Seriously... Who benefits from a state granted monopoly to telecoms? Have you seen that work well lately?
It doesn't even make sense that you're trying to defend the power of the people to grant corporate monopolies. How about the power of the people to decide for themselves what service they want? How about the power of the smaller towns to decide for themselves whether or not they want to organize their own broadband service as an additional option for their residents?
Why do you think more choices lead to less freedom?
If a ballot-reader counts the votes, fine. We can have fast results without giving up accountability.
Look it up. Ballot readers are compromised as easily as the original machines.
An ideal arrangement is to have a printed ballot as the official ballot, and a supervised hand-counted count which is the OFFICIAL count. Then, the original voting machines can also perform an electronic tally themselves, and this electronic tally can serve as a check for the hand count. If the two differ significantly, something has gone wrong, and an audit must be performed.
If the media want to report the electronic tally as a preliminary result, let them. Simply declare that only the hand count (which can be supervised) is official.
If that were true, maintaining a high speed on the highway would take very little gas.
It does take very little gas, in comparison to acceleration. Put a car in neutral, or push in your clutch on a flat road, and see how long it takes to slow down by even 20%. If you assume this is around 20 seconds to decelerate, use that to estimate the tangential force of the tires on the road, and assume a large roller that the car contacts for a full 20cm, and you consider how little a wheel assembly can accelerate on, say, ice in less than a hundredth of a second of contact (since it MUST accelerate to faster than the speed of the car to transfer ANY nonzero amount of energy), then I estimate you'd get less than a joule out of each car. Now I could easily be off by an order of magnitude, but that's on the scale of a hamster wheel.
All it would really be is a horribly inefficient way to use a standard car engine to generate electricity.
Ages ago in a sceince lesson we were asked to analyse the idea of pulling rollers on the M25 motorway to capture the energy of vehicles that ran over them, well I sort of spotted the flaw in the plan being that the car would all get sucky MPG and polute more.
Uhm. But the surface of the tire does not slide along the road unless something has gone very wrong, and most of a car's motion is maintained by inertia, so there is very little tangential force at the point of contact. Therefore a roller would receive almost no rotation anyway. (Think about it.)
While there are places emoticons clearly do not belong, such as in formal business documents, there are also quite reasonable places to consider using them, such as informal communications between people engaged in business. Smiling, at its most basic form, is a signal that something is not a danger, and acts as a tool for bonding. This has intrinsic value for business, and it's why people also sometimes smile while conducting business in person. Why not extend this capability to less formal electronic communication for business as well since the tool already exists?
Doesn't matter, report it even if it's a quarter. Lots of businesses run on small margins.
Personally, I wouldn't bother to return a quarter because it's not really worth the time it would take to try to return it. Ever try to convince a cashier they made a price mistake? It can take between 30 seconds and 15 minutes, depending on the cashier. It's really not worth gambling on it being 15 minutes for a quarter.
If a business goes bankrupt for said quarter, then hey, close the lemonade stand and get a job.
As I understand it, if you intentionally pay less than the agreed price for something, or intentionally take money that does not belong to you, that is stealing, and is illegal, regardless of whether it is $0.01 or $1 million.
If a store clerk rings up an item, turns to you, and says, "That'll be $3.99," and you hand them $3.99, then that's the agreed price. What it says back on the shelf has nothing to do with it.
Any incongruity between the store clerk and the wishes of the store managers is not the responsibility of the customer.
Apple does it all the time with its various updates. Without accepting the new license, itunes does NOT open.
IANAL, and I am not an iTunes user, but since iTunes is a service which must be used to gain access to songs that have already been paid for, it seems that this would qualify as a contract entered into under economic duress, and would therefore be unenforceable.
Why is it that the introduction of a non-lethal, safer-than-shooting-a-gun method of subduing a suspected criminal considered such a bad thing?
It's not intrinsically a bad thing, but it's something that must be approached with great concern for policies regarding use. The problem is, psychologically speaking non-lethal weapons have a much lower threshold for use. This greatly raises the possibility of non-lethal weapons being used on the innocent and those who are NOT engaged in criminal activity.
We have already seen this with things such as tasers and rubber bullets. For example, see police firing at crowds of peaceful protesters in LA and chasing them down the street. There are apparently insufficient safeguards in place to prevent police from using non-lethal weapons on peaceful protesters, and thus the freedom of assembly, which should be protected by the constitution, has been severely violated.
Is that really true?! It seems very counterintuitive.
It seems to me that bluffing is a reactive or anticipatory activity. The optimal strategy would therefore depend on what strategy the other player is using. Since the other player can choose any arbitrary strategy, this does not seem like an easily solvable problem.
I remember when that story broke, and loads of people were saying, "I use Linux, but I'm not going to buy a Dell,"
Personally, I swore off Dell laptops a long time ago. But their support of Linux is what has changed my mind. For my next laptop purchase I intend to seriously consider Dell. Having the hardware pre-tested and known to function is a nice advantage which can save a lot of time in the buying process (and potentially even more time during the installation process if I don't have to fuss with tricky hardware).
Customer? How about considering students members, since after all, they do "apply" and are then "accepted" as a member of the student body. And most colleges and universities have some sort of charter which makes the education of these students the primary goal and focus of the institution.
And government grants do not like to fund projects that are moving into the product phase, because they want businesses to pick up the slack there. So a lot of products fall into the moneyless black hole in between proof of principle and product.
Just yesterday, we were trying to re-encode some movies using a Sorenson codec, and it's just not possible under Linux. Even if it was possible, it certainly wouldn't be possible legally, as (from what I can understand) Apple and Sorenson are in a race condition -- neither one will allow the other to release the codec legally.
Since you're a commercial shop, if you're concerned about the legality, just buy a license for a cheap piece of software that comes with said codec, set the license next to the computer under a paperweight, and then use the codec how you want (for example, with the rest of your Linux software).
I do believe that the only way to for the forces of good to prevail in the future is to be as pure as possible now, to develop, sponsor, and use as free as possible systems going forward.
Quite right. Not to mention, unencumbered codecs would be far more convenient, because they could be bundled with everything and give a unified standard.
You have to hunt for codecs on windows too, and it's usually more difficult because each has to be found individually and sometimes they come along with crapware.
Precisely. My father was having great difficulty watching things on his standard from-the-store windows computer due to a lack of codecs, and asked me where he could find them all at. I just told him to download vlc for windows, and then everything worked fine for him.
Most people just want things to work without too much hassle.
...robs Microsoft of the potential revenue of a Windows license.
Hypothetically perhaps a small portion of the Windows license. But let's for the moment pretend the entire value of Microsoft Windows were contained within a couple codecs. Can you imagine the amount of legal expenses it would cost Microsoft to try to sue for one windows license worth at a time from end-users playing videos?
If they did start causing legal trouble over the usage of their codecs, you can also bet usage of those codecs would drop quite a bit.
i've always had trouble with this idea. my primary reason, is that the future hasn't happened so how can it exist before the present?
When you say "hasn't happened", you're saying the future is not in the past. Your entire confusion is based on the intuition that the present must always follow causally from the past. The simplest resolution to this would simply be that your intuition is wrong. No contradictions are introduced by rejecting this assumption.
Just because something appears a certain way most of the time, or seems to match our everyday experience, that does not mean it must fundamentally and always be this way. Quantum mechanics is full of things that we must learn to accept at the expense of everyday intuition.
Some article author doesn't know what he's talking about... I quote:
"Ordinary random number generators found in most computers in use today are 'pseudo-random' numbers that use various algorithms to pick the numbers from large pre-compiled databases of numbers obtained by methods such as rolling the dice."
In actuality, PRNGs typically operate based on a function with a very long periodicity, not a pre-compiled list of dice rolls. And what I consider to be a typical state-of-the-art contemporary random number generator is closer to/dev/random, which functions as a true random number generator on all standard Linux installations.
Absolutely. The presence of the court order for this is quite comforting to see. I hope we return to a time when we can presume there will always be this, as stated by the constitution.
Slashdot Mirror
If your parents are Ma Bell and Uncle Sam, then your family tree has a forking bug...
Seriously... Who benefits from a state granted monopoly to telecoms? Have you seen that work well lately?
It doesn't even make sense that you're trying to defend the power of the people to grant corporate monopolies. How about the power of the people to decide for themselves what service they want? How about the power of the smaller towns to decide for themselves whether or not they want to organize their own broadband service as an additional option for their residents?
Why do you think more choices lead to less freedom?
Look it up. Ballot readers are compromised as easily as the original machines.
An ideal arrangement is to have a printed ballot as the official ballot, and a supervised hand-counted count which is the OFFICIAL count. Then, the original voting machines can also perform an electronic tally themselves, and this electronic tally can serve as a check for the hand count. If the two differ significantly, something has gone wrong, and an audit must be performed.
If the media want to report the electronic tally as a preliminary result, let them. Simply declare that only the hand count (which can be supervised) is official.
It does take very little gas, in comparison to acceleration. Put a car in neutral, or push in your clutch on a flat road, and see how long it takes to slow down by even 20%. If you assume this is around 20 seconds to decelerate, use that to estimate the tangential force of the tires on the road, and assume a large roller that the car contacts for a full 20cm, and you consider how little a wheel assembly can accelerate on, say, ice in less than a hundredth of a second of contact (since it MUST accelerate to faster than the speed of the car to transfer ANY nonzero amount of energy), then I estimate you'd get less than a joule out of each car. Now I could easily be off by an order of magnitude, but that's on the scale of a hamster wheel.
On that point we completely agree.
Uhm. But the surface of the tire does not slide along the road unless something has gone very wrong, and most of a car's motion is maintained by inertia, so there is very little tangential force at the point of contact. Therefore a roller would receive almost no rotation anyway. (Think about it.)
While there are places emoticons clearly do not belong, such as in formal business documents, there are also quite reasonable places to consider using them, such as informal communications between people engaged in business. Smiling, at its most basic form, is a signal that something is not a danger, and acts as a tool for bonding. This has intrinsic value for business, and it's why people also sometimes smile while conducting business in person. Why not extend this capability to less formal electronic communication for business as well since the tool already exists?
Personally, I wouldn't bother to return a quarter because it's not really worth the time it would take to try to return it. Ever try to convince a cashier they made a price mistake? It can take between 30 seconds and 15 minutes, depending on the cashier. It's really not worth gambling on it being 15 minutes for a quarter.
If a business goes bankrupt for said quarter, then hey, close the lemonade stand and get a job.
If a store clerk rings up an item, turns to you, and says, "That'll be $3.99," and you hand them $3.99, then that's the agreed price. What it says back on the shelf has nothing to do with it.
Any incongruity between the store clerk and the wishes of the store managers is not the responsibility of the customer.
IANAL, and I am not an iTunes user, but since iTunes is a service which must be used to gain access to songs that have already been paid for, it seems that this would qualify as a contract entered into under economic duress, and would therefore be unenforceable.
Uh. And how many people can watch a computer system do its count?
This is not a programming quality issue. Replacing existing systems with ones which do not allow direct supervision and oversight is a step backwards.
Sounds like an easy college prank to play on unsuspecting people.
(That's the problem with presumption of guilt upon accusation.)
It's not intrinsically a bad thing, but it's something that must be approached with great concern for policies regarding use. The problem is, psychologically speaking non-lethal weapons have a much lower threshold for use. This greatly raises the possibility of non-lethal weapons being used on the innocent and those who are NOT engaged in criminal activity.
We have already seen this with things such as tasers and rubber bullets. For example, see police firing at crowds of peaceful protesters in LA and chasing them down the street. There are apparently insufficient safeguards in place to prevent police from using non-lethal weapons on peaceful protesters, and thus the freedom of assembly, which should be protected by the constitution, has been severely violated.
It seems to me that bluffing is a reactive or anticipatory activity. The optimal strategy would therefore depend on what strategy the other player is using. Since the other player can choose any arbitrary strategy, this does not seem like an easily solvable problem.
Personally, I swore off Dell laptops a long time ago. But their support of Linux is what has changed my mind. For my next laptop purchase I intend to seriously consider Dell. Having the hardware pre-tested and known to function is a nice advantage which can save a lot of time in the buying process (and potentially even more time during the installation process if I don't have to fuss with tricky hardware).
Customer? How about considering students members, since after all, they do "apply" and are then "accepted" as a member of the student body. And most colleges and universities have some sort of charter which makes the education of these students the primary goal and focus of the institution.
Here are some better ones.
MSNBC
Wired
And government grants do not like to fund projects that are moving into the product phase, because they want businesses to pick up the slack there. So a lot of products fall into the moneyless black hole in between proof of principle and product.
Like giving people a full refund?
Since you're a commercial shop, if you're concerned about the legality, just buy a license for a cheap piece of software that comes with said codec, set the license next to the computer under a paperweight, and then use the codec how you want (for example, with the rest of your Linux software).
Quite right. Not to mention, unencumbered codecs would be far more convenient, because they could be bundled with everything and give a unified standard.
Precisely. My father was having great difficulty watching things on his standard from-the-store windows computer due to a lack of codecs, and asked me where he could find them all at. I just told him to download vlc for windows, and then everything worked fine for him.
Most people just want things to work without too much hassle.
Not in the real world. The interwoven complexity of laws can be quite ambiguous until a specific thing is tested in the courts, and precedent is set.
Hypothetically perhaps a small portion of the Windows license. But let's for the moment pretend the entire value of Microsoft Windows were contained within a couple codecs. Can you imagine the amount of legal expenses it would cost Microsoft to try to sue for one windows license worth at a time from end-users playing videos?
If they did start causing legal trouble over the usage of their codecs, you can also bet usage of those codecs would drop quite a bit.
When you say "hasn't happened", you're saying the future is not in the past. Your entire confusion is based on the intuition that the present must always follow causally from the past. The simplest resolution to this would simply be that your intuition is wrong. No contradictions are introduced by rejecting this assumption.
Just because something appears a certain way most of the time, or seems to match our everyday experience, that does not mean it must fundamentally and always be this way. Quantum mechanics is full of things that we must learn to accept at the expense of everyday intuition.
Some article author doesn't know what he's talking about... I quote:
/dev/random, which functions as a true random number generator on all standard Linux installations.
"Ordinary random number generators found in most computers in use today are 'pseudo-random' numbers that use various algorithms to pick the numbers from large pre-compiled databases of numbers obtained by methods such as rolling the dice."
In actuality, PRNGs typically operate based on a function with a very long periodicity, not a pre-compiled list of dice rolls. And what I consider to be a typical state-of-the-art contemporary random number generator is closer to
Absolutely. The presence of the court order for this is quite comforting to see. I hope we return to a time when we can presume there will always be this, as stated by the constitution.