If nothing else, imagine the cost savings to manufacturers if they adopted a universal hardware architecture.
It's not about cost savings, it's about proprietary lock-in. It's about forcing you to use their service departments that get better-than-Apple profit margins.
The problem with all these analogies is Microsoft DID put a long warranty on XP, and SP2 is still covered.
Not sure how you get that from that chart. Under XP SP2, the columns for mainstream/extended support retired say "Not Applicable". The way I read it, that July 2010 "Service Pack Retired" date is the date at which MS will stop being obliged to keep SP2 on their web site and MSDN. The real support dates that matter are the ones for the original XP release, 4/14/2009 for regular support and 4/8/2014 for extended (pay) support. This is supported by the note for XP SP3, you know...the latest Service Pack, which says "Support ends 24 months after the next service pack releases or at the end of the product's support lifecycle, whichever comes first." Now personally I would have expected 10 years of support that, with XP released on 12/31/2001, you would expect would be 12/31/2011, but apparently that's not the case.
For that matter, the "natural" death of a neolithic caveman with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer, or any number of other ailments, would probably be either by starvation from an inability to hunt/farm, or by succumbing to the attack of a predator which they could no longer defend themselves against.
I know you used to shit your pants twice a day. For years.
Speak for yourself. My son is 19 months old and, if we're at home instead of travelling around (and even in the latter case sometimes), he'll signal to us that he needs to use the potty to take a dump. It's been like that for a few months already. He's a little less reliable when it comes to pee, but we still spend significantly less than average on diapers. Outside of North America, it's actually pretty common for babies to be potty trained before their second year.
Well, the other thing of course is that, since the statistical estimate was ~11%+/-3%, that 5% increase results in possibly over a 50% increase in the estimated number of file sharers in their "worst case" scenario (8%). Basically these people padded the estimates at every possible step instead of carrying through the error factor. Shoddy error analysis that would probably get a bare pass (if not an outright fail) for a first year paper in any scientific discipline.
The only possible interpretation for all those analytical errors from a professional organization is deliberate bias in favour of the organization that commissioned the report. Much more rigorous statistical analysis for things like civilian deaths in Iraq and climate change reports have been dismissed by the same type of politicians who champion this report. The problem is that around 90% of the population may have enough math for their taxes, but have no interest in the mathematical baggage to recognize the bullshit in reports like the BPI's. Heck, you have to explain to many of them that 90% means 9 out of 10. That same segment of the population has no interest in achieving that understanding of statistics either, so they are ripe for believing those manipulative lies.
Of course not. But at least the last two complications, and probably all three, seriously limit the chances that the effect of nuking it will be controllable and useful. But hey we've got plenty of nukes available so if you want to waste a few go for it. Keep in mind that you'll be basically salting a big rock with radioactives that, if you don't manage to deflect the rock out of an impact trajectory, will act as fallout poisoning on the re-entry and impact area. Some people might get upset over turning a 2 year dead zone into one that has to be abandoned for decades.
Or to put it another way, real world problems are rarely amenable to the explosion-filled solutions preferred by Hollywood screen writers.
Those who take their own life aren't brave... that's all I'm saying. They should be held to the same standard as someone who runs a race, doesn't like how its going, and quits. Sure, personal choice. But the runner that makes it to the end, even if they are dead last, endears far greater respect.
So you would dismiss the effort of the runner who tears an Achilles tendon for not crawling on bloody hands and knees hundreds of meters to the finish line? Whether they finished or not, they would have more of my respect than you are likely to garner.
Life is pain. Death is nothing. Which is more noble to endure?
Some pains you can rise above and some pains drag you under until what makes you you is gone anyways. There's not much nobility in being in such massive pain from a terminal disease that it requires mind-clouding drugs at a nearly drool-inducing level to be able to rest, or being otherwise incapacitated to the extent of being completely uncommunicative, dependent on others, and incapable of contributing in any way. Frankly I wouldn't wish that end on anyone, not even people who think it's "noble". You also seem to be unaware that severe constant pain often changes people, making them less tolerant or even aggressive. Turning into a mean bastard that lashes out at everyone might not be a huge personality change for some. However, I would hope I get the chance to go out gracefully so that people remember the person I want and strive to be, rather than a person I would be loathe to become.
Seems to me that insisting that someone who wants to die rather than suffer from an incurable terminal disease will instead have to live with pain for many months instead, just so that some nurse and doctors can get some moolah and "contribute to the economy" is incredibly ghoulish. If the guy wants to die to avoid dragging the inevitable out, let him. That money will be spent in other ways and still circulate in the economy; decreasing the national debt through inheritance taxes, and/or spent by the family. It will be better spent than keeping somebody alive and in pain against their will. the latter sounds an awful lot like torture to me.
The problem is that a number of the objects of interest
may be particulate agglomerations that aren't solid enough to have something push at them,
are likely to be spinning, so that you would first need to stop their spin, otherwise see this
are likely to be of irregular shape and mass distribution that would make it difficult to push them efficiently in the direction you want without getting unwanted spin resulting.
Sure you could solve each of these problems individually, but a gravity tug bypasses them all at once, at the expense of needing either
more time to operate
a larger attractive mass requiring more energy to move both it and the target object
Probably the cheapest solution would be to refine a good sized nickel-iron asteroid into a compact solid metal mass and then attach a solar sail for thrust. Bonus points for compressing the metal mass into neutronium compressed by a diamond shell.
File data compression is available on a per-directory tree basis in Windows Server. While storage is cheap enough for end users and disk compression doesn't work for most of their needs (archives of already compressed files like MP3s and video), it's still significantly used for selective storage optimization of things like document repositories in corporate environments. Its current implementation is a descendant of Microsoft's derivative from the Stac patents (though I would expect they would soon expire, if it hasn't happened already).
So, as compression continues to be specialized for the file formats themselves, (i.e. docx files which are effectively zipped XMLs), general file system-level compression is being rendered obsolete. However that's a long possibly profitable period that was cut short. I don't support software patents, but I resent their one-sided exploitation by the powerful even more.
That being said, I'm not sure why they pursued the course they did. It seems fairly clear from the sequence of events that I've read, that Microsoft had been working with these guys on some sort of partnership, broke off talks at some point, and went ahead and used the IP anyway. Maybe they thought they could get away with it?
Why not? They effectively have done the same thing before. That's just the most well known one where the opposition "won". Even though Microsoft settled, Stac was effectively wiped out.
So can somebody tell my WTF, if I already have some legitimate DNA from the person I'm attempting to frame, I wouldn't just place that at the crime scene instead?
You can also do it based on in the DNA information for the standard 13-site tests typically kept in databases. That effectively allows you to frame somebody without ever coming close to them. Which could be important if your target is a 250lb outlaw biker or a paranoid schizo with a criminal record. But as someone else pointed out, this isn't a surprise to anybody that has an understanding of how these tests work, as well as understanding the potential usefulness of DNA manipulation for motivation in advancement of the state of the art.
Did you give the police a sample of your kids' DNA in case they ever got lost or kidnapped? If you really are concerned about the extremely long odds that that would happen, you might have been better off taking the sample, freeze drying it in your freezer and putting it in a safety deposit box rather than handing it over so that it can go in a database somewhere. Seriously, if I were growing up now instead of decades ago, and later found my parents had done that when I was a child, I would be seriously angry. Because now that the police have the sample, they can retest it to match whatever increase in gene fragment sites is used to "decrease the chance of an accidental or falsified match". Storage is cheap enough that in the long run they'll probably wind up tracking all the thousands of possible human DNA gene variations since it's only about 20,000 or so genes. At which point someone can just fake up some introns and insert them randomly to make a pretty convincing copy without ever being near the intended target. Sounds ludicrous now, but it will be borderline trivial in another few decades. Five years ago, most people (particularly those in the law enforcement sphere) would have labeled the scenario described in the article as paranoia.
The Surrogates: Never hear of this one before today either. Actually sounds pretty interesting, like science fiction of old. In the future people don't go outside, they interact with robot "surrogates". Someone is killing them. The main guy an FBI agent played by Bruce Willis has to leave his house for the first time to investigate. I like the plot idea, it is original, and there is too few of that. Also Bruce Willis in science fiction has a good track record as far as I am concerned, and I think will fit the part well. I think I will defiantly check this out when available.
You do realize that, after Social Security (21%), the second biggest item in the US budget (16.9%) is the Department of Defense, and that's not counting all the money spent on Iraq and Afghanistan since that was funded with separate "emergency" funding bills. So the second biggest government expenditure is the sacred cow of conservatives. But yeah, Medicare is already 3rd.
Make a small version of one of these. Use a fixed duct to make it take its air from one the inevitable warm exhausts from your electronics. "Movement. I've got lots of movement." This baby is hot.
I unfortunately missed the Friday Stross-Krugman panel (and look forward to seeing/hearing it online) but Krugman also did a solo second panel on Saturday, from science fiction to economics, that totally rocked. I hope that will also become available on the net. A recording of the panel should be recommended viewing for every English speaker just for the short section in that panel on how the map is not the territory. One of the better panels I've seen in a number of years, which showed the guy isn't just intelligent, learned, and funny, but also has acquired a good deal of wisdom over the years.
AH, but if you get moderated insightful or Informative, a lot of people will have the setting that adds a bonus point. So what happens is that your post never goes over 4 because that level gets displayed as a 5 with no possibility of getting modded up another point for a natural 5. Why is that a problem? Well, maybe you actually would like to get some more points on your achievement score, but you can never get your insightful and informative posts to crack the 4 glass ceiling.
I think I've heard more than a few re-mixed danced tracks or covers of 80s music recently. The music industry's always used covers, but I would be interested in seeing statistics as to whether they're doing more "reboots" due to a lack of creativity these days. Every now and then classic music by bands like Queen gets rediscovered by a new generation, you overhear some kid on the bus say "I just heard this great new band called..." and start to feel old.
As to why kids aren't being as exposed to original 80's music on the airwaves? partly because it's what many of their parents listen to and you're supposed to rebel against your parents. But almost certainly a factor is that it's easier to rake in the cash on a "new release" album at >$18 than on an older classic album being discounted at $9.99.
When I first did that to my son, he was pretty upset. The effect was augmented because I had my hand "skitter" on its fingers across the couch and his body while making its way to his face. Sort of like Thing in The Munsters.
When I tried it again recently he thought it was funny.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about cost savings, it's about proprietary lock-in. It's about forcing you to use their service departments that get better-than-Apple profit margins.
Not sure how you get that from that chart. Under XP SP2, the columns for mainstream/extended support retired say "Not Applicable". The way I read it, that July 2010 "Service Pack Retired" date is the date at which MS will stop being obliged to keep SP2 on their web site and MSDN. The real support dates that matter are the ones for the original XP release, 4/14/2009 for regular support and 4/8/2014 for extended (pay) support. This is supported by the note for XP SP3, you know...the latest Service Pack, which says "Support ends 24 months after the next service pack releases or at the end of the product's support lifecycle, whichever comes first." Now personally I would have expected 10 years of support that, with XP released on 12/31/2001, you would expect would be 12/31/2011, but apparently that's not the case.
Unless you happen to drive a large truck and the GPS doesn't handle re-routing according to overpass height clearances.
For that matter, the "natural" death of a neolithic caveman with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer, or any number of other ailments, would probably be either by starvation from an inability to hunt/farm, or by succumbing to the attack of a predator which they could no longer defend themselves against.
Speak for yourself. My son is 19 months old and, if we're at home instead of travelling around (and even in the latter case sometimes), he'll signal to us that he needs to use the potty to take a dump. It's been like that for a few months already. He's a little less reliable when it comes to pee, but we still spend significantly less than average on diapers. Outside of North America, it's actually pretty common for babies to be potty trained before their second year.
Well, the other thing of course is that, since the statistical estimate was ~11%+/-3%, that 5% increase results in possibly over a 50% increase in the estimated number of file sharers in their "worst case" scenario (8%). Basically these people padded the estimates at every possible step instead of carrying through the error factor. Shoddy error analysis that would probably get a bare pass (if not an outright fail) for a first year paper in any scientific discipline.
The only possible interpretation for all those analytical errors from a professional organization is deliberate bias in favour of the organization that commissioned the report. Much more rigorous statistical analysis for things like civilian deaths in Iraq and climate change reports have been dismissed by the same type of politicians who champion this report. The problem is that around 90% of the population may have enough math for their taxes, but have no interest in the mathematical baggage to recognize the bullshit in reports like the BPI's. Heck, you have to explain to many of them that 90% means 9 out of 10. That same segment of the population has no interest in achieving that understanding of statistics either, so they are ripe for believing those manipulative lies.
Of course not. But at least the last two complications, and probably all three, seriously limit the chances that the effect of nuking it will be controllable and useful. But hey we've got plenty of nukes available so if you want to waste a few go for it. Keep in mind that you'll be basically salting a big rock with radioactives that, if you don't manage to deflect the rock out of an impact trajectory, will act as fallout poisoning on the re-entry and impact area. Some people might get upset over turning a 2 year dead zone into one that has to be abandoned for decades.
Or to put it another way, real world problems are rarely amenable to the explosion-filled solutions preferred by Hollywood screen writers.
So you would dismiss the effort of the runner who tears an Achilles tendon for not crawling on bloody hands and knees hundreds of meters to the finish line? Whether they finished or not, they would have more of my respect than you are likely to garner.
That straw woman was called Terri Schiavo.
Some pains you can rise above and some pains drag you under until what makes you you is gone anyways. There's not much nobility in being in such massive pain from a terminal disease that it requires mind-clouding drugs at a nearly drool-inducing level to be able to rest, or being otherwise incapacitated to the extent of being completely uncommunicative, dependent on others, and incapable of contributing in any way. Frankly I wouldn't wish that end on anyone, not even people who think it's "noble". You also seem to be unaware that severe constant pain often changes people, making them less tolerant or even aggressive. Turning into a mean bastard that lashes out at everyone might not be a huge personality change for some. However, I would hope I get the chance to go out gracefully so that people remember the person I want and strive to be, rather than a person I would be loathe to become.
Seems to me that insisting that someone who wants to die rather than suffer from an incurable terminal disease will instead have to live with pain for many months instead, just so that some nurse and doctors can get some moolah and "contribute to the economy" is incredibly ghoulish. If the guy wants to die to avoid dragging the inevitable out, let him. That money will be spent in other ways and still circulate in the economy; decreasing the national debt through inheritance taxes, and/or spent by the family. It will be better spent than keeping somebody alive and in pain against their will. the latter sounds an awful lot like torture to me.
Sure you could solve each of these problems individually, but a gravity tug bypasses them all at once, at the expense of needing either
Probably the cheapest solution would be to refine a good sized nickel-iron asteroid into a compact solid metal mass and then attach a solar sail for thrust. Bonus points for compressing the metal mass into neutronium compressed by a diamond shell.
File data compression is available on a per-directory tree basis in Windows Server. While storage is cheap enough for end users and disk compression doesn't work for most of their needs (archives of already compressed files like MP3s and video), it's still significantly used for selective storage optimization of things like document repositories in corporate environments. Its current implementation is a descendant of Microsoft's derivative from the Stac patents (though I would expect they would soon expire, if it hasn't happened already).
So, as compression continues to be specialized for the file formats themselves, (i.e. docx files which are effectively zipped XMLs), general file system-level compression is being rendered obsolete. However that's a long possibly profitable period that was cut short. I don't support software patents, but I resent their one-sided exploitation by the powerful even more.
Why not? They effectively have done the same thing before. That's just the most well known one where the opposition "won". Even though Microsoft settled, Stac was effectively wiped out.
You can also do it based on in the DNA information for the standard 13-site tests typically kept in databases. That effectively allows you to frame somebody without ever coming close to them. Which could be important if your target is a 250lb outlaw biker or a paranoid schizo with a criminal record. But as someone else pointed out, this isn't a surprise to anybody that has an understanding of how these tests work, as well as understanding the potential usefulness of DNA manipulation for motivation in advancement of the state of the art.
Did you give the police a sample of your kids' DNA in case they ever got lost or kidnapped? If you really are concerned about the extremely long odds that that would happen, you might have been better off taking the sample, freeze drying it in your freezer and putting it in a safety deposit box rather than handing it over so that it can go in a database somewhere. Seriously, if I were growing up now instead of decades ago, and later found my parents had done that when I was a child, I would be seriously angry. Because now that the police have the sample, they can retest it to match whatever increase in gene fragment sites is used to "decrease the chance of an accidental or falsified match". Storage is cheap enough that in the long run they'll probably wind up tracking all the thousands of possible human DNA gene variations since it's only about 20,000 or so genes. At which point someone can just fake up some introns and insert them randomly to make a pretty convincing copy without ever being near the intended target. Sounds ludicrous now, but it will be borderline trivial in another few decades. Five years ago, most people (particularly those in the law enforcement sphere) would have labeled the scenario described in the article as paranoia.
Original? You've got to be kidding me. The Robots of Dawn
You do realize that, after Social Security (21%), the second biggest item in the US budget (16.9%) is the Department of Defense, and that's not counting all the money spent on Iraq and Afghanistan since that was funded with separate "emergency" funding bills. So the second biggest government expenditure is the sacred cow of conservatives. But yeah, Medicare is already 3rd.
Make a small version of one of these. Use a fixed duct to make it take its air from one the inevitable warm exhausts from your electronics. "Movement. I've got lots of movement." This baby is hot.
I unfortunately missed the Friday Stross-Krugman panel (and look forward to seeing/hearing it online) but Krugman also did a solo second panel on Saturday, from science fiction to economics, that totally rocked. I hope that will also become available on the net. A recording of the panel should be recommended viewing for every English speaker just for the short section in that panel on how the map is not the territory. One of the better panels I've seen in a number of years, which showed the guy isn't just intelligent, learned, and funny, but also has acquired a good deal of wisdom over the years.
I have max karma as well. The funny thing is that that post turned out to be my first one in a long time that managed to get a natural 5 Insightful.
AH, but if you get moderated insightful or Informative, a lot of people will have the setting that adds a bonus point. So what happens is that your post never goes over 4 because that level gets displayed as a 5 with no possibility of getting modded up another point for a natural 5. Why is that a problem? Well, maybe you actually would like to get some more points on your achievement score, but you can never get your insightful and informative posts to crack the 4 glass ceiling.
Why aren't teens listening to 80's music now?
I think I've heard more than a few re-mixed danced tracks or covers of 80s music recently. The music industry's always used covers, but I would be interested in seeing statistics as to whether they're doing more "reboots" due to a lack of creativity these days. Every now and then classic music by bands like Queen gets rediscovered by a new generation, you overhear some kid on the bus say "I just heard this great new band called ..." and start to feel old.
As to why kids aren't being as exposed to original 80's music on the airwaves? partly because it's what many of their parents listen to and you're supposed to rebel against your parents. But almost certainly a factor is that it's easier to rake in the cash on a "new release" album at >$18 than on an older classic album being discounted at $9.99.
As you can see from this lyrical snippet from Frank Zappa's Joe's Garage / Outside Now, he got along well with his record company:
There's also Pink Floyd's Have a cigar.
"And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
We call it Riding the Gravy Train."
When I first did that to my son, he was pretty upset. The effect was augmented because I had my hand "skitter" on its fingers across the couch and his body while making its way to his face. Sort of like Thing in The Munsters.
When I tried it again recently he thought it was funny.
If anybody would want to buy it, it would be the Chinese. They have the dollars to spare these days.