Is that criminal libel must be something that constitutes a direct incitement to violence. It goes along the same lines as the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" scenario or the "clear and present danger" test. In this sense, posting his resentment on a web page is actually LESS like criminal libel than saying the same things directly to the targets of his criticism. To do that could be a direct incitement, but he did it in a more detatched way, by publishing online. While it is true that this method had the result of publicly defaming large numbers of people, that is not justification for CRIMINAL charges. It could well be grounds for a civil suit, but that's not what they're doing to him. Personally, I hope he actually does get to prove every single one of his accusations. It's not libel if it's true, and now that he's in court, you know that EVERYONE will be listening. Of course, since it's juvenile court, it may be closed, but I suppose it would be possible to open it up, if he so desired.
This whole scenario kind of reminds me of "An Enemy of the People", I hope he wins.
The earth's gravity has not changed appreciably since 4.5 billion years ago, when an object about the size of mars collided with proto-earth, flinging up our moon in the process. It's true that the moon is very slowly degrading the spin of the earth. In fact, if the sun didn't burn out first, the earth would eventually settle down to a day that's 47 times as long as it is now, due to tidal forces from the moon. This does not affect the dinosaurs, however, since they were fairly recent, on the geological scale.
It is true that the spin of the earth does lessen gravity a little bit. I don't know the exact scale, but it is enough that some companies and countries are considering equatorial rocket launch platforms, since that added boost saves a lot of money on fuel. Still, this change does not make such a huge difference (as travelling from Ontario to the Bahamas will show) as to allow a quintupling or so in the size of the largest creatures on earth.
I suppose I should clarify one thing. Contrary to what that evolution article claims, the Elephant is not the largest creature on earth. Think whales. How do they support their weight? They live in water. I do not consider it such a ridiculous concept that perhaps dinosaurs of this size lived mostly in water, with those nice long necks well suited for eating food on the shore while still staying deep enough in the channel to be supported in weight. Of course, a creature like this does not need to jump, as elephants do not. It may not have ever even laid down in its adult life.
I agree with the physics in the article, but I think the author jumps to way too many conclusions.
We still have helium on earth because it is continuously generated by subterranean nuclear decay. There is also a tiny amount in the atmosphere, because like all mixtures of different-density components, it takes a while for the lightest parts to drift to the top. I think most of the helium we get is in fact from holes in (radioactive) rocks, though I don't exactly know the details.
Long ago, before humans roamed the earth, and certainly before they had big telescopes and long-range rocket-powered probes, mars had a breathable atmosphere. Unfortunately, it all got baked away. The critical issue for a planet holding an atmosphere is whether or not it has strong enough gravity to hold particles moving at the speed that gas particles travel in their kinetic vibrations. Earth, for example, cannot hold hydrogen or helium gases. If you pop a helium balloon, the helium will eventually drift out of the atmosphere and into outer space.
Fortunately, since O2 molecules are much more massive than He atoms or H2 molecules, the earth can also hold an O2 atmosphere. Mars is also massive enough for this, but there's a problem. Mars is not massive enough to hold oxygen atoms or ions. This is critical because of the UV radiation that the sun emits, which breaks up O2 molecules. On earth, those oxygen ions come together with O2 to form O3 (ozone) which also helps shield the rest of the atmosphere from UV radiation.
Since Mars isn't massive enough to hold oxygen ions, it can't hold them up in the part of the atmosphere where an ozone layer would likely form. Thus, its atmosphere cannot be protected from more radiation, which further ionizes the O2 molecules. This is precisely what happened to the atmosphere on mars, as well as the surface water, and it is what will eventually happen to Mars's polar ice caps. I don't know exactly what the time scale would be for creating a breathable atmosphere, and I don't know how long it would take for it to dissipate, but I think you'd have to be continually working to keep it there, assuming you had the resources to get a planet-wide breathable atmosphere in the first place.
You just have to pay extra for them. I'm not talking about the "rugged" cases that are lined with kevlar and made of reinforced titanium alloy. Just a simple mid-tower case, with a few strategically places supports. The I have is made out of aluminum. Sure, it's not quite as tough as the old steel cases I have in the basement, but it's a lot better than the new, flimsy, and poorly welded/reinforced cases they have at school, and a good bit lighter, too. It cost me an extra $30 to get. Back in the days of the 8086, which is what my old steel cases once held, the computers costed and arm and a leg, so people didn't mind the protection being a little over-engineered.
By the way, on the topic of other hardware equipment, once when I was doing an upgrade on my machine, with the outer case off, my brother knocked over his newly-opened ginger ale, spilling a full 12 ounces of bubbling, mildly acidic liquid all over my CD-ROM and power supply, and from there it trickled down to thoroughly drench the motherboard, k6-2 processor, RAM, and various PCI/ISA devices. I nearly had a heart attack, but I realized the machine hadn't even noticed. Of course, I shut it off to clean it up, but the thing ran perfectly fine until I upgraded DirectX.
They tell us it can't be used to transmit information. Am I the only one who thinks this is bogus? As far as I know, if there's a way to transmit a signal of some kind, there's a way to encode data on it, be it by quantum effects (mentioned previously on slashdot) or by super-c microwaves, or whatever else science may conjure up. I know that relativity theory is very complicated stuff, but I don't think that superluminal communication necessarily violates cause and effect. Granted, it may appear to an external observer that the pulse arrived before it was sent, but the way these things work, you would not be able to shut off your laser to keep from sending a message you already sent. I know it's complicated, but the relativity works out.
Can someone with a clearer grasp of relativity theory please explain this?
I am extremely sceptical of your logic, and here's why:
If they get an external error, due to improper fabrication, or improper assembly, or the thing getting bumoed by a meteor, or something like that, the drift they will get will be FAR beyond what relativity would do, and likely by several orders of magnitude. Everything has been manufacured to miniscule tolerances, so that should have only a minimal effect. If there is anything more than that, it would likely be due to some other force, which would probably not be so subtle.
They know what kinds of results to expect. They know that even if the theory is disproven, they will still get results of a certain magnitude, far below the minimum effect of any unpredicted mechanical error source.
It's not just "The Government and NASA" working on this. A lot of this is being done by private sector contractors. Also note that the gyroscopes themselves are shown being polished by Stanford people, implicating the educational community for providing invaluable scientific insight. Sure, the government has great stuff, but the talent is spread around quite nicely.
I started out with BASIC in 2nd grade. My dad got me into it as soon as I could sit in the chair in the computer room. Now I'm into C++, and I can program stuff he could only dream about in college. Hopefully, my kids will be hacking the kernel by kindergarden.
It is actually a crime to attempt to see past a visual barricade on public property. (Peeping Tom or Trespassing) Put up a fence, and they can't see your garden. If someone pays the admission cost to enter your garden, takes pictures of it, and then redistributes them, whether or not they charge for them, they have violated your intellectual property rights. Metallica still has the right to control distribution. You want a sample of their songs? Download bootlegs. The pristine album cuts are their cash cow, and rightfully so. No, Metallica doesn't owe us anything, but they're allowing us bootlegs, which they don't have to do. We should be grateful for that.
The judicial system is not based on hard and fast rules like many people would like to think. Certainly, there are some rules which are very strong, but nothing (ABSOLUTELY NOTHING) is inviolable in the judicial system, because there will always be an exception to every scenario thought up.
The courts decide these complicated, redundant, and confusing matters on a CASE BY CASE BASIS. They get to decide every time it comes before them whether or not someone was accessing your site as a potential customer or not. To this extent, they'd allow offline browser caches under most circumstances. In this case, however, Bidder's Edge was clearly and blatantly redistributing E-bay's information, thus taking advertising revenue away, and also depriving E-bay from the basic control of its content. I personally think E-bay might be well-served to allow Bidder's Edge to spider them, but they are perfectly within their right to object, (after all, IANA-MBA) and the court is perfectly well within its authority to uphold this principle.
I am posting to Slashdot through Slashdot's interface. I am not posting through some other website that posts data to Slashdot's servers. If I were, I would not be seeing the same ads, and I (or rather the service) would be depriving Slashdot of advertising revenue. E-bay has the same rights to control its searches. It's true that they could end access through software, but litigation is a much safer method, in many respects. I suppose an appropriate analogy would be if someone sits down in your yard, and you start shooting in the air, without telling them first to leave (verbal warnings are considered legally binding for trespassing, in most jurisdictions). You can see why making the legal effort first gives more legitimacy to your actions. In addition, that makes it so that you have lawyers acting on company policy, rather than techs. No offense to the Slashdot majority, but lawyers are better suited to executing business practices. (Amazon patents notwithstanding)
In the United States, a store actually has the right to remove someone who is collecting price and inventory data, even in their publically accessible store. You are invited to the store to do business with them, not harm their business. There is no new precedent here, simply an application of the old one. If people want to search through e-bay's auctions, they can do so on e-bay's site, while receiving e-bay's advertisements, and filtered the way e-bay wants it. The only fair way to control searches of e-bay auctions is to give e-bay the exclusive rights to execute those searches, which is what this ruling upholds. It is a sound decision.
But I do know a lot about the U.S. judicial system. I do not think this ruling will have any effect in the U.S. It probably will not spread elsewhere, either.
As a general rule, the more a law applies to, the more flexible it is made. Jury selection certainly qualifies, and it is indeed very flexible in the U.S. In the U.S., if a case draws strong passions, there is often a change of venue, to avoid selecting impassioned jurors for the panel.
The change of venue is obviously ineffective at controlling pre-trial publicity if the case makes national news, but there are other ways of dealing with this.
1) Jurors are selected from the voter registration rolls. This means that the people selected tend to have an interest in the course of government, and will take their duties seriously.
2) Potential jurors are interviewed thorougly to determine whether or not they have formed opinions about the case. Sometimes it may take 100 interviews to come up with 12 impartial jurors, but they get a jury eventually.
3) The experience of a trial, with all its formality and deliberation, is a deeply involving experience, much more so than reading a newspaper or watching the evening news or visiting a website. Jurors form very strong opinions from the facts presented at trial, and tend to ignore outside evidence.
4) If there is extensive publicity and speculation during the trial, the jury may be sequestered. In the past, this has involved sheriff's deputies cutting out stories about the case from the paper, and sometimes even listening in on phone calls. Having a deputy nearby while they are using the internet would not be an innovative measure. Sure, this is hard on the jurors, but that's a discussion for another time.
5) In the U.S., at least, it takes a unanimous verdict to end a trial. If the jurors cannot agree, the judge will declare a mistrial and a new one will begin. It is extremely unlikely that one jurors, influenced by an outside source, will convince the rest to change their verdict. In addition, since it is unlikely that an influenced juror to get on the panel in the first place, it is very unlikely that you'd ever have more than a couple make it on, even in extreme cases.
So, I know the U.S. system is safe. I would imagine that many countries already have similar systems in place. Maybe even Australia does, but this was a bad ruling. I'm not worried about bad precedents hitting me. Australians, you've got to take your courts back.
I would like to point out to the vindictive moderators and flamers that the article specifically talks about how it uses WINDOWS 98. Not NT. Not Win2k.
Many thanks to those who noticed this, and pointed out the details of the way windows works with DOS.
I think that the issue here may go beyond simply driver optimizations (except in the case of 3dfx). Windows is still somewhat based on DOS, which never was too big on multitasking. Games completely take over your system, when they run. Linux, being a true multitasking system, does not allow the game to have a completely free reign over system resources, which of course makes it more stable, but also imposes a mild performance hit. Windows, on the other hand, lets the game do whatever it wants with resources, leading of course to inherent instabilities we are all familiar with.
Thank you Bill Gates, for giving me an extra 5 fps, packaged with the extra 5 BSODs per day.
Ummm... according to your logic, if something is layered it only gets a half dimension, then the screen would only be 1.5D, since it's basically layered in each dimension. It's just that two of the dimensions have high enough resolution that it is difficult (not impossible) to tell that it is not continuous. As it stands, layering, or pixellating, depending on what angle you view it from, seems to be well regarded as a full dimension. So, it seems to me that this system is in fact 3D, even though it gets very poor resolution in one dimension.
I don't know if you've ever studied European history, like say, in German and Russia, for example, in the first half of the 20th century, for example. Christianity has done to Judaism far worse than MS has ever done to any other OS or application company. The Holocaust and the brutal treatment under the rule of the Czars are just tiny examples of Christians doing evil to Jews. Christianity has gone far beyond mere FUD in its evils. It makes me ashamed at times to be associated with it.
By the way, his analogy was actually very good. Yes, Jesus was a charismatic leader. Also, as far as Islam not being around at the time, you must have missed the reference to the BSD fork.
Yes, it's true that most analogies are flawed, but that's because they're meant to approximate the situation in simpler terms. This doesn't make them wrong.
$%^& Internet Explorer ate my cookie, that was me. I hate school computers. I almost convinced the librarian to switch to Linux, but the login prompt freaked her out.
Wow. Defects in something related to RAMBUS. Intel is really starting to lose points on reliability. As I recall, the GHz PIII comes with an oversized fan and a recommendation that it not be used in mission-critical systems. At least they've got the responsibility to fix the system right. Ironically, their proposed fix will actually increase RAMBUS profits, since Intel will have to buy a whole lot of it. Problem is for those who will want to upgrade later. They need the whole motherboard replaced. I think my next PC will be an Athlon.
I read their description of it. Apparently, as a security feature, the keyboard locks if you hold down both control keys for 4 seconds. I don't know about anyone else, but when I play Descent, I have the keys set so that left control is primary fire, and right control is secondary. Whenever I go up against bosses, I usually have both held down for up to 30 seconds at a time. I'd be totally screwed. I know I could change the key bindings, but I have used that one for so long that it has become an extension of my hand. I play by instinct. I was really hoping that now I wouldn't lose bathing time for Descent play, but I guess I'll have to wait a bit longer.
Anyone remember the case about how the Nazis wanted to march in Skokie, Illinois? The Supreme Court didn't hear that case, either. They allowed the lower court decision to stand, effectively meaning that it only had a binding precedent in the federal circuit where the lower court case had been decided. The real effect was nationwide, however, as cities and states crafted their new laws to conform to this standard, which the supreme court had not ruled on one way or the other. The concept that "silence gives consent" is in full force in the mind of the people and politicians.
It appears to me as though they're showing off all their products, of which this is the latest iteration. I think we should be proud that they're advancing to Linux, rather than settling for Linux.
My god! Someone mentions a patent on slashdot and the sky falls! They're not patenting thin-ness! They're patenting a specific implementation. Try finding a microprocessor or motherboard that doesn't have a few dozen (or few hundred) patents on it. You can't. It may be Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IBM, Motorola, Sun, or any other company that makes a buck on their own hardware designs.
Yes, there are stupid patents out there. Too many, in fact. That's still no excuse for jumping to conclusions like this based on a VERY short quote that doesn't describe the nature of the patent very well. It sounds to me like they're just going through the standard procedure of patenting their own engineering. Take careful note that he mentions a patent on the production method, not the concept. There are many different ways to produce things. Relax, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong here at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that criminal libel must be something that constitutes a direct incitement to violence. It goes along the same lines as the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" scenario or the "clear and present danger" test. In this sense, posting his resentment on a web page is actually LESS like criminal libel than saying the same things directly to the targets of his criticism. To do that could be a direct incitement, but he did it in a more detatched way, by publishing online. While it is true that this method had the result of publicly defaming large numbers of people, that is not justification for CRIMINAL charges. It could well be grounds for a civil suit, but that's not what they're doing to him. Personally, I hope he actually does get to prove every single one of his accusations. It's not libel if it's true, and now that he's in court, you know that EVERYONE will be listening. Of course, since it's juvenile court, it may be closed, but I suppose it would be possible to open it up, if he so desired.
This whole scenario kind of reminds me of "An Enemy of the People", I hope he wins.
The earth's gravity has not changed appreciably since 4.5 billion years ago, when an object about the size of mars collided with proto-earth, flinging up our moon in the process. It's true that the moon is very slowly degrading the spin of the earth. In fact, if the sun didn't burn out first, the earth would eventually settle down to a day that's 47 times as long as it is now, due to tidal forces from the moon. This does not affect the dinosaurs, however, since they were fairly recent, on the geological scale.
It is true that the spin of the earth does lessen gravity a little bit. I don't know the exact scale, but it is enough that some companies and countries are considering equatorial rocket launch platforms, since that added boost saves a lot of money on fuel. Still, this change does not make such a huge difference (as travelling from Ontario to the Bahamas will show) as to allow a quintupling or so in the size of the largest creatures on earth.
I suppose I should clarify one thing. Contrary to what that evolution article claims, the Elephant is not the largest creature on earth. Think whales. How do they support their weight? They live in water. I do not consider it such a ridiculous concept that perhaps dinosaurs of this size lived mostly in water, with those nice long necks well suited for eating food on the shore while still staying deep enough in the channel to be supported in weight. Of course, a creature like this does not need to jump, as elephants do not. It may not have ever even laid down in its adult life.
I agree with the physics in the article, but I think the author jumps to way too many conclusions.
We still have helium on earth because it is continuously generated by subterranean nuclear decay. There is also a tiny amount in the atmosphere, because like all mixtures of different-density components, it takes a while for the lightest parts to drift to the top. I think most of the helium we get is in fact from holes in (radioactive) rocks, though I don't exactly know the details.
Long ago, before humans roamed the earth, and certainly before they had big telescopes and long-range rocket-powered probes, mars had a breathable atmosphere. Unfortunately, it all got baked away. The critical issue for a planet holding an atmosphere is whether or not it has strong enough gravity to hold particles moving at the speed that gas particles travel in their kinetic vibrations. Earth, for example, cannot hold hydrogen or helium gases. If you pop a helium balloon, the helium will eventually drift out of the atmosphere and into outer space.
Fortunately, since O2 molecules are much more massive than He atoms or H2 molecules, the earth can also hold an O2 atmosphere. Mars is also massive enough for this, but there's a problem. Mars is not massive enough to hold oxygen atoms or ions. This is critical because of the UV radiation that the sun emits, which breaks up O2 molecules. On earth, those oxygen ions come together with O2 to form O3 (ozone) which also helps shield the rest of the atmosphere from UV radiation.
Since Mars isn't massive enough to hold oxygen ions, it can't hold them up in the part of the atmosphere where an ozone layer would likely form. Thus, its atmosphere cannot be protected from more radiation, which further ionizes the O2 molecules. This is precisely what happened to the atmosphere on mars, as well as the surface water, and it is what will eventually happen to Mars's polar ice caps. I don't know exactly what the time scale would be for creating a breathable atmosphere, and I don't know how long it would take for it to dissipate, but I think you'd have to be continually working to keep it there, assuming you had the resources to get a planet-wide breathable atmosphere in the first place.
You just have to pay extra for them. I'm not talking about the "rugged" cases that are lined with kevlar and made of reinforced titanium alloy. Just a simple mid-tower case, with a few strategically places supports. The I have is made out of aluminum. Sure, it's not quite as tough as the old steel cases I have in the basement, but it's a lot better than the new, flimsy, and poorly welded/reinforced cases they have at school, and a good bit lighter, too. It cost me an extra $30 to get. Back in the days of the 8086, which is what my old steel cases once held, the computers costed and arm and a leg, so people didn't mind the protection being a little over-engineered.
By the way, on the topic of other hardware equipment, once when I was doing an upgrade on my machine, with the outer case off, my brother knocked over his newly-opened ginger ale, spilling a full 12 ounces of bubbling, mildly acidic liquid all over my CD-ROM and power supply, and from there it trickled down to thoroughly drench the motherboard, k6-2 processor, RAM, and various PCI/ISA devices. I nearly had a heart attack, but I realized the machine hadn't even noticed. Of course, I shut it off to clean it up, but the thing ran perfectly fine until I upgraded DirectX.
They tell us it can't be used to transmit information. Am I the only one who thinks this is bogus? As far as I know, if there's a way to transmit a signal of some kind, there's a way to encode data on it, be it by quantum effects (mentioned previously on slashdot) or by super-c microwaves, or whatever else science may conjure up. I know that relativity theory is very complicated stuff, but I don't think that superluminal communication necessarily violates cause and effect. Granted, it may appear to an external observer that the pulse arrived before it was sent, but the way these things work, you would not be able to shut off your laser to keep from sending a message you already sent. I know it's complicated, but the relativity works out.
Can someone with a clearer grasp of relativity theory please explain this?
I am extremely sceptical of your logic, and here's why:
If they get an external error, due to improper fabrication, or improper assembly, or the thing getting bumoed by a meteor, or something like that, the drift they will get will be FAR beyond what relativity would do, and likely by several orders of magnitude. Everything has been manufacured to miniscule tolerances, so that should have only a minimal effect. If there is anything more than that, it would likely be due to some other force, which would probably not be so subtle.
They know what kinds of results to expect. They know that even if the theory is disproven, they will still get results of a certain magnitude, far below the minimum effect of any unpredicted mechanical error source.
It's not just "The Government and NASA" working on this. A lot of this is being done by private sector contractors. Also note that the gyroscopes themselves are shown being polished by Stanford people, implicating the educational community for providing invaluable scientific insight. Sure, the government has great stuff, but the talent is spread around quite nicely.
I started out with BASIC in 2nd grade. My dad got me into it as soon as I could sit in the chair in the computer room. Now I'm into C++, and I can program stuff he could only dream about in college. Hopefully, my kids will be hacking the kernel by kindergarden.
It is actually a crime to attempt to see past a visual barricade on public property. (Peeping Tom or Trespassing) Put up a fence, and they can't see your garden. If someone pays the admission cost to enter your garden, takes pictures of it, and then redistributes them, whether or not they charge for them, they have violated your intellectual property rights. Metallica still has the right to control distribution. You want a sample of their songs? Download bootlegs. The pristine album cuts are their cash cow, and rightfully so. No, Metallica doesn't owe us anything, but they're allowing us bootlegs, which they don't have to do. We should be grateful for that.
The judicial system is not based on hard and fast rules like many people would like to think. Certainly, there are some rules which are very strong, but nothing (ABSOLUTELY NOTHING) is inviolable in the judicial system, because there will always be an exception to every scenario thought up.
The courts decide these complicated, redundant, and confusing matters on a CASE BY CASE BASIS. They get to decide every time it comes before them whether or not someone was accessing your site as a potential customer or not. To this extent, they'd allow offline browser caches under most circumstances. In this case, however, Bidder's Edge was clearly and blatantly redistributing E-bay's information, thus taking advertising revenue away, and also depriving E-bay from the basic control of its content. I personally think E-bay might be well-served to allow Bidder's Edge to spider them, but they are perfectly within their right to object, (after all, IANA-MBA) and the court is perfectly well within its authority to uphold this principle.
I am posting to Slashdot through Slashdot's interface. I am not posting through some other website that posts data to Slashdot's servers. If I were, I would not be seeing the same ads, and I (or rather the service) would be depriving Slashdot of advertising revenue. E-bay has the same rights to control its searches. It's true that they could end access through software, but litigation is a much safer method, in many respects. I suppose an appropriate analogy would be if someone sits down in your yard, and you start shooting in the air, without telling them first to leave (verbal warnings are considered legally binding for trespassing, in most jurisdictions). You can see why making the legal effort first gives more legitimacy to your actions. In addition, that makes it so that you have lawyers acting on company policy, rather than techs. No offense to the Slashdot majority, but lawyers are better suited to executing business practices. (Amazon patents notwithstanding)
In the United States, a store actually has the right to remove someone who is collecting price and inventory data, even in their publically accessible store. You are invited to the store to do business with them, not harm their business. There is no new precedent here, simply an application of the old one. If people want to search through e-bay's auctions, they can do so on e-bay's site, while receiving e-bay's advertisements, and filtered the way e-bay wants it. The only fair way to control searches of e-bay auctions is to give e-bay the exclusive rights to execute those searches, which is what this ruling upholds. It is a sound decision.
But I do know a lot about the U.S. judicial system. I do not think this ruling will have any effect in the U.S. It probably will not spread elsewhere, either.
As a general rule, the more a law applies to, the more flexible it is made. Jury selection certainly qualifies, and it is indeed very flexible in the U.S. In the U.S., if a case draws strong passions, there is often a change of venue, to avoid selecting impassioned jurors for the panel.
The change of venue is obviously ineffective at controlling pre-trial publicity if the case makes national news, but there are other ways of dealing with this.
1) Jurors are selected from the voter registration rolls. This means that the people selected tend to have an interest in the course of government, and will take their duties seriously.
2) Potential jurors are interviewed thorougly to determine whether or not they have formed opinions about the case. Sometimes it may take 100 interviews to come up with 12 impartial jurors, but they get a jury eventually.
3) The experience of a trial, with all its formality and deliberation, is a deeply involving experience, much more so than reading a newspaper or watching the evening news or visiting a website. Jurors form very strong opinions from the facts presented at trial, and tend to ignore outside evidence.
4) If there is extensive publicity and speculation during the trial, the jury may be sequestered. In the past, this has involved sheriff's deputies cutting out stories about the case from the paper, and sometimes even listening in on phone calls. Having a deputy nearby while they are using the internet would not be an innovative measure. Sure, this is hard on the jurors, but that's a discussion for another time.
5) In the U.S., at least, it takes a unanimous verdict to end a trial. If the jurors cannot agree, the judge will declare a mistrial and a new one will begin. It is extremely unlikely that one jurors, influenced by an outside source, will convince the rest to change their verdict. In addition, since it is unlikely that an influenced juror to get on the panel in the first place, it is very unlikely that you'd ever have more than a couple make it on, even in extreme cases.
So, I know the U.S. system is safe. I would imagine that many countries already have similar systems in place. Maybe even Australia does, but this was a bad ruling. I'm not worried about bad precedents hitting me. Australians, you've got to take your courts back.
I would like to point out to the vindictive moderators and flamers that the article specifically talks about how it uses WINDOWS 98. Not NT. Not Win2k.
Many thanks to those who noticed this, and pointed out the details of the way windows works with DOS.
Thanks also to those who actually READ THE ARTICLE.
I think that the issue here may go beyond simply driver optimizations (except in the case of 3dfx). Windows is still somewhat based on DOS, which never was too big on multitasking. Games completely take over your system, when they run. Linux, being a true multitasking system, does not allow the game to have a completely free reign over system resources, which of course makes it more stable, but also imposes a mild performance hit. Windows, on the other hand, lets the game do whatever it wants with resources, leading of course to inherent instabilities we are all familiar with.
Thank you Bill Gates, for giving me an extra 5 fps, packaged with the extra 5 BSODs per day.
The real link to the Temple of the Lemur is
http://totl.net
and the link to the Spudserver page is
http://totl.net/Spud/
All that aside, I think this is really cool. Reminds me of something I saw on MacGuyver, when he powered his alarm clock on a potato.
I would also like to beat the Beowulf trolls to the punch by saying that such a thing would dramatically improve the economy in Idaho.
Ummm... according to your logic, if something is layered it only gets a half dimension, then the screen would only be 1.5D, since it's basically layered in each dimension. It's just that two of the dimensions have high enough resolution that it is difficult (not impossible) to tell that it is not continuous. As it stands, layering, or pixellating, depending on what angle you view it from, seems to be well regarded as a full dimension. So, it seems to me that this system is in fact 3D, even though it gets very poor resolution in one dimension.
I don't know if you've ever studied European history, like say, in German and Russia, for example, in the first half of the 20th century, for example. Christianity has done to Judaism far worse than MS has ever done to any other OS or application company. The Holocaust and the brutal treatment under the rule of the Czars are just tiny examples of Christians doing evil to Jews. Christianity has gone far beyond mere FUD in its evils. It makes me ashamed at times to be associated with it.
By the way, his analogy was actually very good. Yes, Jesus was a charismatic leader. Also, as far as Islam not being around at the time, you must have missed the reference to the BSD fork.
Yes, it's true that most analogies are flawed, but that's because they're meant to approximate the situation in simpler terms. This doesn't make them wrong.
$%^& Internet Explorer ate my cookie, that was me. I hate school computers. I almost convinced the librarian to switch to Linux, but the login prompt freaked her out.
Wow. Defects in something related to RAMBUS. Intel is really starting to lose points on reliability. As I recall, the GHz PIII comes with an oversized fan and a recommendation that it not be used in mission-critical systems. At least they've got the responsibility to fix the system right. Ironically, their proposed fix will actually increase RAMBUS profits, since Intel will have to buy a whole lot of it. Problem is for those who will want to upgrade later. They need the whole motherboard replaced. I think my next PC will be an Athlon.
I read their description of it. Apparently, as a security feature, the keyboard locks if you hold down both control keys for 4 seconds. I don't know about anyone else, but when I play Descent, I have the keys set so that left control is primary fire, and right control is secondary. Whenever I go up against bosses, I usually have both held down for up to 30 seconds at a time. I'd be totally screwed. I know I could change the key bindings, but I have used that one for so long that it has become an extension of my hand. I play by instinct. I was really hoping that now I wouldn't lose bathing time for Descent play, but I guess I'll have to wait a bit longer.
*sigh*
Anyone remember the case about how the Nazis wanted to march in Skokie, Illinois? The Supreme Court didn't hear that case, either. They allowed the lower court decision to stand, effectively meaning that it only had a binding precedent in the federal circuit where the lower court case had been decided. The real effect was nationwide, however, as cities and states crafted their new laws to conform to this standard, which the supreme court had not ruled on one way or the other. The concept that "silence gives consent" is in full force in the mind of the people and politicians.
It appears to me as though they're showing off all their products, of which this is the latest iteration. I think we should be proud that they're advancing to Linux, rather than settling for Linux.
My god! Someone mentions a patent on slashdot and the sky falls! They're not patenting thin-ness! They're patenting a specific implementation. Try finding a microprocessor or motherboard that doesn't have a few dozen (or few hundred) patents on it. You can't. It may be Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IBM, Motorola, Sun, or any other company that makes a buck on their own hardware designs.
Yes, there are stupid patents out there. Too many, in fact. That's still no excuse for jumping to conclusions like this based on a VERY short quote that doesn't describe the nature of the patent very well. It sounds to me like they're just going through the standard procedure of patenting their own engineering. Take careful note that he mentions a patent on the production method, not the concept. There are many different ways to produce things. Relax, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong here at all.