it only comes out of the pockets of those who regularly buy and sell.
Right; 'cos this being Slashdot most of us can hold of buying food for a month or two and just buy electronics. Seriously; that's the whole point of this. When the price of food falls; the financial guys involved in arbitrage know in advance of the people who are buying for supermarkets and they pocket part of the money which the supermarkets otherwise wouldn't have to pay the producers.
The only way to avoid this is to ensure that they pay a transaction cost for each transaction.
The response has been clear, and it's the same response as free software people have given everywhere: "show us your patents". Even the current US legal system is pretty clear about this. If you are aware that your patent is being infringed, you have a duty to come forward to tell the person who is doing that. If you don't; when it comes to damages it is completely obvious that you didn't do your best to minimise the damage caused to yourself and you don't deserve to be paid off.
What Apple and Microsoft are doing is either a) allowing people to continue doing "damage" by using a patent they don't have the right to when Apple or Microsoft could stop that by clearly stating which patent it is or more likely, b) spreading FUD. In case a) since MS and Apple are the only ones who know what the patents are, they should be liable for the continued "damage" from the use of patents from the point where they decided to speak about the patents without stating which ones.
Someone should take this up in a court e.g. in Germany where some parts of the legal system still seem to function.
Look; you are talking about an essay which confuses an equation (the drake equation) with a theory (the drake equation is correct) with a project (SETI). I think your above comment has something worth discussing, but could you please rewrite it without the link to someone completely educationally subnormal who I just feel the need to trash in writing. Here goes:
The Drake equation is not an equation which was ever proposed to give an instant answer. Michael Crichton acts as if he was the person who discovered the uncertainty in the drake equation when in fact that uncertainty was the whole point of stating the drake equation. The Drake equation is, instead, a suggestion for a way of defining the things you have to find out in order to work out how much life there is in the universe.
Now, in so far as we can tell in an essay which doesn't even understand the basic names of the things it is trying to criticise, Crichton goes on to accuse SETI of lack of science. "SETI is not science" he says; "untestable theories may have heuristic value" he goes on, implying that SETI's theories are untestable. However, this is wrong. Seti's theory is simple to state:
We will be able to detect alien societies through their output of electromagnetic waves.
and the test is the quite simple one they are doing. Look for those waves. If you find them you are right, if you don't you are wrong.
Let's look further into his commentary (N.B. as ever I'm cutting out points I want to discuss; you have the link to the original so you can read it whole to understand what these represent). The bit about nuclear war: "The similarity to the Drake equation is striking"; "Nobody knows how much smoke will be generated when cities burn". Science is precisely about things that we don't know yet. If it was true that nobody had ever seen a city burn before, then there's a dead simple thing you can do. Nuke a city. It's not nice, but it is scientific. You might even be able to build a city and then nuke it (I believe this was done on a smaller scale for some early bomb tests).
Seldom have I seen a more pathetic attempt at showing up bad science. I agree with his conclusion (there needs to be science independent of special interests) but find myself almost doubting it as I read his paper.
please look for a better essay which shows your point.
What does one thing have to do with the other? What have you been smoking?
The break in to google was based on a windows / IE vulnerability which was otherwise unknown. Looking through articles about it it's pretty clear it ends up as "state actors" from China. In other words, exactly they people MS gave source code access to.
Great, so let's make all encryption algorithms secret. Security through obscurity has worked sooooo well in the past...
Or how about using one of the standard open source well studied implementations? What's wrong is the idea of giving the source code to China and leaving all other users in the dark.
Can India afford that, or are they just bluffing?
The can't afford not to. China and India are in a state of more or less cold war. Whilst I think that India has probably been more aggressive than China, the lack of trust means that when there's the next crisis, the measures they need to take to secure their telecomms infrastructure will be much more expensive than getting it right in the first place
And why do you think it's your job to "block" a sovereign country on an internal issue? Would you like the Chinese to "block" you if California wanted to become independent? Mind your own fucking business!
a) I'm not American, and, for the record, I think the US attitude to China and the Chinese is totally fucked up (be rude to them, threaten them, insult them whilst at the same time getting all your goods from them and doing nothing for ethics of your companies in China).
b) the people of California have the same right to self determination as the Taiwanese and I would strongly encourage them to become independent. In the case where they had a clear mass majority will to do so I would definitely support them as reasonable. Unfortunately, unlike the Taiwanese, they don't want to be independent, so their own wish leaves them trapped in the USA.
c) This is nowhere near an internal issue. Taiwan has been independent of the PRC for years. It was part of the UN independently. There is very little common link between it and modern day China. It has every right to it's own sovereignty.
The fact that you were modded 5+ Insigthful for this crazy post makes me think you're not the only one smoking weird stuff.
China is a wierd place right now. Trying to achieve the highest quality in manufacturing and killing Chinese children (mainly) with bad baby milk. Fighting against corruption, but not understanding that the stuff that happened to Google causes even more harm (which could be mitigated with an open, clear, good investigation and punishment of whoever did it, even if they are in the securit forces). As long as that's true, you can hardly expect the outsider's view to be solidly and clearly positive. China needs to get serious democracy and human rights. If that happened, it could be a real world leader the rest of us could follow.
Damnit; of course Apple's signing is the only thing protecting us from the void. That's why networks with Symbian phones (where the user can install just about anything they want) collapse almost every day of the week. Nothing at all to do with Apple being a bunch of control freaks.
I'm glad the post changed your mind because mostly it's correct. By packaging everything up and taking away user decisions (contrast with Microsoft's UAC) they've made something which is very useful to people who otherwise wouldn't be able to cope. However, you shouldn't confuse the good (a simple system with a defined use) with the bad (deliberate censorship and DRM) which is riding on top of it. Both Android and the N900, whilst they aren't yet as well done as the iPhone/iPad OS show that the Apple style control of the appliance interface is possible without the Apple style control of the user and the way the user uses the device.
Criticising Apple for too much lock down is not contradictory with thinking that a locked down default may be be a good idea.
The dual screen thing is very good idea. People still like closing their books and will want to close their electronic tablets too....
I like where you are going with this. So we have a device with a screen like an Ipad, but you can close it to protect the device. Then we have a second screen which can be used for input when the device is open. The only thing I see wrong is that even haptic input isn't that great. But, what if, instead of soft keys, we had hard keys, sort of mounted on a circuit board (a "board-key". if you like). Admittedly you'd lose the flexibility of dual screens but then again divided screens aren't always ideal, you could just have different sizes of single screens available depending on people's needs. It would then be a bit like a journal or a book that could take notes. Call it a "book-note" and you've got a really great marketing idea. You might even be able to sell them in the thousands.
but Indian goverment is not buying the stuff. It's the telecom operators that buy it and use it to sell services to regular citizens. The goverment could buy trusted equipment for their needs.
The teleco stuff is the stuff you will use to call for help and communicate during a war. Since the idea of total war it has been clear that your civilian infrastructure may be targeted in war. The idea of something which lets your opposition remotely disable most of your industrial capacity is crazy. That's what Chinese exchanges represent for India.
The effect of giving the Windows source code to China seems to have been that people in China used it to break into Google and tens of other major corporations. Why should this be any different? There are expert groups in China who will find vulnerabilities in the systems and then, instead of having to have trojanised equipment from their own vendors, they will be able to attack the other vendor's equipment just as well.
What's really funny is that India is stopping buying Chinese made teleco equipment whilst other countries like the US; also great friends of China (when will you stop blocking their discipline against the rebel province of Taiwan???) still continue to buy Chinese.
It is often wrongly applied to IP networking, but it was meant for the CLNP networking infrastructure.
There FTFY. I have never seen anything which causes more confusion to people learning networking than the use of the OSI model to explain it. Any trainer who does it (yes I'm looking at you CISCO) should be damned to Steve Ballmer's dungeon.
s/layer/lair/ but then that's the problem with open sourcers.. We don't have the weeks of preparation by a team of PR people before we publish and are damned.
Where he's been ever since. Microsoft's evil layer, just under Steve Balmer's bedroom, chained to a chair, just waiting for this correction to be posted so that he could post the XKCD cartoon. Imagine the willpower it takes to sit for weeks refreshing slashdot just waiting for that first post. If only he could escape to use his powers for good.
Chen's story is; and you don't know any better at this point; that the original finder called Apple and was told it was a fake. Now, you know, and I know, that this was just some idiot in technical support trying to close his ticket as fast as possible. However, Apple knows that too. It's a choice Apple made when they designed their technical support process. They could instead have instructed their technical support to investigate customer claims as closely as possible. That would cost more, however so they don't do that. This is Apple's decision, Apple's risk and the consequences are for Apple to bear.
Environmentalism is not like Palinism. It's science based not cult based. In science, a large amount of progress is had by conflicting ideas. Someone has a theory, they test this against the evidence. In a "science based" activity like medicine, you take the best guess you can based on the evidence available. This inevitably would lead to occasional changes in viewpoint. The suprising thing about environmentalism is how few of these have happened and how much the "anti-environmentalists" have to struggle to make it seem there has. "The environmentalists used to say there would be a global winter"; oh, no they didn't; but they used to say the world was cooling; oh no they didn't; but there was once an article by an environmentalist saying there might be cooling...
It's like the oil company lobbyists "there is no global warming"; okay "there is global warming, but it's not caused by humans"; okay "the global warming is caused by humans but it's within the normal limits"; okay, "the global warming is exceptional but it's for the good"; okay "the global warming is bad, but not using petrol would be worse"; okay "the global warming will be deadly but we'll be able to find a solution"; okay "we haven't found a solution, but we have lots of lobbyists, money and lawyers".
I said another because exactly the same thing (leak of the source code against Microsoft's will) has happened to Windows previously. Another 30 companies were included in this recent Google break in. I know that a company I worked for had similar problems a while ago.
Basically, you can assume that your "enemy" already has the source code. The only question is, can you get more friends to read it? If you don't publish then the only other eyes will be hostile sice friendly eyes won't have access. If you do publish you have a reasonable chance be able to get friendly eyes to help.
Yes; well the truth is that only if those eyes are looking (I'm sure the crackers will be). But still, it's yet another example that not publishing your source code just means that the only eyes looking other than your own are hostile eyes. Google should now publish the source code to this system and more of their other internal stuff that others could use and share.
I don't think you read my posting carefully enough, but since you ask why I used the analogy of theft in my comment, I'll answer.
The entertainment industry is free riding on an agreement (copyright) designed to encourage literature and quality writing. They are allowed to restrict other's freedom of speech in return for (supposedly) increasing the amount of speech. However, not only are they turning in completely vapid useless and sometimes even damaging speech; now they are actively trying to interfere with all sorts of other free speech.
At the point where they start to knowingly interfere with free speech (by encouraging censorware) and deliberately failing to keep up their own end of the bargain (by ensuring that their copyright products will not be available after the term of copyright) anything more that they try to take is theft. They have broken their contract with society and lost the right to any of the royalties which they take. I used an analogy to theft deliberately and with meaning.
There is method in their madness. They ask for the moon and then, whilst you are arguing about how outrageous that is, they slip 100 dollars out of your pocket. Even if you catch them, the police just shrug their shoulders "100 dollars sounds like a pretty good price for the moon sir; what are you complaining about? Now please move along and let's not have any funny business".
Sometimes the position of the pirate party looks more and more sensible.
"AH AH AH AH AH!" whoosh.. The sound you can hear is the sound of the Count laughing at the joke as he flies just over your head.
On your serious point, however, The Egg Shell skull is real; this is not an random potential idea, it is actually the way courts work.. However it's only an issue once you have committed a crime or done something wrong. If you shake someone's hand, that's normal behavior. If, however, you deliberately shake his hand trying to hurt him (actual assault) and then crush his bones then you are in problem. So in the other, fail to read the grandparent and miss the joke, poster's message, you would only get into trouble if you deliberately led the teenager on trying to break her heart and cause her psychological problems. It's important to remember that, opposite to engineering and CS, law deals mostly with intent and much less with action.
In fact, if anyone read to the second page of the articleyou'd see that the standard actualy says
6.5.1 Economizers. Each cooling system that has a fan shall include either an air or
water economizer meeting the requirements of Sections 6.5.1.1 through 6.5.1.4.
Exceptions: Economizers are not required for the systems listed below.
[.....]
i. Where the cooling efficiency meets or exceeds the efficiency requirements in Table
6.3.2.
This is in stark contrast to both Google and Yahoo's claims that "to comply, you must use economizers" (Yahoo engineer) or that "the standard requires data centers to use economizers" (Google blog). So it's clear that the big boys are lying at this point. The only question is why? Clearly something's up.
If the more hyped one gets more applications and is more useful in the end, then unfortunately you often end up preferring the more hyped one. It's a simple Betamax vs VHS choice. Even there, often "better" for you means something completely different from "better" for the people delivering them.
Your point being? You have to take your "victims as they find them". Are you trying to deprive her of her god given right to sue in the USA for some kind of ethnic discrimination thing? Have you not noticed how nobody else in this discussion has even mentioned this completely irrelevant fact. There is an important legal principle; the egg shell skull which says that when he shone his light in her face, he should have taken this possibility into account.
I'm shocked you should post this kind of speciesistic rant; that it gets modded up to five just shows how sick slashdot has become. Next we'll have people up claiming that apple doesn't deserve all the rights of a person just because it's a company.
and I'm afraid you may have missed mine; I'll try to write better..
A judge is going to take phone calls or read/answer email while he is presiding_at_trial/court_is_in_session?
The judge is still presiding over the trial even when the court is not in session. It's normal for urgent motions to come in for whatever reasons and the judge would get notified of them by phone/email/etc. I assume that the judge bought a blackberry specifically because a plain desktop PC and desk phone was not efficient enough and he needed a mobile device. If it's a purely personal device then you are right; this shouldn't be contempt of court (it should be harassment instead). In the case where it's a work device, stopping the judge using his mobile device is disrupting the work of the court and the judge is perfectly right to respond to that. Thirty days seems a bit excessive to me, but that's just a guess; I'd really have to read much more than I have about it to even express an opinion on that.
Slashdot Mirror
it only comes out of the pockets of those who regularly buy and sell.
Right; 'cos this being Slashdot most of us can hold of buying food for a month or two and just buy electronics. Seriously; that's the whole point of this. When the price of food falls; the financial guys involved in arbitrage know in advance of the people who are buying for supermarkets and they pocket part of the money which the supermarkets otherwise wouldn't have to pay the producers.
The only way to avoid this is to ensure that they pay a transaction cost for each transaction.
The response has been clear, and it's the same response as free software people have given everywhere: "show us your patents". Even the current US legal system is pretty clear about this. If you are aware that your patent is being infringed, you have a duty to come forward to tell the person who is doing that. If you don't; when it comes to damages it is completely obvious that you didn't do your best to minimise the damage caused to yourself and you don't deserve to be paid off.
What Apple and Microsoft are doing is either a) allowing people to continue doing "damage" by using a patent they don't have the right to when Apple or Microsoft could stop that by clearly stating which patent it is or more likely, b) spreading FUD. In case a) since MS and Apple are the only ones who know what the patents are, they should be liable for the continued "damage" from the use of patents from the point where they decided to speak about the patents without stating which ones.
Someone should take this up in a court e.g. in Germany where some parts of the legal system still seem to function.
The Drake equation is not an equation which was ever proposed to give an instant answer. Michael Crichton acts as if he was the person who discovered the uncertainty in the drake equation when in fact that uncertainty was the whole point of stating the drake equation. The Drake equation is, instead, a suggestion for a way of defining the things you have to find out in order to work out how much life there is in the universe.
Now, in so far as we can tell in an essay which doesn't even understand the basic names of the things it is trying to criticise, Crichton goes on to accuse SETI of lack of science. "SETI is not science" he says; "untestable theories may have heuristic value" he goes on, implying that SETI's theories are untestable. However, this is wrong. Seti's theory is simple to state:
We will be able to detect alien societies through their output of electromagnetic waves.
and the test is the quite simple one they are doing. Look for those waves. If you find them you are right, if you don't you are wrong.
Let's look further into his commentary (N.B. as ever I'm cutting out points I want to discuss; you have the link to the original so you can read it whole to understand what these represent). The bit about nuclear war: "The similarity to the Drake equation is striking"; "Nobody knows how much smoke will be generated when cities burn". Science is precisely about things that we don't know yet. If it was true that nobody had ever seen a city burn before, then there's a dead simple thing you can do. Nuke a city. It's not nice, but it is scientific. You might even be able to build a city and then nuke it (I believe this was done on a smaller scale for some early bomb tests).
Seldom have I seen a more pathetic attempt at showing up bad science. I agree with his conclusion (there needs to be science independent of special interests) but find myself almost doubting it as I read his paper.
please look for a better essay which shows your point.
What does one thing have to do with the other? What have you been smoking?
The break in to google was based on a windows / IE vulnerability which was otherwise unknown. Looking through articles about it it's pretty clear it ends up as "state actors" from China. In other words, exactly they people MS gave source code access to.
Great, so let's make all encryption algorithms secret. Security through obscurity has worked sooooo well in the past...
Or how about using one of the standard open source well studied implementations? What's wrong is the idea of giving the source code to China and leaving all other users in the dark.
Can India afford that, or are they just bluffing?
The can't afford not to. China and India are in a state of more or less cold war. Whilst I think that India has probably been more aggressive than China, the lack of trust means that when there's the next crisis, the measures they need to take to secure their telecomms infrastructure will be much more expensive than getting it right in the first place
And why do you think it's your job to "block" a sovereign country on an internal issue? Would you like the Chinese to "block" you if California wanted to become independent? Mind your own fucking business!
a) I'm not American, and, for the record, I think the US attitude to China and the Chinese is totally fucked up (be rude to them, threaten them, insult them whilst at the same time getting all your goods from them and doing nothing for ethics of your companies in China).
b) the people of California have the same right to self determination as the Taiwanese and I would strongly encourage them to become independent. In the case where they had a clear mass majority will to do so I would definitely support them as reasonable. Unfortunately, unlike the Taiwanese, they don't want to be independent, so their own wish leaves them trapped in the USA.
c) This is nowhere near an internal issue. Taiwan has been independent of the PRC for years. It was part of the UN independently. There is very little common link between it and modern day China. It has every right to it's own sovereignty.
The fact that you were modded 5+ Insigthful for this crazy post makes me think you're not the only one smoking weird stuff.
China is a wierd place right now. Trying to achieve the highest quality in manufacturing and killing Chinese children (mainly) with bad baby milk. Fighting against corruption, but not understanding that the stuff that happened to Google causes even more harm (which could be mitigated with an open, clear, good investigation and punishment of whoever did it, even if they are in the securit forces). As long as that's true, you can hardly expect the outsider's view to be solidly and clearly positive. China needs to get serious democracy and human rights. If that happened, it could be a real world leader the rest of us could follow.
What was that whoosh? Low flying ducks again?
Damnit; of course Apple's signing is the only thing protecting us from the void. That's why networks with Symbian phones (where the user can install just about anything they want) collapse almost every day of the week. Nothing at all to do with Apple being a bunch of control freaks.
I'm glad the post changed your mind because mostly it's correct. By packaging everything up and taking away user decisions (contrast with Microsoft's UAC) they've made something which is very useful to people who otherwise wouldn't be able to cope. However, you shouldn't confuse the good (a simple system with a defined use) with the bad (deliberate censorship and DRM) which is riding on top of it. Both Android and the N900, whilst they aren't yet as well done as the iPhone/iPad OS show that the Apple style control of the appliance interface is possible without the Apple style control of the user and the way the user uses the device.
Criticising Apple for too much lock down is not contradictory with thinking that a locked down default may be be a good idea.
The dual screen thing is very good idea. People still like closing their books and will want to close their electronic tablets too....
I like where you are going with this. So we have a device with a screen like an Ipad, but you can close it to protect the device. Then we have a second screen which can be used for input when the device is open. The only thing I see wrong is that even haptic input isn't that great. But, what if, instead of soft keys, we had hard keys, sort of mounted on a circuit board (a "board-key". if you like). Admittedly you'd lose the flexibility of dual screens but then again divided screens aren't always ideal, you could just have different sizes of single screens available depending on people's needs. It would then be a bit like a journal or a book that could take notes. Call it a "book-note" and you've got a really great marketing idea. You might even be able to sell them in the thousands.
but Indian goverment is not buying the stuff. It's the telecom operators that buy it and use it to sell services to regular citizens. The goverment could buy trusted equipment for their needs.
The teleco stuff is the stuff you will use to call for help and communicate during a war. Since the idea of total war it has been clear that your civilian infrastructure may be targeted in war. The idea of something which lets your opposition remotely disable most of your industrial capacity is crazy. That's what Chinese exchanges represent for India.
The effect of giving the Windows source code to China seems to have been that people in China used it to break into Google and tens of other major corporations. Why should this be any different? There are expert groups in China who will find vulnerabilities in the systems and then, instead of having to have trojanised equipment from their own vendors, they will be able to attack the other vendor's equipment just as well.
What's really funny is that India is stopping buying Chinese made teleco equipment whilst other countries like the US; also great friends of China (when will you stop blocking their discipline against the rebel province of Taiwan???) still continue to buy Chinese.
It is often wrongly applied to IP networking, but it was meant for the CLNP networking infrastructure.
There FTFY. I have never seen anything which causes more confusion to people learning networking than the use of the OSI model to explain it. Any trainer who does it (yes I'm looking at you CISCO) should be damned to Steve Ballmer's dungeon.
s/layer/lair/ but then that's the problem with open sourcers.. We don't have the weeks of preparation by a team of PR people before we publish and are damned.
Where he's been ever since. Microsoft's evil layer, just under Steve Balmer's bedroom, chained to a chair, just waiting for this correction to be posted so that he could post the XKCD cartoon. Imagine the willpower it takes to sit for weeks refreshing slashdot just waiting for that first post. If only he could escape to use his powers for good.
Chen's story is; and you don't know any better at this point; that the original finder called Apple and was told it was a fake. Now, you know, and I know, that this was just some idiot in technical support trying to close his ticket as fast as possible. However, Apple knows that too. It's a choice Apple made when they designed their technical support process. They could instead have instructed their technical support to investigate customer claims as closely as possible. That would cost more, however so they don't do that. This is Apple's decision, Apple's risk and the consequences are for Apple to bear.
I think that if you had a PR department which could keep things hushed up for 2000 years, you wouldn't be complaining.
It's like the oil company lobbyists "there is no global warming"; okay "there is global warming, but it's not caused by humans"; okay "the global warming is caused by humans but it's within the normal limits"; okay, "the global warming is exceptional but it's for the good"; okay "the global warming is bad, but not using petrol would be worse"; okay "the global warming will be deadly but we'll be able to find a solution"; okay "we haven't found a solution, but we have lots of lobbyists, money and lawyers".
[...] the group definitely should have paid [...] People need to take personal responsibility
hmm.
I said another because exactly the same thing (leak of the source code against Microsoft's will) has happened to Windows previously. Another 30 companies were included in this recent Google break in. I know that a company I worked for had similar problems a while ago.
Basically, you can assume that your "enemy" already has the source code. The only question is, can you get more friends to read it? If you don't publish then the only other eyes will be hostile sice friendly eyes won't have access. If you do publish you have a reasonable chance be able to get friendly eyes to help.
Yes; well the truth is that only if those eyes are looking (I'm sure the crackers will be). But still, it's yet another example that not publishing your source code just means that the only eyes looking other than your own are hostile eyes. Google should now publish the source code to this system and more of their other internal stuff that others could use and share.
I don't think you read my posting carefully enough, but since you ask why I used the analogy of theft in my comment, I'll answer.
The entertainment industry is free riding on an agreement (copyright) designed to encourage literature and quality writing. They are allowed to restrict other's freedom of speech in return for (supposedly) increasing the amount of speech. However, not only are they turning in completely vapid useless and sometimes even damaging speech; now they are actively trying to interfere with all sorts of other free speech.
At the point where they start to knowingly interfere with free speech (by encouraging censorware) and deliberately failing to keep up their own end of the bargain (by ensuring that their copyright products will not be available after the term of copyright) anything more that they try to take is theft. They have broken their contract with society and lost the right to any of the royalties which they take. I used an analogy to theft deliberately and with meaning.
Sometimes the position of the pirate party looks more and more sensible.
"AH AH AH AH AH!" whoosh.. The sound you can hear is the sound of the Count laughing at the joke as he flies just over your head.
On your serious point, however, The Egg Shell skull is real; this is not an random potential idea, it is actually the way courts work.. However it's only an issue once you have committed a crime or done something wrong. If you shake someone's hand, that's normal behavior. If, however, you deliberately shake his hand trying to hurt him (actual assault) and then crush his bones then you are in problem. So in the other, fail to read the grandparent and miss the joke, poster's message, you would only get into trouble if you deliberately led the teenager on trying to break her heart and cause her psychological problems. It's important to remember that, opposite to engineering and CS, law deals mostly with intent and much less with action.
This is in stark contrast to both Google and Yahoo's claims that "to comply, you must use economizers" (Yahoo engineer) or that "the standard requires data centers to use economizers" (Google blog). So it's clear that the big boys are lying at this point. The only question is why? Clearly something's up.
If the more hyped one gets more applications and is more useful in the end, then unfortunately you often end up preferring the more hyped one. It's a simple Betamax vs VHS choice. Even there, often "better" for you means something completely different from "better" for the people delivering them.
Your point being? You have to take your "victims as they find them". Are you trying to deprive her of her god given right to sue in the USA for some kind of ethnic discrimination thing? Have you not noticed how nobody else in this discussion has even mentioned this completely irrelevant fact. There is an important legal principle; the egg shell skull which says that when he shone his light in her face, he should have taken this possibility into account.
I'm shocked you should post this kind of speciesistic rant; that it gets modded up to five just shows how sick slashdot has become. Next we'll have people up claiming that apple doesn't deserve all the rights of a person just because it's a company.
I think you missed my point.
and I'm afraid you may have missed mine; I'll try to write better..
A judge is going to take phone calls or read/answer email while he is presiding_at_trial/court_is_in_session?
The judge is still presiding over the trial even when the court is not in session. It's normal for urgent motions to come in for whatever reasons and the judge would get notified of them by phone/email/etc. I assume that the judge bought a blackberry specifically because a plain desktop PC and desk phone was not efficient enough and he needed a mobile device. If it's a purely personal device then you are right; this shouldn't be contempt of court (it should be harassment instead). In the case where it's a work device, stopping the judge using his mobile device is disrupting the work of the court and the judge is perfectly right to respond to that. Thirty days seems a bit excessive to me, but that's just a guess; I'd really have to read much more than I have about it to even express an opinion on that.