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User: Late+Adopter

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  1. Not to mention the slippery slope on Amazon Pushes For National Internet Sales Tax · · Score: 1

    If Amazon concedes that states and localities have enforcement powers beyond their borders for taxing purposes, will Amazon also need to be subject to ALL of the sales regulations imposed by their customers' jurisdictions? Will I get a big pop-up saying that a switchknife of the length I've chosen isn't legal in my city? Will they have to check ID for M-rated games?

  2. Re:Still no way for overloading operators?? on Neal Gafter On Java Under Oracle · · Score: 1

    You're right, strictly speaking, but what I was referring to was commutivity of the algorithm, not necessarily the result. You want to know that whatever decides (a gt b) is also going to decide whether (b gt a).

  3. Re:Still no way for overloading operators?? on Neal Gafter On Java Under Oracle · · Score: 1

    Yes. At least for me with Cpp, using + for string concatenation leads to more headaches than it's worth. I prefer to use boost::format.

  4. Re:Still no way for overloading operators?? on Neal Gafter On Java Under Oracle · · Score: 1

    Operators imply commutivity (a+b = b+a). You can't guarantee that if the function is implemented by a or b. It's a bad idea that leads to subtle errors down the road.

  5. Re:Since no one ever buys them... on Is There a Hearing Aid Price Bubble? · · Score: 1

    Non-profits can and often do take in revenue in excess of their costs (they wouldn't be very stable otherwise!) The difference is what tax law allows them to do with those profits (reinvest in their business vs. distribute to the owners).

  6. Re:Actually... on Amazon Folds In California Sales Tax Deal · · Score: 1

    The value of goods and services is in the eye of the beholder. Parties engage in trade (and employment) because the perception is that both sides stand to gain.

  7. Re:BS taxes on Amazon Folds In California Sales Tax Deal · · Score: 1

    It's all a wash as long as total revenue as a percentage of GDP remains the same, right? You're just collecting it from somewhere else (incentivizing/disincentivizing different things).

    That said, all the taxes you've listed are probably better for society than sales tax. Disincentivizing consumption and targeting the poor are two things that generally aren't great for an economy.

  8. Re:Data Security Anyone? on Is Tablet Success Bound To Their Crackability? · · Score: 1

    But what about in a corporate environment, where the OWNER is distinct from the person in physical possession of the device? Can we at least have some basic infrastructure to ensure that when a device is going to be permitted to access sensitive resources/material, it has some verifiability of its state?

  9. Re:Does anyone on Google Is Grooming Chrome As a Game Platform · · Score: 1

    If you only allow a subset you don't get native speed, you get the speed that your subset of instructions allows.

    The inner sandbox uses static analysis to detect security defects in untrusted x86 code. Previously, such analysis has been challenging for arbitrary x86 code due to such practices as self-modifying code and overlapping instruc- tions. In Native Client we disallow such practices through a set of alignment and structural rules that, when observed, insure that the native code module can be disassembled reliably, such that all reachable instructions are identified during disassembly. With reliable disassembly as a tool, our validator can then insure that the executable includes only the subset of legal instructions, disallowing unsafe machine instructions. The inner sandbox further uses x86 segmented memory to constrain both data and instruction memory references. Leveraging existing hardware to implement these range checks greatly simplifies the runtime checks required to con- strain memory references, in turn reducing the performance impact of safety mechanisms.

    As long as you weren't trying to write self-modifying code (and note most compilers won't do this), your performance impacts are basically restricted to checking non-local jumps. Not strictly native, but close enough.

    not native speed as to sandbox you must create a vm like system.

    That's provably untrue. See AppArmor and SE-Linux, both of which operate without creating a virtual machine (only implementing replacement system calls).

  10. Differential Geometry is the key on Ask Slashdot: Math Curriculum To Understand General Relativity? · · Score: 1

    Differential Geometry will give you the mathematical foundation for expressing non-flat spaces. From there, GR is "just" the Einstein Field Equations and the implications thereof. And compared to, say, quantum mechanics, there's very few solvable exact solutions to make case studies out of (black holes and possible evolutions of the universe, really).

    Springer has an OK book on Differential Geometry, and then you want to move on to Gravitation, by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.

  11. Re:Pure LOL on What's the Carbon Footprint of Bicycling? · · Score: 1

    (I am reminded of the time in college when as a grader in a physics class, the students were asked to find how high a pressurized leak on a water tank would shoot into the air. Two student's answers had the water at escape velocity speeds, sending them into orbit the earth.)

    I get your point re: reality checking, but as an aside, any velocity straight up without a sustaining acceleration will eventually come back down. Escape velocity is the speed tangential to the surface of the earth (i.e. on the least energetic orbital trajectory) that is in excess of what gravity can keep pulled to the surface (g $lt; v^2/r). And you still have to fight against air resistance trying to decelerate you while you're inside the atmosphere.

  12. Re:Shysters all on RIAA Math: Sell 1 Million Albums, Still Owe $500k · · Score: 1

    Or at least they've managed to make a large number of people, including you, think so. Surely for their purposes, that's good enough.

  13. Re:moronic proposition on Calling BS On Unpaid Internships · · Score: 1

    Do you have evidence there's monopoly forces at work? From an outsider's perspective it appears to be a classic supply and demand problem with too many people who want to be interns.

  14. Re:There is no obscenity exemption on Court on Video Games: Less Cleavage, More Carnage · · Score: 1

    That's the "strict constructionist" point of view. Many people (most?) hold a more moderate point of view that the Constitution shouldn't be interpreted in such strict black and white, and that if the Constitution held every exception to the rule the framer's had in mind, and WOULD have had in mind if they could predict all new situations, it would be as long as some of the bills congress passes, printed on 7000 sheets of paper.

  15. Re:Too early on A Late Adopter's Guide To USB 3.0 · · Score: 1

    Well, that all depends.

  16. Re:Why not actually try IT on GNOME To Lose Minimize, Maximize Buttons · · Score: 1

    You might want to change your Downloads folder to /tmp. It enables you to forget about the file once you're done using it (and encourages you to put it somewhere more meaningful than "Downloads" if you want to keep it).

  17. Re:Big companies will design an expensive approach on NASA Wants Spacecraft For Mars Return Trip · · Score: 1

    It's in their interest to come up with a solution that could feasibly be purchased. Too cheap and not enough profit, but too expensive and Congress doesn't pay for it.

  18. Re:mplayer on Canonical To Divert Money From GNOME · · Score: 1

    You're not a True *nix Geek until you graduate to MPD and managing your playlist with an intelligent randomizer daemon.

  19. Re:The smart phone got him off? on Smart Phone Gets Driver Out of a Speeding Ticket · · Score: 1

    I'm not from the united states, and I wasn't talking specifically about them.

    But you were responding to a comment that DID specifically refer to the US Constitution, and you called it "the most uninformed comment I've ever seen". You owe the author some evidence for that statement.

  20. Kobayashi Maru on Microsoft Vehemently Denies Google's "Bing Sting" · · Score: 1

    Right. Google challenged Bing to a no-win scenario and now is getting all upset and accusing Bing's winning strategy as "cheating" because it didn't fall within their box of how they thought search engines were supposed to operate.

  21. Presumptive Title on News Corp's The Daily Is Doomed · · Score: 1

    Isn't a little much to editorialize in the title itself? I understand the referenced article is an opinion piece, but can the editors please clarify that this isn't an event that's actually happened or been established as true, perhaps with a more appropriate title like "Blogger claims New Corp's The Daily is doomed"?

  22. Re:Quick question: on EFL 1.0 Is Finally Released · · Score: 1

    Because as far as I can tell, E17 isn't actually out yet. This article is about a set of libraries E17 will depend on, none of which contain widgets or other graphical components.

  23. Re:What are we doing with the old cars? on White House Wants 1M Electric Cars By 2015 · · Score: 1

    Many used cars end up in Mexico, where they can be turned around for a significant profit thanks to NAFTA.

    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/24/MN99V44MC.DTL

  24. Re:Telnet vs. SSH on Hackers Bringing Telnet Back · · Score: 1

    You can't use passwordless public-key authentication on stock Telnet. Also the lack of X tunneling might be an issue if there's a firewall in the way.

  25. Re:My grandmother is one of them... on 60% of AOL's Profits Come From Misinformed Customers · · Score: 1

    If you're in a business situation and you're using AOL dial-up to guarantee Internet access, you're doing it wrong. Get a (tethering) smartphone or a WiMax modem. Or have a dial-up access line on the business premises at much lower cost.