I see no reason to accept that inter-worldline conservation of energy should be accepted.
One reason for not accepting this is the existence of the universe. If conservation of energy were not constrained to only work within a universe, then this would have required an unbelievable amount of energy.
FWIW, suppose that we take these results as proof that the universe is being run on a simulator. In that case multiple copies would result in greater consumption of ram, and slower execution, as observed from OUTSIDE of the universe, but from within the universe they would be unobservable. (This might also explain why the state of something is known only when it might be interacting with something eles.)
P.S.: I'm not asserting this theory. I merely wish to point out that it is consistent with observed evidence.
N.B.: AFAICT there are still five interpretations consistent with quantum mechanics. 1) Solipsism. (You can never rule that out.) 2) Superpredestinationism. (Every result was decided before the universe was set into motion.) 3) Many-Worlds 4) Copenhagen. (No understanding is possible. Only knowledge of statistics.) 5) The Participatory Universe. The future causes the past as well as the past causing the future.
Now these are all broad categories, so some of them come in multiple flavors, but they appear to all be consistent with what is known of quantum mechanics. (I have my doubts about Copenhagen, but it seems to still be popular with physicists, so it must be seen as reasonable, despite the models of understanding offered by the other approaches.)
It's been many years since I used an MS product, but my memory says that they were much better at promissing backwards compatibility than at delivering it. This may have improved.
In particular I am remembering MSAccess95/MSAccess2000, which they definitely advertised as being compatible. I ended up keeping two separate machines, one for each, with a different copy of the program on each. Changes, including data updates, were transmitted between the two as ASCII files, because if MSAccess2000 ever opened the MSAccess95 version (even when told not to save any changes) within a month the MSAccess95 version would become corrupt. The interesting thing is that it didn't happen immediately, which made it a real fun problem to trace down.
It was necessary to keep both versions running, because different clients had different versions, and they weren't about to spring for the $$$ to get a new computer just to run MSAccess2000. I never did get a straight answer about how to solve this problem out of MS, I had to figure it out myself. (Fortunately the program had been running for about a year before we bought a copy of MSAccess2000....so I had a strong hint as to where the problem lay.)
I also heard various horror stories about MSWord incompatibilities, but none of those ever affected me.
N.B.: As you can see, this all happened several years ago...around 2001. Things may well have improved. Perhaps.
I'm not certain, but every article I've seen has only concerned hive bees. Also, if it's only that they "lose their way home", perhaps most solitaries don't actually have all that much of a home for much of the time. In any case, they could forage without returning home, and their homes could be much smaller, I believe that bumble bees dig small nests underground, and be chosen to be in places that they CAN find. (I.e., they aren't subjected to being in places that are convenient to humans.)
"barratry" refers to repeatedly filing lawsuits...but I think that in order to be barratry it has to be against the same defendant. Also, I think that if you drop the lawsuit, then it can't be used as a part of an action against one for barratry. And I'm fairly certain that if they win you can't use the action against them. The only time I've seen it used by someone who knew what the word meant it referred to repeatedly filing lawsuits, losing them, and then filing a slight variation as a new lawsuit. (IANAL)
FWIW, the scientists are merely proposing it as a theory. They aren't claiming more than that it is consistent with a few minor tests. It probably is.
This isn't to say that this is the correct answer, just that it's consistent with the evidence against which it has been tested. (Probably that evidence forms the background against which it was formulated.) They are suggesting that it might be worth testing further. This seems reasonable. Since the cause of Colony Collapse Disease isn't known, examining new ideas is an appropriate next step.
There are several proposed reasons (in Slashdot, above) why this theory shouldn't be accepted. If it is to be accepted it would need to be able to answer those objections. To require that it answer them at this point, however, is unreasonable. The mechanisms behind theories are often reformulated several times during the early period of their development. E.g., it could turn out that cell phones use a pulse code that heterodynes to a frequency that matches the length of one of a bees neurons. Since any neural circuit has lots of neurons, lots of frequencies in a particular range would work. It might need to match a particular pulsation pattern, which just happens to match some popular ring-tone...and all that would need being done is abolishing that ring-tone. Were this to be the mechanism, it wouldn't be found without investigating cell-phone/bee interactions. (This is a REALLY silly hypothesis...but I don't know of anything that rules it out.)
Certainly this is an important enough problem that plausible theories should be investigated. And the plausibility of a theory is judged partially by comparing against its competitors. Also, there's no reason to just investigate one theory. (Different groups should be choosing different theories to investigate, as long as one isn't overwhelmingly probable...and possibly even then.)
To me the theory being greeted by a number of bad jokes can mean that people think it's an implausible theory, but it can equally well mean that they don't like the possibility that it might be correct. In this case, given this audience, I suspect that the latter is in operation whether the first is in operation or not.
FWIW, I believe that the only bees affected are the hive bees. These ARE the source of honey, and they are the kind that can be carted around from place to place. They are also a minority of all bees. If pesticides aren't used indiscriminately, then native bees can do much of the work of pollination. But, of course, this won't happen if you kill them off whenever your plants aren't in flower.
If hive bees vanish, then successful farming will REQUIRE that less insecticide be used...or at least that it be of a very targeted variety.
And there probably *isn't* any better legal choice. So things are going to keep getting worse until people get so angry that they're willing to use illegal means to get rid of the government. The minority parties are a fool's trap in the american voting system. Only a few are duped by them, but many will vote that way because they feel equally disgusted by both of the major parties. And lots of others won't bother to vote at all, because neither side even tries to represent them, so why bother. It's not voter apathy, it's voter disgust.
At one point I thought I could work for better government on, at least, a local level. A couple of elections was enough to disabuse me of that. The candidates were all power-grabbers. The one's with the good reputations were just taking credit for good work done by others. One might think that this meant that they were espousing the values of those people, but a couple of betrayals convinced me that this was not what was happening. I know of one (ONE) government official that I still mainly trust to attempt to do right as she sees it. (We don't always agree, but I'm relatively certain that she is sincere.) The others are opportunists.
Think of it as a device for absorbing the unwanted vibrations then. I'm sure that if it's converting the vibrations into electricity, then it's diminishing their strength. Thus you both harvest the energy of the vibrations and increase the efficiency of your windmill.
Still, one doesn't know exactly how efficient these things are at absorbing vibrational energy. If they're good enough, they could make pretty good silencers (and the windmill could be replaced by something that amplified the vibrations rather than suppressing them).
Everything depends on the final cost/unit and the efficiency of absorption.
Current cost wouldn't mean anything. Research scientists aren't production engineers. A hand-made cpu is pretty expensive, *ESPECIALLY* if you try to do it below micro scale. Production CPUs are so cheap that the current cost of a computer is dominated by the cost of MSWind...and is anyway around $500 for a basic box. That's 1/10th what I paid for my first Apple, and there's been inflation since then. And computers are a lot more powerful, and include a lot more features.
So... if you bought one now it might well be over $100,000. If you bought one on the first day they went on sale they might cost $1,000. If you bought one a year later they might cost $100. They'd probably stay around there until the patents expired, then they'd rapidly start dropping in price until they got under $1.00... how far under depends on how bad the coming cycle of inflation is. I wouldn't be totally surprised by a final cost of under $0.01 each. These things don't use much in the way of materials to make, so what you're paying for is their construction.
Something being a virtual meeting in Second Life doesn't inherently make it much better than a meeting at the office. It *could* be, but there's not guarantee.
What's going on here is that there's this news story, and it doesn't tell enough to make an informed decision. So people are forced to fill in the missing pieces based on their prior experiences, and their guesses on how it's going to turn out this time.
E.g.: What license is the software going to be under? How do you know? At what point will the developed code become available to the public, and how will this availability be made manifest? Choices here range from something like the Python site to a site on SourceForge with raw code dumps, to Cosmos, to mail in a request and we'll mail you forms to fill out to ask for use to mail you back a printout. Possibly of assembler for a machine you don't have access to. *ALL* of those would be compatible with the provided description. So would any license from BSD to GPL to QPL to a custom proprietary license that granted you the right to use the code and develop it but not to redistribute it. (They said Open Source. Symantec Libraries for the Macintosh were technically open source. They even gave you binary redistribution rights. But you couldn't redistribute the source or the documentation. [Well, this was a few decades ago. I don't know their current license.])
In other words: What this project is offering is, in all significant respects, unknown. (But it's a flashy news story, so it gets lots of clicks. And THAT'S the point. [And to me it's essentially as useles as the Weekly World News...but I always try to read their front page. Where else can you read about the earth being invaded from Mars, illustrated by a giant Nautillus shell?])
The RIAA is merely acting as an agent for others (the labels) who hold the copyrights.
If the RIAA is found to be abusing the legal process, forbidding them from continuing to prosecute copyrights would not touch the rights of the actual copyright holders, it would merely that they either act directly themselves, or hire a new agent.
I have not idea how likely such a decision would be, but to me it would appear just.
There are other plausible responses. Placing the code under GPL is sometimes a workable one. It depends on the situation. In *THIS* situation the only permanent solution appears to be development from "scratch". ("scratch" is in quotes, because you don't need to go clean-room. You just need to ensure that the code is not "derivitive" (as defined by copyright law...ugh!, so go in for a bit of overkill).
E.g., in this situation one of the copyright rules that applies is that "If there's only one way to do something, doing it that way isn't covered by copyright law". This pretty much means that you can use the hardware interfacing information discovered by the GPL driver. But you've still got to rewrite most of it, plausibly changing, e.g., where the routine boundaries lie (except where those are standardized by general conventions).
If that's all you consider, then the GPL terms clearly apply.
I feel a *tiny* bit more iffy about applying them to BSD software...but only a tiny bit. If the developer had wanted to chose the BSD license, then he would have chosen it.
Actually, if it were just GPL and BSD developers involved, I'd have said: Ignore it. It's not worth causing a fuss over. Unfortunately, we live in a world with some others who have different opinions on how one should handle code. (Actually, if all code were either GPL or BSD, I'd probably choose the BSD license. As it is, however, I'm looking at the GPL v3.)
I remember, though, that BSD code has done a WHOLE LOT for GPL systems over the years. So I feel a *tiny* bit iffy about being strict about license terms in this situation. (Then I look over my shoulder and remember who's lurking out there.)
FWIW (and to supply only a little bit of context) when he said that he was so sleepy that he had to remain standing so that he wouldn't go to sleep during the interview. In such a case one can generally only respond properly with previously thought-out responses, and one doesn't notice even rather blatant consequences of what one says or does. (I once crossed a street with my eyes closed in such a state. Only later did I realize *THAT* I had been foolish, and it was the next day [or so] before I realized just *HOW* foolish I had been.)
That he consented to give the interview was both kind AND foolish of him. He should have expected people like parent, but he was too sleepy to think straight.
So what's your replacement for Relativity and Quantum Mechanics?
There are things which are actually difficult to understand, but which can't both be made simpler and also remain accurate.
It is a reasonable **GOAL** to have a really simple license. This doesn't mean that this goal can be achieved without sacrificeing other goals. Thing of it as an exercise in Linear Programming. It's an optimization problem: How to achieve a minimax in n dimensions over an m-dimensional space with a complicted metric. This class of problems is not even generally soluble.
People want compatibility with various licenses, e.g. GPL v3 and Apache, so that code used in one can also be used in the other by someone other than the original author.
I'm interested in drawn cell animation. Currently I haven't found anything decent to use. I.e., I'm using Canvas + TheGimp + iMovie + Audacity. It sort of works for up to a minute or so, but that's really pushing things.
I've looked at FinalCut, but nothing I could see indicated that it would work with anything but video, which I don't have. I've got either drawn cells, or cut paper. If drawn, it might have been drawn on a computer, or it might have been scanned in. If cut paper, I might have manipulated it with theGimp or with Canvas after scanning it in. (Frequently I like to remove noise...but for cut paper it's important that the shadows not be distrubed. That changes the entire feel.)
Strangely enough, that's what I do. Only I don't do it myself, I delegate that to a local computer store. I suppose that if you buy enough computers it might pay to do it yourself...but not a lot.
And the local computer store also handles warranty repair. They don't "pick up and deliver" or "service on site". That would cost extra, and it's not worth it to me.
I've considered AppleCare, but I don't care for shipping computers via UPS or FedEx or... and depending on them getting where they are supposed to go...and getting back, too. The local computer store is a much better deal. (And it's also FAR better than the local "AppleStore" (or whatever it's name is). We've got two, and they don't provide nearly the same quality of service. And they're more expensive.
Steve Jobs has his good points and his bad points. He's not really against copy protection. What he's against is having his name associated with an "inferior product". If that means getting rid of copy protection, then he wants to get rid of it. If it means supporting copy protection, then he wants to support it. His goal was accurately protrayed by the advertising slogan "Insanely great!". I frequently disagree with his estimation of what makes something great, but I do acknowledge that that's his goal.
P.S.: This doesn't mean I like OSX. I don't. I find it confusing in a way that I've never found either Linux, CP/M, Mac OS 1->7.5, or MSWind95. (N.B.: I'm not saying these were all better than OSX. Many of them had fewer capabilites. But they weren't confusing in the same way. In CP/M, e.g., RTFM was a perfectly valid reply to many questions.) But I think that Steve Jobs does like it (OS/X). Just because we disagree about what's "great" doesn't mean I don't believe that what he sees as great is his goal.
I've read the original article (perhaps) which indicates that this article is misrepresenting the data, but even there I couldn't find out how they selected who they would ask questions of.
Why inherently more risky? Every government of which I've seen pertinant record has debased it's currency. (Except [for a short period in?] Dynastic Egypt, where the currency was the labor of the peasants. That one was self-debasing, to the extent that they dared.)
Slashdot Mirror
I see no reason to accept that inter-worldline conservation of energy should be accepted.
One reason for not accepting this is the existence of the universe. If conservation of energy were not constrained to only work within a universe, then this would have required an unbelievable amount of energy.
FWIW, suppose that we take these results as proof that the universe is being run on a simulator. In that case multiple copies would result in greater consumption of ram, and slower execution, as observed from OUTSIDE of the universe, but from within the universe they would be unobservable. (This might also explain why the state of something is known only when it might be interacting with something eles.)
P.S.: I'm not asserting this theory. I merely wish to point out that it is consistent with observed evidence.
N.B.: AFAICT there are still five interpretations consistent with quantum mechanics.
1) Solipsism. (You can never rule that out.)
2) Superpredestinationism. (Every result was decided before the universe was set into motion.)
3) Many-Worlds
4) Copenhagen. (No understanding is possible. Only knowledge of statistics.)
5) The Participatory Universe. The future causes the past as well as the past causing the future.
Now these are all broad categories, so some of them come in multiple flavors, but they appear to all be consistent with what is known of quantum mechanics. (I have my doubts about Copenhagen, but it seems to still be popular with physicists, so it must be seen as reasonable, despite the models of understanding offered by the other approaches.)
Perhaps you meant "faux pas"? I think that means "false step". It's probably from French. (Possibly Norman French? It feels more modern, though.)
It's been many years since I used an MS product, but my memory says that they were much better at promissing backwards compatibility than at delivering it. This may have improved.
In particular I am remembering MSAccess95/MSAccess2000, which they definitely advertised as being compatible. I ended up keeping two separate machines, one for each, with a different copy of the program on each. Changes, including data updates, were transmitted between the two as ASCII files, because if MSAccess2000 ever opened the MSAccess95 version (even when told not to save any changes) within a month the MSAccess95 version would become corrupt. The interesting thing is that it didn't happen immediately, which made it a real fun problem to trace down.
It was necessary to keep both versions running, because different clients had different versions, and they weren't about to spring for the $$$ to get a new computer just to run MSAccess2000. I never did get a straight answer about how to solve this problem out of MS, I had to figure it out myself. (Fortunately the program had been running for about a year before we bought a copy of MSAccess2000....so I had a strong hint as to where the problem lay.)
I also heard various horror stories about MSWord incompatibilities, but none of those ever affected me.
N.B.: As you can see, this all happened several years ago...around 2001. Things may well have improved. Perhaps.
I'm not certain, but every article I've seen has only concerned hive bees. Also, if it's only that they "lose their way home", perhaps most solitaries don't actually have all that much of a home for much of the time. In any case, they could forage without returning home, and their homes could be much smaller, I believe that bumble bees dig small nests underground, and be chosen to be in places that they CAN find. (I.e., they aren't subjected to being in places that are convenient to humans.)
"barratry" refers to repeatedly filing lawsuits...but I think that in order to be barratry it has to be against the same defendant. Also, I think that if you drop the lawsuit, then it can't be used as a part of an action against one for barratry. And I'm fairly certain that if they win you can't use the action against them. The only time I've seen it used by someone who knew what the word meant it referred to repeatedly filing lawsuits, losing them, and then filing a slight variation as a new lawsuit. (IANAL)
FWIW, the scientists are merely proposing it as a theory. They aren't claiming more than that it is consistent with a few minor tests. It probably is.
This isn't to say that this is the correct answer, just that it's consistent with the evidence against which it has been tested. (Probably that evidence forms the background against which it was formulated.) They are suggesting that it might be worth testing further. This seems reasonable. Since the cause of Colony Collapse Disease isn't known, examining new ideas is an appropriate next step.
There are several proposed reasons (in Slashdot, above) why this theory shouldn't be accepted. If it is to be accepted it would need to be able to answer those objections. To require that it answer them at this point, however, is unreasonable. The mechanisms behind theories are often reformulated several times during the early period of their development. E.g., it could turn out that cell phones use a pulse code that heterodynes to a frequency that matches the length of one of a bees neurons. Since any neural circuit has lots of neurons, lots of frequencies in a particular range would work. It might need to match a particular pulsation pattern, which just happens to match some popular ring-tone...and all that would need being done is abolishing that ring-tone. Were this to be the mechanism, it wouldn't be found without investigating cell-phone/bee interactions. (This is a REALLY silly hypothesis...but I don't know of anything that rules it out.)
Certainly this is an important enough problem that plausible theories should be investigated. And the plausibility of a theory is judged partially by comparing against its competitors. Also, there's no reason to just investigate one theory. (Different groups should be choosing different theories to investigate, as long as one isn't overwhelmingly probable...and possibly even then.)
To me the theory being greeted by a number of bad jokes can mean that people think it's an implausible theory, but it can equally well mean that they don't like the possibility that it might be correct. In this case, given this audience, I suspect that the latter is in operation whether the first is in operation or not.
FWIW, I believe that the only bees affected are the hive bees. These ARE the source of honey, and they are the kind that can be carted around from place to place. They are also a minority of all bees. If pesticides aren't used indiscriminately, then native bees can do much of the work of pollination. But, of course, this won't happen if you kill them off whenever your plants aren't in flower.
If hive bees vanish, then successful farming will REQUIRE that less insecticide be used...or at least that it be of a very targeted variety.
And there probably *isn't* any better legal choice. So things are going to keep getting worse until people get so angry that they're willing to use illegal means to get rid of the government. The minority parties are a fool's trap in the american voting system. Only a few are duped by them, but many will vote that way because they feel equally disgusted by both of the major parties. And lots of others won't bother to vote at all, because neither side even tries to represent them, so why bother. It's not voter apathy, it's voter disgust.
At one point I thought I could work for better government on, at least, a local level. A couple of elections was enough to disabuse me of that. The candidates were all power-grabbers. The one's with the good reputations were just taking credit for good work done by others. One might think that this meant that they were espousing the values of those people, but a couple of betrayals convinced me that this was not what was happening. I know of one (ONE) government official that I still mainly trust to attempt to do right as she sees it. (We don't always agree, but I'm relatively certain that she is sincere.) The others are opportunists.
Think of it as a device for absorbing the unwanted vibrations then. I'm sure that if it's converting the vibrations into electricity, then it's diminishing their strength. Thus you both harvest the energy of the vibrations and increase the efficiency of your windmill.
Still, one doesn't know exactly how efficient these things are at absorbing vibrational energy. If they're good enough, they could make pretty good silencers (and the windmill could be replaced by something that amplified the vibrations rather than suppressing them).
Everything depends on the final cost/unit and the efficiency of absorption.
Current cost wouldn't mean anything. Research scientists aren't production engineers. A hand-made cpu is pretty expensive, *ESPECIALLY* if you try to do it below micro scale. Production CPUs are so cheap that the current cost of a computer is dominated by the cost of MSWind...and is anyway around $500 for a basic box. That's 1/10th what I paid for my first Apple, and there's been inflation since then. And computers are a lot more powerful, and include a lot more features.
... how far under depends on how bad the coming cycle of inflation is. I wouldn't be totally surprised by a final cost of under $0.01 each. These things don't use much in the way of materials to make, so what you're paying for is their construction.
So... if you bought one now it might well be over $100,000. If you bought one on the first day they went on sale they might cost $1,000. If you bought one a year later they might cost $100. They'd probably stay around there until the patents expired, then they'd rapidly start dropping in price until they got under $1.00
Still, it's true.
Something being a virtual meeting in Second Life doesn't inherently make it much better than a meeting at the office. It *could* be, but there's not guarantee.
What's going on here is that there's this news story, and it doesn't tell enough to make an informed decision. So people are forced to fill in the missing pieces based on their prior experiences, and their guesses on how it's going to turn out this time.
E.g.: What license is the software going to be under? How do you know? At what point will the developed code become available to the public, and how will this availability be made manifest? Choices here range from something like the Python site to a site on SourceForge with raw code dumps, to Cosmos, to mail in a request and we'll mail you forms to fill out to ask for use to mail you back a printout. Possibly of assembler for a machine you don't have access to. *ALL* of those would be compatible with the provided description. So would any license from BSD to GPL to QPL to a custom proprietary license that granted you the right to use the code and develop it but not to redistribute it. (They said Open Source. Symantec Libraries for the Macintosh were technically open source. They even gave you binary redistribution rights. But you couldn't redistribute the source or the documentation. [Well, this was a few decades ago. I don't know their current license.])
In other words: What this project is offering is, in all significant respects, unknown. (But it's a flashy news story, so it gets lots of clicks. And THAT'S the point. [And to me it's essentially as useles as the Weekly World News...but I always try to read their front page. Where else can you read about the earth being invaded from Mars, illustrated by a giant Nautillus shell?])
The RIAA is merely acting as an agent for others (the labels) who hold the copyrights.
If the RIAA is found to be abusing the legal process, forbidding them from continuing to prosecute copyrights would not touch the rights of the actual copyright holders, it would merely that they either act directly themselves, or hire a new agent.
I have not idea how likely such a decision would be, but to me it would appear just.
None. Nor is more needed.
P.S.: The same can also be said for the BSD, or any other license you happen to fancy.
Wouldn't breaking and entering come under "other investigation techniques"?
That seems to give anyone who has ever written something a rather extensive blank check. It's not just pretexting.
There are other plausible responses. Placing the code under GPL is sometimes a workable one. It depends on the situation. In *THIS* situation the only permanent solution appears to be development from "scratch". ("scratch" is in quotes, because you don't need to go clean-room. You just need to ensure that the code is not "derivitive" (as defined by copyright law...ugh!, so go in for a bit of overkill).
E.g., in this situation one of the copyright rules that applies is that "If there's only one way to do something, doing it that way isn't covered by copyright law". This pretty much means that you can use the hardware interfacing information discovered by the GPL driver. But you've still got to rewrite most of it, plausibly changing, e.g., where the routine boundaries lie (except where those are standardized by general conventions).
If that's all you consider, then the GPL terms clearly apply.
I feel a *tiny* bit more iffy about applying them to BSD software...but only a tiny bit. If the developer had wanted to chose the BSD license, then he would have chosen it.
Actually, if it were just GPL and BSD developers involved, I'd have said: Ignore it. It's not worth causing a fuss over. Unfortunately, we live in a world with some others who have different opinions on how one should handle code. (Actually, if all code were either GPL or BSD, I'd probably choose the BSD license. As it is, however, I'm looking at the GPL v3.)
I remember, though, that BSD code has done a WHOLE LOT for GPL systems over the years. So I feel a *tiny* bit iffy about being strict about license terms in this situation. (Then I look over my shoulder and remember who's lurking out there.)
The local computer store is more accessible. Also, whenever I've compared prices, they're cheaper.
Nice trimming of context.
FWIW (and to supply only a little bit of context) when he said that he was so sleepy that he had to remain standing so that he wouldn't go to sleep during the interview. In such a case one can generally only respond properly with previously thought-out responses, and one doesn't notice even rather blatant consequences of what one says or does. (I once crossed a street with my eyes closed in such a state. Only later did I realize *THAT* I had been foolish, and it was the next day [or so] before I realized just *HOW* foolish I had been.)
That he consented to give the interview was both kind AND foolish of him. He should have expected people like parent, but he was too sleepy to think straight.
So what's your replacement for Relativity and Quantum Mechanics?
There are things which are actually difficult to understand, but which can't both be made simpler and also remain accurate.
It is a reasonable **GOAL** to have a really simple license. This doesn't mean that this goal can be achieved without sacrificeing other goals. Thing of it as an exercise in Linear Programming. It's an optimization problem: How to achieve a minimax in n dimensions over an m-dimensional space with a complicted metric. This class of problems is not even generally soluble.
People want compatibility with various licenses, e.g. GPL v3 and Apache, so that code used in one can also be used in the other by someone other than the original author.
I'm interested in drawn cell animation. Currently I haven't found anything decent to use. I.e., I'm using Canvas + TheGimp + iMovie + Audacity. It sort of works for up to a minute or so, but that's really pushing things.
I've looked at FinalCut, but nothing I could see indicated that it would work with anything but video, which I don't have. I've got either drawn cells, or cut paper. If drawn, it might have been drawn on a computer, or it might have been scanned in. If cut paper, I might have manipulated it with theGimp or with Canvas after scanning it in. (Frequently I like to remove noise...but for cut paper it's important that the shadows not be distrubed. That changes the entire feel.)
Strangely enough, that's what I do. Only I don't do it myself, I delegate that to a local computer store. I suppose that if you buy enough computers it might pay to do it yourself...but not a lot.
... and depending on them getting where they are supposed to go...and getting back, too. The local computer store is a much better deal. (And it's also FAR better than the local "AppleStore" (or whatever it's name is). We've got two, and they don't provide nearly the same quality of service. And they're more expensive.
And the local computer store also handles warranty repair. They don't "pick up and deliver" or "service on site". That would cost extra, and it's not worth it to me.
I've considered AppleCare, but I don't care for shipping computers via UPS or FedEx or
Steve Jobs has his good points and his bad points. He's not really against copy protection. What he's against is having his name associated with an "inferior product". If that means getting rid of copy protection, then he wants to get rid of it. If it means supporting copy protection, then he wants to support it. His goal was accurately protrayed by the advertising slogan "Insanely great!". I frequently disagree with his estimation of what makes something great, but I do acknowledge that that's his goal.
P.S.: This doesn't mean I like OSX. I don't. I find it confusing in a way that I've never found either Linux, CP/M, Mac OS 1->7.5, or MSWind95. (N.B.: I'm not saying these were all better than OSX. Many of them had fewer capabilites. But they weren't confusing in the same way. In CP/M, e.g., RTFM was a perfectly valid reply to many questions.) But I think that Steve Jobs does like it (OS/X). Just because we disagree about what's "great" doesn't mean I don't believe that what he sees as great is his goal.
I've read the original article (perhaps) which indicates that this article is misrepresenting the data, but even there I couldn't find out how they selected who they would ask questions of.
Why inherently more risky? Every government of which I've seen pertinant record has debased it's currency. (Except [for a short period in?] Dynastic Egypt, where the currency was the labor of the peasants. That one was self-debasing, to the extent that they dared.)