just plain "webcam software" for Linux that I know of.
On the other hand, there are a lot of components that you can put together to do things with webcams. It depends on what exactly you mean. Do you mean a camera to show your face while you're "chatting" with someone? Or a fixed room-monitor cam that people can get snapshots from off of a website? Or something to stick in a window to do time-lapse movies with? Or are you just looking for drivers? I know I've seen software components that can do each of those things...
Well, that's not EXACTLY accurate, but close enough.
Different fruits have different mixtures of sugar. Peaches, for example, are primarily sucrose (plain old "table sugar") naturally as I recall.
Or 3)Maybe it really IS their job, even if it's stupid...
I think in many cases someone sequestered (either by necessity or just by circumstance and/or arrogance) from "real world" considerations talked to someone with some sort of risk-management expertise, who looked at industry statistics and had to ask the original policy-makers "Okay, how much risk are you willing to take that an employee who gives notice might do something bad on the way out?", and was given the answer "none at all, why would we take risks like that?". And thus the "zero-tolerance" policy gets enshrined in the Holy Binder of Company Law and everybody has to abide by it, even while they know it's stupid.
And sometimes that's still better than having no defined policies or consistent practices at all...
I like to think of governments as particularly firmly established and powerful insurance companies.
Basically, a government collects insurance premiums (taxes), pays its employees and executives (senior government officials) with both money and perks, enacts programs to help prevent the need to pay out on claims (e.g. law enforcement, safety departments, education to hopefully provide employable skills, etc.), and pays out to victims of certain types of misfortune (either directly in the form of monetary aid or with other support paid for with tax money.)
As you point out, though, the difference between a government and, say Lloyd's of London or Allstate or whoever is that governments can compel the purchase of their products with armed force. (Don't believe me? Try refusing to pay your taxes...)
The only real differences between different governments are how quickly the guns come out when they want to offer a new "product" ("Democratic" governments are kind of like public companies in that the shareholders often get to vote on new programs [though all kinds of shenanigans can be performed by government authorities to sway the vote or work around a vote that doesn't go the way they want] first, and are then asked more or less politely to participate a few times before the guns come out. Despotic governments break out the guns as part of the planning of the new "product"), what kinds of situations they cover (e.g. degree of health-care provided, how much education is subsidized, etc) and how well they cover them, and what proportion of the premiums gets skimmed off to pay for the salaries, bonuses, and perks of the government officials and employees.
Or so I like to think.
MySQL's attitude seems to be a little different from EV1's.
EV1 directly funded The SCO Group and was explicitly supporting SCO's wild "Intellectual Property" claims - even to the extent of, afterwards, paying for advertisements in "Linux Journal" claiming to be "IP Compliant".
MySQL, on the other hand, has not paid SCO anything and is at least claiming that they were more interested in supporting existing and new users of MySQL who happen to be on SCO's platform right now.
Can't say that I'm actually happy seeing ANYONE giving any kind of support to The SCO Group right now, but this does seem substantially different from EV1's behavior.
I think that money is to employee satisfaction what penis size is to sexual prowess. It is important that there be enough, but once you reach that point it is more useful to focus on making the situation more enjoyable in other ways than to simply have "more" (although "more" is generally also appreciated somewhat). And even if there ISN'T "enough", if you are REALLY GOOD in other ways you can make up for it. Or so I've heard.
That's just because his Action Items didn't include utilizing his resources with synergy.
I'll add a vote for this, at least on a "try it out and see how it works for you" basis - my experience with it is limited at this point but I like what I see so far.
I've just started using Citadel as an SMTP/IMAP server to see how it works. It was pretty easy to compile and get running, and seems to work painlessly with Thunderbird. I haven't tried calendars in it yet, but that's "soon" on my list, once I've had time to find the documentation on it.
I had a problem getting webcit to run properly, but I haven't really had time to dig into that yet. Probably just something stupid I've done on my end.
(insert "warming up" sound effects here.) "I raped and then strangled the puppy. Then I used the puppy's dead body to bludgeon a little old lady to death. After that, I walked across the street and flung both bodies on somebody's lawn."
There. I have "virtually" committed bestiality, animal cruelty, elder abuse, murder, jaywalking, trespassing, and littering, using technology that is readily available to children, with no more effort than it takes to post to Slashdot(tm)!
How many more will have to suffer before computer keyboards are outlawed for minors?!?!? WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN???
Are you saying that Microsoft is paying people to develop Microsoft Windows drivers for their (the hardware manufacturers') own hardware?...
While I strongly agree that the patent process here (like many other places - patents in this area often remind of me of software patents) is being horribly abused, there ARE some potential non-obvious uses for gene sequences besides making proteins.
Antisense RNA therapy, for example (put simply, it's a way of performing a denial-of-service attack against the expression of a particular gene - handy if the gene in question is one that causes, say, growth of a cancerous tumor.)
Welcome to the broken state of the USPTO (and, most likely, patent offices in other nations as well).
In fairness, I'm TOLD that what's being patented isn't really the gene itself, but specific uses of the gene (e.g. "use of human gene sequence [whatever] to detect expression of cancer-related gene [whatever]", to pull a conceivably representative description out of a random orifice).
On the other hand, I'm also told that many of these "specific" uses amount to 'using the gene to discover other genes' in some vague fashion.
So it's not at all like patenting the speed of light. But it IS like patenting "using the known speed of light to determine the distance between two objects" (for example). Should be obvious to someone "in the field" but the USPTO doesn't bother to really check on or enforce that it would seem.
"All Your Base-Pair Are Belong To Us"
I don't personally know much about the format, but it may be the new "binary key" is unique to the new "Microsoft Office 'Open' XML format", which is DIFFERENT from the MS Office 2003 XML formats...
Many of them, I think, are missing because of their dependency on (non-open-source) Java, which is not included. (In other words, Eclipse itself is OSS, but since it relies of non-OSS Java, they leave it out too.)
I have no idea about the bitstream vera fonts, though - that makes no sense to me at all, since I was sure they were distributed as open source...
You could possibly implement it with DavFS...