Mapquest.ca doesn't exist, or at least it's broken for the moment. But if you go to MapQuest, hit the Maps button, click where it says "United States" and change it to Canada, then type Montreal in for the city, you get the one you want. Of course it's not going to give you Montreal if you type it in the box on the front page, that's for US addresses!
Which $80 Wal-Mart device, exactly, is the equivalent of an iPod?
I don't have one, I don't want one. But the advantages are clear. You can fit as much music as you could ever want to listen to in your jeans pocket. You can listen to the tracks you want all day without recharging or refilling the player. You never have to ask, "What do I want to listen to tomorrow?" because the thing contains your entire collection.
The difference is slashdot never prentended to be unbiased. Everybody who reads the site knows that they have a very strong bias, and what it is. The editors do nothing to hide that.
Compare this with "fair and balanced" FOX News. I wouldn't care if they simply admitted to being biased, or even if they just stopped claiming that they weren't.
I have an idea. Let's fill all of low-earth orbit with a very, very low-pressure gas. It will be thin enough that spacecraft won't have to worry about the drag, satellites won't lose significant altitude during their operational lifetimes, and space stations will need only an occasional reboosting. But thanks to the square-cube law, debris would de-orbit very rapidly. While we're at it, let's make it so that every few years, we temporarily add more gas to make sure that we got anything that was missed before.
Of course, our atmosphere and the sun's variable cycle are already doing this for us. Hooray!
Not to say that space junk isn't a problem. But it's not, and never will be, a permanent problem in low orbits.
Junk deorbits rapidly. The square-cubed law means that they have higher surface area for their weight, and therefore proportionately higher atmospheric drag. Massive amounts of junk pumped into low orbits would be gone in months. In very high orbits (like geosync, not sure about the GPS orbits) it's a different situation, but there's also a lot more space at that distance.
I have never seen any convincing argument that clicking a button labelled "Agree" has the same legal power as signing your name to a document. Therefore you waive no rights when using the iTMS, and you may legally do anything with your purchases that is allowed by standard US copyright law.
It doesn't need to be "expressly permitted". It's implicitly permitted by fair use. Since there is no legal barrier, and of course there is no technical barrier, you can do this without a problem.
This is a gigantic problem with lawmakers; they create laws with a particular spirit, but with a letter that is much more broad. These morons don't realize that local prosecutors don't give a shit about the spirit of the law, they simply want to use the letter of the law to put people in jail when they think these people deserve it.
Congress needs to stop trusting prosecutors, and spell everything out if they really have the intentions they claim.
Or, tin-foil hat mode, they actually mean to do business this way, and use overbroad laws to turn everybody into criminals so that all undesirables can be put in jail without all the mess and expense of an investigation, evidence, a trial, etc.
We are much better than the Europeans, as they always misuse technology. We invented gunpowder, but we were smart enough to not make guns. We invented the printing press, but we were smart enough to not publish newspapers. We invented the compass, but we were smart enough to not discover America.
The US has a very long history of projecting serious power far overseas whenever it feels it would serve its interests. I happen to believe that most of those times it was a just cause, and I have no problem with this policy, but that's how it is.
China, on the other hand, has never sent troops into a country that isn't right next to it. They don't have the capability, nor, I think, the desire. If you have any counterexamples to this, I'd love to hear them, but until then I have to call BS on your assertion.
Telemarketers sell useless shit to people who don't know any better. They are already not performing anything worthwhile. The only difference after they're out of a job is that the idiots who buy stuff from them will be keeping their money instead of giving it to parasites. Total economic impact: zero.
You forgot the picture of the space shuttle and the poem from Jacques Prevert. Of course the poem is easy to ignore if you don't understand it, but I like it.
You also totally missed the point of the "teddy bear" (actually Winnie the Pooh); he's holding a Chinese flag! This one is supposed to merely be amusing.
The Goering quote, on the other hand, is just supposed to be scary. I don't know if you got "the point" of this one; I'm not even sure if there is a point. I put it there because I thought it was interesting and thought maybe it would make people think.
In any case, I withdraw my derisive commentary about the poster's university and replace it with the following derisive commentary: it just goes to show that lots of smarts in one area doesn't mean a thing about smarts in another area.
I am amazed at how many times I see this assertion when it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
OS X uses BSD as its base. Many BSD programs will compile out of the box and work, and even many graphical programs will work if you first install X11. However, "standard" applications don't use X11. They use either Carbon or Cocoa. If they want to access a file, they probably use Carbon or Cocoa file-access functions. If they want to have threads, they use Carbon or Cocoa thread functions, or they use Mach threads if they need something lower-level. A port to Linux would be roughly as difficult as a port to Windows or any other OS. In other words, "It's the APIs, stupid."
So is all that stuff I see about being legally able to copy up to 10% of a book just total BS, or what? (Your link is down for me, so I can't RTFA right now.)
Has this experiment been to the advantage of the people of the US?
I'm posting this reply from a five-pound computer with more power than a thousand computers from 1980, running on batteries and able to communicate with nearly any location in the world as long as it's within a couple of hundred feet of my house.
So yeah, obviously this experiment has been a total failure. Bring back 1980! I can't wait to get back to working on my Apple II.
Whenever people quote ten years to design a good man-rated rocket, it makes me alternately laugh and cry.
Don't forget that the old NASA went from no manned spaceflight whatsoever to building Saturn V's and putting people on the moon in just slightly more than eight years. And these were with people who not only had no prior experience with manned spaceflight, but people who couldn't even read about it because nobody had ever done it before.
I am fully confident that a competent organization could duplicate that feat and then some, just because we already know that it's possible. Sadly I am just as fully confident that today's NASA is not that organization.
Gee, it's not like this will be the first video version of HHTG ever done. The one the BBC did was pretty good, even if it wasn't as good as the books or the radio play.
A university probably also has the right to search your shoes before you enter a classroom, since it is private property and you have the choice not to enter, but people will still complain extremely loudly about it, and rightly so.
Some universities just don't get it. They see their network as a service that they are obligated to provide, as a minus on their balance sheet. They want that minus to be as small as possible. Students obviously need web and e-mail, so web and e-mail access must be provided.
Some universities do get it. These are the universities who realize that they don't know everything. The universities who understand that their network is an educational and research tool, and that allowing students to find new uses for the campus network is part of their students' educations. They provide free (as in speech) access. They provide working network ports everywhere that you can plug your laptop into. They provide wide-area WiFi coverage. They don't yell at you when you go into a lab, yank the network cable out of your workstation and plug it into your computer instead.
This is not to say that this second type of university simply allows the students to run rampant on the network. But the tools are different. Instead of yanking network access at a hint of trouble and invasively scanning people's PCs, they use traffic shaping and selective blocking, not because they think P2P is evil but simply to conserve bandwidth. They treat their students as reasonable human beings because they realize that they are ultimately the university's customers.
I once went to a school that did things like this. If they suspected you of evil, they would freeze your account and then wait for you to contact them. When you finally did, they'd read you a laundry list of things you never did. It was a high school. I expect high schools to be totally moronic and invasive people factories. I expect more from institutions of higher learning.
I seriously doubt if the residents of these developing nations care even a teeny tiny bit whether the movie industry thinks it's worth selling DVDs there.
If my experience in China is any indication, the native DVD industry does a fine job of getting movies out to people quickly (usually before the real DVD is out in the US) and cheaply (less than $1 equivalent per disc). Of course there's the small matter of it being illegal, the quality is somewhat hit-and-miss, and not available through convenient mail-order, but that doesn't seem to bother people that much.
(Best gift for a Matrix fan: A Matrix: Revolutions DVD in August! Of course, it was taken from a camera and the quality is horrible, but he thought it was cool anyway.)
Others have replied, but I'll add my voice too since I'm the grandparent poster.
I'm living in France at the moment, where the average price of a DVD is somewhere around $30 equivalent. At that price, it is very much worth it to import DVDs from the US, and this is what region codes prevent. The theaters thing is, I believe, also a large reason, but it's not the only reason.
And to a couple of my sibling posters: the only difference between "PAL" DVDs and "NTSC" DVDs is the framerate (and possibly resolution, I'm not clear on this point). Either type of DVD will play correctly in any DVD player hooked up to a television that the DVD player can drive.
This isn't the first movie to come out simultaneously all over the world. Notably, the first two (and one assumes/hopes the last) Lord of the Rings movies, I'm sure their DVDs are as region-coded as everybody else's.
Region-coding is all about market control, not some silly thing about keeping people from importing the DVD before the movie is in theaters. They don't want you importing the DVD because they can get away with charging you more money that way.
Sorry, but your laptop's badly-implemented "sleep" function is vastly different from my laptop's sleep function.
Putting your laptop in some "low-power mode" and then using that for storage is, of course, utterly stupid. But on a Mac laptop, sleep is not "low-power mode", the machine is turned off, with the exception of memory. Memory doesn't take a lot of electricity to save its contents.
So, point 1 is silly, I have no problem with this. Point 2 is stupid, the processor is shut off. no heat is generated. Point 3 is stupid. Of course the disk is "locked", the disk is off. Although I have to say that, due to carelessness, I have dropped my computer once while it was sleeping and once while it was turned on and active, and it was fine after either one.
Lastly, if your OS has problems resuming from sleep on a different network, get a new OS.
I will repeat it again: I use the sleep function on my laptop all the time. I never actually keep the machine fully shut down. The computer has sat in bags for days, endured X-Ray machines, trans-atlantic and trans-pacific flights, been manhandled and dropped, and has changed networks more times than I can count, over two years without ever having a problem. My previous laptops have similar experiences, no problems. The only reason I ever have had to shut the computer fully down is to change an internal hardware component, like the wireless card, or RAM, or a hard disk.
So, no, your laptop cannot sleep, it has some sort of idiotic low-power mode that they call "sleep".
Slashdot Mirror
Mapquest.ca doesn't exist, or at least it's broken for the moment. But if you go to MapQuest, hit the Maps button, click where it says "United States" and change it to Canada, then type Montreal in for the city, you get the one you want. Of course it's not going to give you Montreal if you type it in the box on the front page, that's for US addresses!
Well, they do have WMD
Which $80 Wal-Mart device, exactly, is the equivalent of an iPod?
I don't have one, I don't want one. But the advantages are clear. You can fit as much music as you could ever want to listen to in your jeans pocket. You can listen to the tracks you want all day without recharging or refilling the player. You never have to ask, "What do I want to listen to tomorrow?" because the thing contains your entire collection.
The difference is slashdot never prentended to be unbiased. Everybody who reads the site knows that they have a very strong bias, and what it is. The editors do nothing to hide that.
Compare this with "fair and balanced" FOX News. I wouldn't care if they simply admitted to being biased, or even if they just stopped claiming that they weren't.
I have an idea. Let's fill all of low-earth orbit with a very, very low-pressure gas. It will be thin enough that spacecraft won't have to worry about the drag, satellites won't lose significant altitude during their operational lifetimes, and space stations will need only an occasional reboosting. But thanks to the square-cube law, debris would de-orbit very rapidly. While we're at it, let's make it so that every few years, we temporarily add more gas to make sure that we got anything that was missed before.
Of course, our atmosphere and the sun's variable cycle are already doing this for us. Hooray!
Not to say that space junk isn't a problem. But it's not, and never will be, a permanent problem in low orbits.
Junk deorbits rapidly. The square-cubed law means that they have higher surface area for their weight, and therefore proportionately higher atmospheric drag. Massive amounts of junk pumped into low orbits would be gone in months. In very high orbits (like geosync, not sure about the GPS orbits) it's a different situation, but there's also a lot more space at that distance.
I have never seen any convincing argument that clicking a button labelled "Agree" has the same legal power as signing your name to a document. Therefore you waive no rights when using the iTMS, and you may legally do anything with your purchases that is allowed by standard US copyright law.
It doesn't need to be "expressly permitted". It's implicitly permitted by fair use. Since there is no legal barrier, and of course there is no technical barrier, you can do this without a problem.
This is a gigantic problem with lawmakers; they create laws with a particular spirit, but with a letter that is much more broad. These morons don't realize that local prosecutors don't give a shit about the spirit of the law, they simply want to use the letter of the law to put people in jail when they think these people deserve it.
Congress needs to stop trusting prosecutors, and spell everything out if they really have the intentions they claim.
Or, tin-foil hat mode, they actually mean to do business this way, and use overbroad laws to turn everybody into criminals so that all undesirables can be put in jail without all the mess and expense of an investigation, evidence, a trial, etc.
When, exactly, has history shown that?
The US has a very long history of projecting serious power far overseas whenever it feels it would serve its interests. I happen to believe that most of those times it was a just cause, and I have no problem with this policy, but that's how it is.
China, on the other hand, has never sent troops into a country that isn't right next to it. They don't have the capability, nor, I think, the desire. If you have any counterexamples to this, I'd love to hear them, but until then I have to call BS on your assertion.
Telemarketers sell useless shit to people who don't know any better. They are already not performing anything worthwhile. The only difference after they're out of a job is that the idiots who buy stuff from them will be keeping their money instead of giving it to parasites. Total economic impact: zero.
You forgot the picture of the space shuttle and the poem from Jacques Prevert. Of course the poem is easy to ignore if you don't understand it, but I like it.
You also totally missed the point of the "teddy bear" (actually Winnie the Pooh); he's holding a Chinese flag! This one is supposed to merely be amusing.
The Goering quote, on the other hand, is just supposed to be scary. I don't know if you got "the point" of this one; I'm not even sure if there is a point. I put it there because I thought it was interesting and thought maybe it would make people think.
In any case, I withdraw my derisive commentary about the poster's university and replace it with the following derisive commentary: it just goes to show that lots of smarts in one area doesn't mean a thing about smarts in another area.
Your Ph.D. is in English, and you're a "scientist" because you ask interesting questions in your Creation Science seminar at church, right?
Otherwise, if you're a "scientist" because your Ph.D. actually involved science, please tell me which university you went to so I can avoid it.
I am amazed at how many times I see this assertion when it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
OS X uses BSD as its base. Many BSD programs will compile out of the box and work, and even many graphical programs will work if you first install X11. However, "standard" applications don't use X11. They use either Carbon or Cocoa. If they want to access a file, they probably use Carbon or Cocoa file-access functions. If they want to have threads, they use Carbon or Cocoa thread functions, or they use Mach threads if they need something lower-level. A port to Linux would be roughly as difficult as a port to Windows or any other OS. In other words, "It's the APIs, stupid."
So let's lay this strange myth to rest.
So is all that stuff I see about being legally able to copy up to 10% of a book just total BS, or what? (Your link is down for me, so I can't RTFA right now.)
Has this experiment been to the advantage of the people of the US?
I'm posting this reply from a five-pound computer with more power than a thousand computers from 1980, running on batteries and able to communicate with nearly any location in the world as long as it's within a couple of hundred feet of my house.
So yeah, obviously this experiment has been a total failure. Bring back 1980! I can't wait to get back to working on my Apple II.
Whenever people quote ten years to design a good man-rated rocket, it makes me alternately laugh and cry.
Don't forget that the old NASA went from no manned spaceflight whatsoever to building Saturn V's and putting people on the moon in just slightly more than eight years. And these were with people who not only had no prior experience with manned spaceflight, but people who couldn't even read about it because nobody had ever done it before.
I am fully confident that a competent organization could duplicate that feat and then some, just because we already know that it's possible. Sadly I am just as fully confident that today's NASA is not that organization.
Gee, it's not like this will be the first video version of HHTG ever done. The one the BBC did was pretty good, even if it wasn't as good as the books or the radio play.
Congratulations, you have just re-invented Freenet.
A university probably also has the right to search your shoes before you enter a classroom, since it is private property and you have the choice not to enter, but people will still complain extremely loudly about it, and rightly so.
Some universities just don't get it. They see their network as a service that they are obligated to provide, as a minus on their balance sheet. They want that minus to be as small as possible. Students obviously need web and e-mail, so web and e-mail access must be provided.
Some universities do get it. These are the universities who realize that they don't know everything. The universities who understand that their network is an educational and research tool, and that allowing students to find new uses for the campus network is part of their students' educations. They provide free (as in speech) access. They provide working network ports everywhere that you can plug your laptop into. They provide wide-area WiFi coverage. They don't yell at you when you go into a lab, yank the network cable out of your workstation and plug it into your computer instead.
This is not to say that this second type of university simply allows the students to run rampant on the network. But the tools are different. Instead of yanking network access at a hint of trouble and invasively scanning people's PCs, they use traffic shaping and selective blocking, not because they think P2P is evil but simply to conserve bandwidth. They treat their students as reasonable human beings because they realize that they are ultimately the university's customers.
I once went to a school that did things like this. If they suspected you of evil, they would freeze your account and then wait for you to contact them. When you finally did, they'd read you a laundry list of things you never did. It was a high school. I expect high schools to be totally moronic and invasive people factories. I expect more from institutions of higher learning.
I seriously doubt if the residents of these developing nations care even a teeny tiny bit whether the movie industry thinks it's worth selling DVDs there.
If my experience in China is any indication, the native DVD industry does a fine job of getting movies out to people quickly (usually before the real DVD is out in the US) and cheaply (less than $1 equivalent per disc). Of course there's the small matter of it being illegal, the quality is somewhat hit-and-miss, and not available through convenient mail-order, but that doesn't seem to bother people that much.
(Best gift for a Matrix fan: A Matrix: Revolutions DVD in August! Of course, it was taken from a camera and the quality is horrible, but he thought it was cool anyway.)
Others have replied, but I'll add my voice too since I'm the grandparent poster.
I'm living in France at the moment, where the average price of a DVD is somewhere around $30 equivalent. At that price, it is very much worth it to import DVDs from the US, and this is what region codes prevent. The theaters thing is, I believe, also a large reason, but it's not the only reason.
And to a couple of my sibling posters: the only difference between "PAL" DVDs and "NTSC" DVDs is the framerate (and possibly resolution, I'm not clear on this point). Either type of DVD will play correctly in any DVD player hooked up to a television that the DVD player can drive.
Yeah, get real.
This isn't the first movie to come out simultaneously all over the world. Notably, the first two (and one assumes/hopes the last) Lord of the Rings movies, I'm sure their DVDs are as region-coded as everybody else's.
Region-coding is all about market control, not some silly thing about keeping people from importing the DVD before the movie is in theaters. They don't want you importing the DVD because they can get away with charging you more money that way.
Sorry, but your laptop's badly-implemented "sleep" function is vastly different from my laptop's sleep function.
Putting your laptop in some "low-power mode" and then using that for storage is, of course, utterly stupid. But on a Mac laptop, sleep is not "low-power mode", the machine is turned off, with the exception of memory. Memory doesn't take a lot of electricity to save its contents.
So, point 1 is silly, I have no problem with this. Point 2 is stupid, the processor is shut off. no heat is generated. Point 3 is stupid. Of course the disk is "locked", the disk is off. Although I have to say that, due to carelessness, I have dropped my computer once while it was sleeping and once while it was turned on and active, and it was fine after either one.
Lastly, if your OS has problems resuming from sleep on a different network, get a new OS.
I will repeat it again: I use the sleep function on my laptop all the time. I never actually keep the machine fully shut down. The computer has sat in bags for days, endured X-Ray machines, trans-atlantic and trans-pacific flights, been manhandled and dropped, and has changed networks more times than I can count, over two years without ever having a problem. My previous laptops have similar experiences, no problems. The only reason I ever have had to shut the computer fully down is to change an internal hardware component, like the wireless card, or RAM, or a hard disk.
So, no, your laptop cannot sleep, it has some sort of idiotic low-power mode that they call "sleep".