The root problem seems to be that the GP is misunderstanding the meaning of "in loco parentis". It doesn't mean "parent in the place", it means "in the stead of the parent": "loco" in that sentence is equivalent to "stead", and has nothing to do with the school grounds, or any space or time limitation.
I'll respond to my own post. It turns out that the Gnome Keyring and the KDE Wallet don't integrate, after all, so if you have both KDE and Gnome applications on your system you are effectively without a single centralized password manager, as previously feared. There are plans to integrate the two managers, but they're "at a very early stage".
If there are "several" such applications, doesn't that in fact mean that there is no single centralized password manager, like the (trollish) GP surmised? Or is it the case that, when you run a KDE application on a mainly-Gnome system, it gets passwords from the Gnome Keyring, and vice versa?
Linking to a barely related (and barely coherent) blog post before going on a wholly off-topic rant does not quite make a comment on-topic. I'm not sure what makes Beppe Grillo's opinion relevant: his (former?) career as a comedian? His stint as a demagogue? His multiple manslaughter conviction? Italian public opinion has moved past the anti-political phase that characters like Grillo briefly embodied. The current government is doing a pretty decent job (which looks like a stellar job when compared to its predecessor's), and its approval ratings remain high - which is all the more remarkable when you consider the current situation of worldwide economic crisis. Things are changing.
That said, if Berlusconi messes with the Internet I'm ready to turn into a single-issue voter and support anyone who would set things right. I doubt he's actually going to manage to do that, though.
But then your apparatus consists of an existing general purpose computer, not patentable due to prior art, combined with the software containing the algorithm, not patentable because it's a method. Furthermore, the act of combining a computer with software is itself not patentable, due to prior art and being obvious to anyone who knows what a computer is.
I don't think that would result in something patentable.
I used not to use ad blockers because I wanted to support the sites I visit. However, Flash is (at least on Macs) a hideous resource hog that keeps my CPU busy and my fans running louder as long as I have any page with Flash content open, and I like leaving many tabs open most of the time. Since Flash ads have become more and more prevalent, I have given up and started using Privoxy to filter ads.
However, I think most/all ad systems nowaday pay per click, or use even stricter metrics; I doubt many still pay per ad view. So, given that I seldom clicked ads before, blocking them shouldn't have much of an impact on the sites' bottom lines.
Speaking of patents as assets, they're included in a business's balance sheet, aren't they? Wikipedia says their expense is amortized over their useful life, but how is the expense determined? Is it just the cost of registering the patent, or does it include R&D costs?
Basically, what kind of impact is this going to have on the balance sheets of patent holders?
I don't know where you got the idea that the Swiss are an army of Chuck Norris clones, but the Swiss Guard has been defeated by Italian forces before; notably, when Italy conquered the majority of the Papal states, and then Rome, leaving only what became today's Vatican.
However, there are real reasons why it would be difficult to invade the Vatican. One, the majority of the Italian population is Catholic, and would oppose such a move. This makes it a non-starter under the current democratic government, naturally, but it would be a significant problem even for a dictator. In fact, the treaty that established the Vatican City was signed by Mussolini, who was eager to appease Catholic sentiment. Two, the Holy See has diplomatic relations with 177 states, and there are over one billion Catholics in the world. International opposition to an invasion would result in strong sanctions against the invading country, at the very least.
None of these reasons apply to Sealand, of course. In fact, there is a much closer precedent involving Italy and an island micro-nation. In the 60s, Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa built a platform in the Adriatic Sea, right outside of Italian territorial waters, and declared it independent under the Esperanto name of "Respubliko de la Insulo de la Rozoj" (Republic of the Island of Roses). Italy reacted quickly: the Coast Guard established a naval blockade of the platform, the Police occupied it, and eventually, the Navy demolished it using explosives. There were hardly any international protests, and the incident was soon forgotten.
Not necessarily. Assuming the error made by people in reporting the direction is essentially random, by the law of large numbers the average of thousands or reports from a given city should be quite close to the actual direction of the impact point from that city.
Copernicus was a Catholic cleric. He was buried inside a cathedral. The church didn't take objection to his work until six decades after his death, under a changing political and cultural climate.
Maybe it's because I'm a programmer, but I haven't had any trouble installing PostgreSQL or Django on Leopard. I didn't even use MacPorts. Perhaps if you told us what was so painful about it...
That was my first thought too. Do they make any attempts at detecting whether the OS was updated, or new software was installed that requires a reboot, so they can perform a full boot and update the startup snapshot when needed?
The answer might be obvious to the people involved in the project, but as an external observer I'm left to wonder why they were using StarOffice in the first place. Why not OpenOffice?
How can this post be modded "informative"? He didn't bother explaining what the meaning of the word is supposed to be, nor how it is supposed to be used. Withholding information is the exact opposite of being informative.
What's relevant to the news is not necessarily the same as what's relevant to the courts. In this case, there had been a string of violent acts committed by minors (vandalism, bullying etc.) where the perpetrators had used cell phones to film the incidents, and ended up disseminating evidence themselves. This was considered strange and novel enough to make national news for a while, until it got boring and the media moved on. That's just the media being the media.
Meanwhile, Mastella thought he could get some air time by shooting his mouth off on the news of the day. That's just a bad politician being a bad politician. By the way, his well-deserved political disgrace is fully related to his being the leader of a "corruption-ridden micro-party": when his party's corruption was exposed, he was forsaken by his allies, and the handful of votes his tiny party got was not enough to get past the threshold to get into parliament by itself.
As for not hearing what happened to the perpetrators of that assault incident, that's no surprise: only the most important crimes get covered by the national news all the way to the end of the trial. That was a minor case which could only get full and continued coverage on local papers.
American girls keep stealing boys' names. No, seriously. Check out chapter 6 of Freakonomics.
Re:Treadmills into FPSes?
on
The Gym Arcade
·
· Score: 1
Realistically, laser game gives you about 5% the exercise you get from a treadmill or a stationary bike.
I'm afraid many people don't understand the point of a gym. You go to the gym to exercise efficiently, not to have fun. That's why people go to the gym even though it's mind-numbingly boring. Of course, if you can make it fun as well, it's even better, but it won't change people's priorities. "A lot of exercise with a bit of fun" is still going to beat "a lot of fun with a bit of exercise" if your goal is exercising. You can get your fun elsewhere after the gym, anyway.
1) It's not an art in any acceptable sense of the word. ("An activity I like" is not acceptable.)
2) Adults don't necessarily have time for playing team sports regularly, especially when that requires synchronizing the schedules of at least ten players. Not to mention the possibility and inconvenience of sporting injuries (and when I say possibility, I mean certainty).
3) If you just need to exercise to stay fit, playing a team sport (with all the organizational overhead that goes with it) is an incredibly inefficient way of reaching that goal. That's why gyms are popular in the first place: they offer a direct, no-nonsense approach to getting the exercise you need.
Bottom line, hoping that people will go back to frolicking in the fields is a waste of time.
People are talking as if Chrome's V8 was the fastest JavaScript engine around, but it wasn't - WebKit's SquirrelFish Extreme was faster. Is Minefield's engine even faster? Ars Technica's tests show that TraceMonkey runs the SunSpider benchmark in between 78% and 84% of V8's time. However, according to earlier tests, SquirelFish Extreme completes the benchmark in 74% of V8's time, making it even faster than the newest TraceMonkey.
So it looks like Minefield, though fast, is not the fastest browser in JavaScript.
For now, you can get PowerPC builds from a third party. (I have posted this information before, but affected users might be more likely to find it here.) They don't have 3.0 yet, but you can get 3.0rc4. The most annoying thing is that OO.o actually has PPC builds of 3.0, but only for a few languages, and English is not among them. What's up with that?
Slashdot Mirror
The root problem seems to be that the GP is misunderstanding the meaning of "in loco parentis". It doesn't mean "parent in the place", it means "in the stead of the parent": "loco" in that sentence is equivalent to "stead", and has nothing to do with the school grounds, or any space or time limitation.
I'll respond to my own post. It turns out that the Gnome Keyring and the KDE Wallet don't integrate, after all, so if you have both KDE and Gnome applications on your system you are effectively without a single centralized password manager, as previously feared. There are plans to integrate the two managers, but they're "at a very early stage".
If there are "several" such applications, doesn't that in fact mean that there is no single centralized password manager, like the (trollish) GP surmised? Or is it the case that, when you run a KDE application on a mainly-Gnome system, it gets passwords from the Gnome Keyring, and vice versa?
Linking to a barely related (and barely coherent) blog post before going on a wholly off-topic rant does not quite make a comment on-topic. I'm not sure what makes Beppe Grillo's opinion relevant: his (former?) career as a comedian? His stint as a demagogue? His multiple manslaughter conviction? Italian public opinion has moved past the anti-political phase that characters like Grillo briefly embodied. The current government is doing a pretty decent job (which looks like a stellar job when compared to its predecessor's), and its approval ratings remain high - which is all the more remarkable when you consider the current situation of worldwide economic crisis. Things are changing.
That said, if Berlusconi messes with the Internet I'm ready to turn into a single-issue voter and support anyone who would set things right. I doubt he's actually going to manage to do that, though.
But then your apparatus consists of an existing general purpose computer, not patentable due to prior art, combined with the software containing the algorithm, not patentable because it's a method. Furthermore, the act of combining a computer with software is itself not patentable, due to prior art and being obvious to anyone who knows what a computer is.
I don't think that would result in something patentable.
I really appreciated the fact that you began your post with "I am a game developer", and not "IAAGD (I am a game developer)".
I used not to use ad blockers because I wanted to support the sites I visit. However, Flash is (at least on Macs) a hideous resource hog that keeps my CPU busy and my fans running louder as long as I have any page with Flash content open, and I like leaving many tabs open most of the time. Since Flash ads have become more and more prevalent, I have given up and started using Privoxy to filter ads.
However, I think most/all ad systems nowaday pay per click, or use even stricter metrics; I doubt many still pay per ad view. So, given that I seldom clicked ads before, blocking them shouldn't have much of an impact on the sites' bottom lines.
You could use Privoxy or some other filtering proxy. It's a bit harder to configure, but works with any browser.
Speaking of patents as assets, they're included in a business's balance sheet, aren't they? Wikipedia says their expense is amortized over their useful life, but how is the expense determined? Is it just the cost of registering the patent, or does it include R&D costs? Basically, what kind of impact is this going to have on the balance sheets of patent holders?
I don't know where you got the idea that the Swiss are an army of Chuck Norris clones, but the Swiss Guard has been defeated by Italian forces before; notably, when Italy conquered the majority of the Papal states, and then Rome, leaving only what became today's Vatican.
However, there are real reasons why it would be difficult to invade the Vatican. One, the majority of the Italian population is Catholic, and would oppose such a move. This makes it a non-starter under the current democratic government, naturally, but it would be a significant problem even for a dictator. In fact, the treaty that established the Vatican City was signed by Mussolini, who was eager to appease Catholic sentiment.
Two, the Holy See has diplomatic relations with 177 states, and there are over one billion Catholics in the world. International opposition to an invasion would result in strong sanctions against the invading country, at the very least.
None of these reasons apply to Sealand, of course. In fact, there is a much closer precedent involving Italy and an island micro-nation. In the 60s, Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa built a platform in the Adriatic Sea, right outside of Italian territorial waters, and declared it independent under the Esperanto name of "Respubliko de la Insulo de la Rozoj" (Republic of the Island of Roses). Italy reacted quickly: the Coast Guard established a naval blockade of the platform, the Police occupied it, and eventually, the Navy demolished it using explosives. There were hardly any international protests, and the incident was soon forgotten.
Not necessarily. Assuming the error made by people in reporting the direction is essentially random, by the law of large numbers the average of thousands or reports from a given city should be quite close to the actual direction of the impact point from that city.
That's where the cash is. Or so I hear.
Copernicus was a Catholic cleric. He was buried inside a cathedral. The church didn't take objection to his work until six decades after his death, under a changing political and cultural climate.
Maybe it's because I'm a programmer, but I haven't had any trouble installing PostgreSQL or Django on Leopard. I didn't even use MacPorts. Perhaps if you told us what was so painful about it...
That was my first thought too. Do they make any attempts at detecting whether the OS was updated, or new software was installed that requires a reboot, so they can perform a full boot and update the startup snapshot when needed?
As tourism takes a hit from the economic crisis, this is a great piece of advertising. "Visit the beautiful Maldives while you still can!"
The answer might be obvious to the people involved in the project, but as an external observer I'm left to wonder why they were using StarOffice in the first place. Why not OpenOffice?
How can this post be modded "informative"? He didn't bother explaining what the meaning of the word is supposed to be, nor how it is supposed to be used. Withholding information is the exact opposite of being informative.
What's relevant to the news is not necessarily the same as what's relevant to the courts. In this case, there had been a string of violent acts committed by minors (vandalism, bullying etc.) where the perpetrators had used cell phones to film the incidents, and ended up disseminating evidence themselves. This was considered strange and novel enough to make national news for a while, until it got boring and the media moved on. That's just the media being the media.
Meanwhile, Mastella thought he could get some air time by shooting his mouth off on the news of the day. That's just a bad politician being a bad politician. By the way, his well-deserved political disgrace is fully related to his being the leader of a "corruption-ridden micro-party": when his party's corruption was exposed, he was forsaken by his allies, and the handful of votes his tiny party got was not enough to get past the threshold to get into parliament by itself.
As for not hearing what happened to the perpetrators of that assault incident, that's no surprise: only the most important crimes get covered by the national news all the way to the end of the trial. That was a minor case which could only get full and continued coverage on local papers.
I wonder what the origin of that difference is?
American girls keep stealing boys' names. No, seriously. Check out chapter 6 of Freakonomics.
Realistically, laser game gives you about 5% the exercise you get from a treadmill or a stationary bike.
I'm afraid many people don't understand the point of a gym. You go to the gym to exercise efficiently, not to have fun. That's why people go to the gym even though it's mind-numbingly boring. Of course, if you can make it fun as well, it's even better, but it won't change people's priorities. "A lot of exercise with a bit of fun" is still going to beat "a lot of fun with a bit of exercise" if your goal is exercising. You can get your fun elsewhere after the gym, anyway.
1) It's not an art in any acceptable sense of the word. ("An activity I like" is not acceptable.)
2) Adults don't necessarily have time for playing team sports regularly, especially when that requires synchronizing the schedules of at least ten players. Not to mention the possibility and inconvenience of sporting injuries (and when I say possibility, I mean certainty).
3) If you just need to exercise to stay fit, playing a team sport (with all the organizational overhead that goes with it) is an incredibly inefficient way of reaching that goal. That's why gyms are popular in the first place: they offer a direct, no-nonsense approach to getting the exercise you need.
Bottom line, hoping that people will go back to frolicking in the fields is a waste of time.
But has the JIT code been implemented for PPC?
No. They seem to be planning to have PPC support eventually, but work is in very early stages.
People are talking as if Chrome's V8 was the fastest JavaScript engine around, but it wasn't - WebKit's SquirrelFish Extreme was faster. Is Minefield's engine even faster? Ars Technica's tests show that TraceMonkey runs the SunSpider benchmark in between 78% and 84% of V8's time. However, according to earlier tests, SquirelFish Extreme completes the benchmark in 74% of V8's time, making it even faster than the newest TraceMonkey. So it looks like Minefield, though fast, is not the fastest browser in JavaScript.
For now, you can get PowerPC builds from a third party. (I have posted this information before, but affected users might be more likely to find it here.) They don't have 3.0 yet, but you can get 3.0rc4. The most annoying thing is that OO.o actually has PPC builds of 3.0, but only for a few languages, and English is not among them. What's up with that?