How about this one?
Of course, it is completely surrounded by suburubia, but there are still a few farms left out there. I suppose they're the exceptions that prove the rule...
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree here. The C=64 keyboard and the BIOS screen editor rocked. The trick was you had to get used to typing with your right hand
in a different position, but once you did, you had the arrow keys accessible without
moving your hand halfway across the keyboard. If I could find a keyboard with the
C=64 arrow-key-shift layout, I would get one today.
Analog TV in the USA ends next year, with HD Radio right behind it. Cell phones are nearly all digital now (not to mention of minimal power), and soon many such signals will be encrypted for privacy and/or to sell to subscribers only...
so basically it will be around 70 years worth of our civilization that will broadcast any sort of intelligible signal. So it will be a sphere 70 light years thick expanding out from us that will be detectable, of hopefully somewere in the hundreds of thousands of years of human society... That's pretty thin odds of a SETI type scan finding us.
Now if you assume aliens want to contact other races, and intentionally broadcast a "here's how to reach us" signal (i.e. in the movie _Contact_), then there's some chance we'll find them. But I suspect if they're just minding their own business, their transmissions will devolve to pretty much white noise from any distant observers position just as ours are doing.
Actually, it's the minimum required by departments of public health
allover the
place
to prevent the spread of disease in restaurants and so on. If you don't
mind everyone in your family getting sick if one of you does, I guess you
don't need to bother.
The point of the heat in a dishwasher is to sterilze with heat rather than, say, chlorine.
However, from the
data
I've seen, dishwashers
use about the same power as an electric iron, coffee maker, or electric hairdryer.
So I don't know where you get your ideas about them.
Actually, Dishwashers tend to use less water and energy than people washing dishes by hand, unless said people are using the 4-dishpan (dirty soapy, clean soapy, rinse, chlorine sanitize) method. This is because dishwashers de-chunk and recycle the soapy water till the dishes are clean, and then use a small amount to rinse, while most people keep a sink full of warm soapy water, and then keep running fresh, warm rinse water while washing dishes in the sink, thereby using several times more hot water than a dishwasher .
But yes, overall, simplifying our lives and living situations would go a long way towards reducing our energy footprint; but we should also avoid false optimizations.
Overhead lines are by definition signifigantly longer than the distance from the motor to the batteries within the vehicle, so you have transmission loss. So if you do regenerative braking and dump the power into overhead lines, you lose a couple of percent dumping the power in, and a couple more percent taking it back out, just from transmission line loss.
On the other hand, current battery technology is fairly heavy, so you're losing some of the value
by accelerating and decelerating the batteries themselves.
So I'm not sure where the trade-off point lies. In any case, running overhead lines all over the place is expensive, not to mention losing power due to rain, etc. So it's more flexible to have the power in the
tram/bus...
While I love Theo when he's being outspoken (here he's clearly right, on principle -- humans write buggy software, and adding more code in this fashion makes it worse because there are more, orthogonal vectors of attack...) it is still good to back things up with empirical data, as the parent post does.
And that same Nova pointed out that resarchers have now demonstrated that the affect of both
CO2 and "dimming" from particulates in the air were underestimated; as both pull in opposite
directions. As we shift to "cleaner" fuels, the decreased dimming will increase the
"pan evaporation" rate, and raise the water vapor levels, and that will really start the
whole thing churning...
... you also couldn't find anyone from Urchin to arrange for a new support contract. So they weren't continuing to take your money and not provide suppport -- they wouldn't even take your money.
Even if it had been implemented that way on a electro-mechanical mixer panel, rather than in software, implementing the same exact interface on a computer screen ought to be "obvious", and not patentable.
This is the thing I find most frustrating about the current patent situation. Things that have been done on paper, or mechanically, for decades are somehow novel and patentable because someone did it in software?!? That's just silly. And ditto for doing things over the Internet.
Which is to say, I think generalizing your latter point invalidates your former one.
"Cryptographic proof" doesn't mean anything to the average person voting at a polling place.
So the system can easily hand you "cryptographic proof" that it voted for the wrong person on your behalf, and you have no way of knowing, other than to ask another piece of equipment which can as easily lie to you.
A vote on a piece of paper can be physially tracked, and easily visually verified by a voter, (or their trusted assistant in the case of someone blind). Infrastructure is in place, and has been, for literally hundreds
of years, for dealing with paper ballots.
With a cryptographic system, we're all blind, and for an assistant to read our ballot to us we have equipment. And we don't know how to build equipment that's tamper proof, so it can be made to lie to us, even if it was built correctly in the first place.
But they don't have support for nearly as much networking hardware as Windows does. In a GPL world, much of that support would have had to be contributed back. With a BSD license, Microsoft can have a whole herd of programmers extend the code, and keep all their extensions, and the improvements to the code don't go back to BSD.
No big deal, you say, that doesn't hurt the BSD code as it exists, sure. But now take 4 or 5 or 20 groups all doing this to the BSD code -- the codebase doesn't move much, even though lots of people are making individual improvements -- even worse, those 20 groups don't get to leverage off of each others improvements.
So while people can contribute changes to BSD code back to the code base (and many folks do), big players like Microsoft can mooch off of them and contribute nothing back; making their product always a little bit better than the BSD licensed one, which starves the BSD licencsed product of customers. And in an open source project, customers are also a developer pool.
Unless you suppose the Discworld mechanism (I suspect it's not original to Terry Pratchett, but he does have the most fun with it) -- where belief in a god causes them to exist, and the more believers they have the more powerful they are.
The beauty of that system is that by convincing everyone to be an Atheist, you actually make it true:-).
Well, I personally did this in 1989 or so, with about a 2 page shell script;
It took an incoming email, used a synonyms file to map words in it to keywords,
and then a prioritized keyword list to either reply to it directly or assign it
to the right support group. This was for the AT&T Data systems Tier IV hotline,
a job which I left in 1991...
And the reason it's a silly patent is that it's an obvious thing to do. I
would never have even considered filing for a patent on it.
It took a whole afternoon to get the first version working, and another
whole afternoon to get the synonym filtering thing to work.
There must be hundreds of other examples of people doing something like this -- why?
Becuase it's an obvious solution to a common problem.
The datagram formats are different between IPV4 and V6, but the parts of them that people
actually use are readily translatable. So you can setup border translators between
IPV4 islands and and IPV6 network or vice-versa.
Its NOT copy protection, it IS player restriction
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 1
Once again, everyone is falling into the semantic trap the *IAA folks want you to fall
into. DRM is *not* coppy protection. You can image copy DVD's all you want and they
still play, and you can copy other formats all you want, once you get a hold of them.
What these tools are doing are trying to restrict when and how you play the media file.
Yes, they claim they're doing that to restrict unauthorized copying, and in some cases
it does makes copying media harder, but let's be clear here, DRM only reduces copying as
a second-order effect of restricting playing.
This is why there is an inherent conflict between these schemes and FSF-defined Free Software.
If your player is Free Software, you can modify it to allow copying, sampling, mashup building, converting to other formats, etc. Only if all of the media players for a medium are carefully controlled crippleware can you turn a player-restriction system into a "copy protection" system.
This is why the *IAA folks fear and loathe reverse-engineers and Free Software -- because they fear customizable/modifiable media players.
And if you ran a webserver at home, your internet connection would not be functional.
Blocking ports is not a security fix, it is breaking the networks functionality, and is simply putting baling wire and chewing gum over serious security problems, rather than really fixing them.
Whatever ports you allow open, these guys will use, and if you block all ports, your network is not functional.
Unfortunately for them,in the minds of the public (and especially the teenager / college student public, who used to buy most of the music), they (the RIAA) have become the Sherrif of Nottingham, and folks like the defendant in this case are Robin Hoods.
That kind of publicity they can do without, as it will turn their prophecies (of internet music sharing being the doom of the music industry) into self-fulfilling prophecies.
Theo may not have the best personality for working with certain personality types, granted.
But when it comes to things technical, if he says he's sure something works a given way, then
that sets a confidence level of over 98%, as far as I'm concerned, and there are very few people
in the world I say that of.
Slashdot Mirror
How about this one? Of course, it is completely surrounded by suburubia, but there are still a few farms left out there. I suppose they're the exceptions that prove the rule...
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree here. The C=64 keyboard and the BIOS screen editor rocked. The trick was you had to get used to typing with your right hand in a different position, but once you did, you had the arrow keys accessible without moving your hand halfway across the keyboard. If I could find a keyboard with the C=64 arrow-key-shift layout, I would get one today.
Oh, right, I forgot; this is Slashdot. No-one has girlfriends, much less spouses and/or children :-)
Maybe some sort of submarine-style ballast tanks, but with helium?
so basically it will be around 70 years worth of our civilization that will broadcast any sort of intelligible signal. So it will be a sphere 70 light years thick expanding out from us that will be detectable, of hopefully somewere in the hundreds of thousands of years of human society... That's pretty thin odds of a SETI type scan finding us.
Now if you assume aliens want to contact other races, and intentionally broadcast a "here's how to reach us" signal (i.e. in the movie _Contact_), then there's some chance we'll find them. But I suspect if they're just minding their own business, their transmissions will devolve to pretty much white noise from any distant observers position just as ours are doing.
The point of the heat in a dishwasher is to sterilze with heat rather than, say, chlorine.
However, from the data I've seen, dishwashers use about the same power as an electric iron, coffee maker, or electric hairdryer. So I don't know where you get your ideas about them.
But yes, overall, simplifying our lives and living situations would go a long way towards reducing our energy footprint; but we should also avoid false optimizations.
Would that involve making the lawyers watch while masked people pirate copyrighted music?
On the other hand, current battery technology is fairly heavy, so you're losing some of the value by accelerating and decelerating the batteries themselves.
So I'm not sure where the trade-off point lies. In any case, running overhead lines all over the place is expensive, not to mention losing power due to rain, etc. So it's more flexible to have the power in the tram/bus...
While I love Theo when he's being outspoken (here he's clearly right, on principle -- humans write buggy software, and adding more code in this fashion makes it worse because there are more, orthogonal vectors of attack...) it is still good to back things up with empirical data, as the parent post does.
And that same Nova pointed out that resarchers have now demonstrated that the affect of both CO2 and "dimming" from particulates in the air were underestimated; as both pull in opposite directions. As we shift to "cleaner" fuels, the decreased dimming will increase the "pan evaporation" rate, and raise the water vapor levels, and that will really start the whole thing churning...
... you also couldn't find anyone from Urchin to arrange for a new support contract. So they weren't continuing to take your money and not provide suppport -- they wouldn't even take your money.
Always feels silly, debating someone who agrees with you :-)
This is the thing I find most frustrating about the current patent situation. Things that have been done on paper, or mechanically, for decades are somehow novel and patentable because someone did it in software?!? That's just silly. And ditto for doing things over the Internet.
Which is to say, I think generalizing your latter point invalidates your former one.
So the system can easily hand you "cryptographic proof" that it voted for the wrong person on your behalf, and you have no way of knowing, other than to ask another piece of equipment which can as easily lie to you.
A vote on a piece of paper can be physially tracked, and easily visually verified by a voter, (or their trusted assistant in the case of someone blind). Infrastructure is in place, and has been, for literally hundreds of years, for dealing with paper ballots.
With a cryptographic system, we're all blind, and for an assistant to read our ballot to us we have equipment. And we don't know how to build equipment that's tamper proof, so it can be made to lie to us, even if it was built correctly in the first place.
No big deal, you say, that doesn't hurt the BSD code as it exists, sure. But now take 4 or 5 or 20 groups all doing this to the BSD code -- the codebase doesn't move much, even though lots of people are making individual improvements -- even worse, those 20 groups don't get to leverage off of each others improvements.
So while people can contribute changes to BSD code back to the code base (and many folks do), big players like Microsoft can mooch off of them and contribute nothing back; making their product always a little bit better than the BSD licensed one, which starves the BSD licencsed product of customers. And in an open source project, customers are also a developer pool.
That's not so true as it was, after some recent Supreme Court decions... See the discussion over at Groklaw
The beauty of that system is that by convincing everyone to be an Atheist, you actually make it true :-).
And the reason it's a silly patent is that it's an obvious thing to do. I would never have even considered filing for a patent on it. It took a whole afternoon to get the first version working, and another whole afternoon to get the synonym filtering thing to work.
There must be hundreds of other examples of people doing something like this -- why? Becuase it's an obvious solution to a common problem.
The datagram formats are different between IPV4 and V6, but the parts of them that people actually use are readily translatable. So you can setup border translators between IPV4 islands and and IPV6 network or vice-versa.
Old Days: MIT Guide to Lockpicking New Times: Learn to Sculpt Faces
What these tools are doing are trying to restrict when and how you play the media file. Yes, they claim they're doing that to restrict unauthorized copying, and in some cases it does makes copying media harder, but let's be clear here, DRM only reduces copying as a second-order effect of restricting playing.
This is why there is an inherent conflict between these schemes and FSF-defined Free Software. If your player is Free Software, you can modify it to allow copying, sampling, mashup building, converting to other formats, etc. Only if all of the media players for a medium are carefully controlled crippleware can you turn a player-restriction system into a "copy protection" system.
This is why the *IAA folks fear and loathe reverse-engineers and Free Software -- because they fear customizable/modifiable media players.
Blocking ports is not a security fix, it is breaking the networks functionality, and is simply putting baling wire and chewing gum over serious security problems, rather than really fixing them.
Whatever ports you allow open, these guys will use, and if you block all ports, your network is not functional.
That kind of publicity they can do without, as it will turn their prophecies (of internet music sharing being the doom of the music industry) into self-fulfilling prophecies.
But when it comes to things technical, if he says he's sure something works a given way, then that sets a confidence level of over 98%, as far as I'm concerned, and there are very few people in the world I say that of.
'nuff said.