I am interested if anyone here fears the security implications of the OnStar system's power?
I'm sure they do. Hell, if you gather enough half-informed paranoiacs in one place, you'll be able to find someone who fears the security implications of anyone and anything.
We shall now head off into the sunset to the tune of the "March Of The 3rd Tin Foil Hat Battalion".
they'd still have won a trademark case with Mozilla Firebird.
I wish people would stop repeating nonsense like this
You appeal to to struggle with complicated sentence constructions. I never said there was a court case, I say they would've won, if there had been a court case. (And they would've).
The trademarks are not identical - googles is 'Gmail' while theirs is 'G-Mail.'
try marketing your Micro-soft operating system and see how long that "but we had a hyphen!" argument holds up.
Who had even heard of their trademark before this?
Doesn't matter. The Firebird database is a niche item, but they'd still have won a trademark case with Mozilla Firebird.
And, frankly, I'm glad, because if large corporations could run round appropriating trademarks on the basis that their present owners are too insignificant to count. There's already enough "might makes right" built into the legal system.
Incidentally, I don't know if this is the same elsewhere, but in the UK gmail.com redirects you to mail.google.com, so it's clear they're already avoiding the gmail name here...
intellectual property rights to its GMail e-mail service.
Look, if you keep using the catch-all phrase "Intellectual Property" to cover distinct ideas, no one will ever get smart about the differences. This is about a trade mark "GMail" -- only the *name* is the important thing here.
And they did register that trademark long in advance of Google.
Well, the hurricanes would start moving east instead of west, so warm water anomalies in the east Pacific would start to devestate Southern California and Western Mexico. Similarly, warm water in the east Atlantic would fire hurricanes at Spain and Western Africa (like they need anymore natural disasters coming there way).
And the Gulf Stream would turn off, and reform as an eastern boundary current up the coast of Europe.
Are we not trying to control something which is not ment to be controled?
Nothing is *meant* to be controlled [or at least "meant" by whom?]. The Creator? Hell, everytime we put up a brolly we are interrupting rain the Mother Nature "meant" to drop on our heads...
make it go in the exact opposite of the target storm
Or better yet, just stop the Earth from spinning. Since Coriolis is so important in sustaining the vorticity of hurricanes, if we can turn off the Coriolis, we'll be laughing.
Without actually doing the arithmetic, the shear volume of ice you'd need to move to cool an appreciable area of the Gulf of Mexico simply doesn't bear thinking about. You'd basically have to cool the entire surface mixed layer, which extends tens of metres downwards.
That's a *lot* of energy to extract through latent heat of water. Really, a hell of a lot.
Actually, pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall... but I digress.
Didn't Microsoft once employ people who were, you know, actual programmers, rather than self-publicists. If I'd known you could get an interview by adding blindfolds to nethack and taking over maintenance of fetchmail, I'd have considered that career path myself.
That's a really good point. A distinction must be made between "standards" that are simply open specifications which anyone can use (such as TCP/IP, or some of the various IM protocols that have sprung up) and actual Standards -- specifications that have gone through actual standardisations.
In short, the important distinction is between "open" and "closed", not between "standards" and "non-standards".
So implementing open specifications is good. Insistence on Standards, as you say, can be a mixed blessing.
Of course they can. Thousands of companies do, every day. (Google "ethical investment" if you don't believe me). As long as they're up front with their stockholders, companies can behave as ethically as the board members decide.
There are clothes companies that won't sell stuff made in sweat shops (hell, even Nike pretend this is the case), just as there are company's that only buy from Christian suppliers. On a smaller scale, my local liquor store refuses to sell to people who the proprietor has been informed has a drink problem. It's easy to be a principled company. It's just not very fashionable.
The big problem is, there are millions of companies for whom the almighty dollar trumps everything. Now we can add Yahoo to that list.
It's not prone to crashes any more than any other embedded system is
That's just crap. It's about as stable as many other multi-purpose, palm-top OS... but none of those are good enough either.
If something's keeping me alive, I want something with extremely high-reliability, near hard realtime performance, coded in a language that's as errorproof as possible in language design (Ada, perhaps) and preferably that's been proven bugfree.
Windows CE is "good enough" for many many tasks. Life critical tasks are not among them.
Australians are. They like sticking with the tried and tested, even when this means that its old and no longer very good. Seen their cricket team recently?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who isn't still double declutching is a puff.
We shall now head off into the sunset to the tune of the "March Of The 3rd Tin Foil Hat Battalion".
And, frankly, I'm glad, because if large corporations could run round appropriating trademarks on the basis that their present owners are too insignificant to count. There's already enough "might makes right" built into the legal system.
Incidentally, I don't know if this is the same elsewhere, but in the UK gmail.com redirects you to mail.google.com, so it's clear they're already avoiding the gmail name here...
And they did register that trademark long in advance of Google.
And the Gulf Stream would turn off, and reform as an eastern boundary current up the coast of Europe.
Without actually doing the arithmetic, the shear volume of ice you'd need to move to cool an appreciable area of the Gulf of Mexico simply doesn't bear thinking about. You'd basically have to cool the entire surface mixed layer, which extends tens of metres downwards.
That's a *lot* of energy to extract through latent heat of water.
Really, a hell of a lot.
Actually, pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall... but I digress.
Didn't Microsoft once employ people who were, you know, actual programmers, rather than self-publicists. If I'd known you could get an interview by adding blindfolds to nethack and taking over maintenance of fetchmail, I'd have considered that career path myself.
That's a really good point. A distinction must be made between "standards" that are simply open specifications which anyone can use (such as TCP/IP, or some of the various IM protocols that have sprung up) and actual Standards -- specifications that have gone through actual standardisations.
In short, the important distinction is between "open" and "closed", not between "standards" and "non-standards".
So implementing open specifications is good. Insistence on Standards, as you say, can be a mixed blessing.
Hey, the Met have never shot anyone acting suspiciously, wearing inappropriate clothes or carrying a bulky item that might be a bomb...
They just claim those things afterwards.
You've forgotten the fundamental axiom of 21st Century society : "Fuck Everyone Else"
Really nice idea of perspective you have at slashdot.
You've decided the most important facet of the Hurricane Katrina recovery operation is FEMA's MS-centric webpage.
Now, your commentary on the disastrous quagmire that is post-invasion Iraq, you're worrying about their TLD.
Jesus.
Clue : If you feel your joke needs labelling as "Funny"... it's probably not Funny
There are clothes companies that won't sell stuff made in sweat shops (hell, even Nike pretend this is the case), just as there are company's that only buy from Christian suppliers. On a smaller scale, my local liquor store refuses to sell to people who the proprietor has been informed has a drink problem. It's easy to be a principled company. It's just not very fashionable.
The big problem is, there are millions of companies for whom the almighty dollar trumps everything. Now we can add Yahoo to that list.
An enormous multinational corporation with no sense of morality?
Inconceivable.
If something's keeping me alive, I want something with extremely high-reliability, near hard realtime performance, coded in a language that's as errorproof as possible in language design (Ada, perhaps) and preferably that's been proven bugfree.
Windows CE is "good enough" for many many tasks. Life critical tasks are not among them.
... more unfounded opinion masquerading as insight and research. And about HCI again.
Great.
I just lowered the frame rate on the MPEG, and put the "Blue Danube Waltz" on the CD player...
Australians are. They like sticking with the tried and tested, even when this means that its old and no longer very good. Seen their cricket team recently?