However the sales contract has words to the effect of Novell retaining copyrights etc. EXCEPT those necessary for SCO to enforce their ownership of the Unix business. And it seems pretty clear that's the hook SCO is hanging their claims on - that they DID get enough of the copyrights to go after Linux.
Not even that. The contract states that Novell retains the copyrights as such, but allows SCO to automatically license the (secondary) rights without further payment as soon as they need them to pursue their business (which was at the point selling UNIX licenses to customers). And the contract also forbids Novell to sell UNIX licenses as long as SCO is selling them.
To me it looks like an exclusive sublicensing contract for SCO, so SCO was (according to the contract) the only company allowed to actually license UNIX, even though the copyrights itself remained at Novell, and SCO just got every necessary license to do the UNIX business. This looks like a construct quite similar to the way Author's Right works in Europe. The Author's Right allways stays with the author (no "work for hire", where the original rights go to the hiring company), but the author then licenses the secondary rights (selling copies, adapting for screening, merchandise etc.pp.) to an editor in exchange for royalities.
On the other hand: IANAL, and I know even less about the US Copyright Act.
On the other hand: We got their fossils, because they were so big. We don't know how large the insects were in average... most of the smaller ones never got into fossil state anyway.
That's the same problem with dinosaurs. The smallest one we know of are about chicken size. We don't know smaller ones, but smaller ones could have tended to be devoured by other animals completely, their bones crushed and destroyed in a much smaller time, so less time for conserving accidents to happen, and their remaining structures so fragile that they are more easily overlooked.
There are quite large insects today... bugs of 5" length, butterflies with 1 foot diameter (admiral's butterfly), scolopenders (ok... not insects, but still...) of 2 feet length... But with other flying animals around (mostly birds), the ecological niche for large flying animals is occupied already, differently than 300 mio years ago, when those large insects had the air for them alone.
Furthermore it has been scientificially established that in a larger group of animals (lets say a hord of rats) only the beta males are going to press said drug button. In the experiments I know of it wasn't a drug button, it was a button which stimulated the brain directly, but that doesn't change the conclusions.
The alpha male was the first one to try the button and the first one to repeat it several times. But after some time only the beta males were running for the button and hitting it to get their thrill. The alpha male was quite uninterested in the button. Winners seem not to take drugs (for a longer time). Sadly it's because they are winners that they don't take drugs, not vice versa. Not taking drugs doesn't necessarily make you a winner. You may end up as the only beta male not being high at least some times.
So making a single monkey addicted to a drug doesn't tell you anything about how a group of monkeys would react on such a drug.
The list of countries where either the government or the popular opinion supports George W. Bush and wishes him being reelected includes:
Japan (Only the administration, the populace prefers Kerry over Bush with 43-23) Australia Russia (again only the government. The popular opinion is 20-10 for Kerry. I would call this completely meaningless with 70% answering "no idea".) Iran (yes, the Mullah regime) Philippines (The only country where G.W.Bush has the majority of the populace behind him with 57%) Poland (A meagre 31%, while Kerry is at 26%.) Nigeria
It does NOT include Great Britain and Italy, whose governments officially endorse George W. Bush's policies. Here George W. Bush's approval rate is around 15%, slightly above the European average. There might be others, but I don't have any data about them (for the arab world the approval rate for George W. Bush is about 2%. Only the populace of 2 out of 13 polled arab countries support the U.S. war on terrorism.)
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 0
You are spreading something that's called a "meme". A meme is a piece of information, that is not necessarily true or false. It just has to be convincing to survive. So the best strategy for a meme to avoid extinction is:
a) Include the necessity to duplicate the meme ("Tell others!") b) Mention dire consequences if not accepted as true ("You will burn in hell! Your house will be destroyed! Your family will abandon you!") c) Make it impossible to prove it false by not defining how the absence of the problem can be discovered. Works also if you attribute the absence of the problem as a direct consequence of the awareness of the problem. d) In connection with c) make it so allencompassing that you have to look virtually everywhere to avoid the predicted consequences of b).
That's for instance how most religions work: They require preaching to the unbelieving, and they cite eternal damnation if you don't follow their advise. And they have one allmighty God, Olymp or allencompassing Principle, thus including both thesis and antithesis, so even disproving the thesis still holds the antithesis valid ("God loves you all and you are his children, even though you don't believe in him. But you can convert anytime you want, and everything will be ok."). And whatever bad happens it is always being explained by either "it got that bad because we weren't religious enough" or "it could have been worse, but our prayers saved us."
That's how Anti-Terrorism works: It requires to inform everyone about the imminate danger and the bad guys out there ("Alarm Level Orange/Red"), it talks about imminent danger of a terrorist attack without any proof, but demands the surrender of personal freedom. After 9/11, has there been any terrorist attack on US soil? Has any of the "thwarted" attacks been proven in court? All people convicted in connection with counterterrorism actions I know of were convicted of visum fraud, financial fraud or other non-terroristic activity (But here the d) principle works fine: They must be terrorists, because they illegally tried to enter the US/gain money/extort social help...) And finally, if pressed about the success in the War on Terrorism, every official will point to exactly the absence of any terrorist attack since 9/11 on US soil. I estimate there would have been exactly the same number of attacks or attack attempts in the US if none of the measures were taken, but I can't prove it because there was no "alternate model".
There was another example for a thouroughly successfull meme: Y2K. There have been billions of dollars spend on fixing the problem, and the few occurences of the problem afterwards were of so little consequences that no one was really hurt. Compared with other bugs discovered at the same time, which had more dire consequences, the Y2K was laughable, but it got the most press. Being a developper myself working on Y2K errors at the time I estimate the number of reported Y2K problems being about a tenth or less compared with the other bugs I was working on. And none of the Y2K problems caused the system to stop working, but several others were stopping the whole business when discovered.
I will start to believe in the success of the War on Terrorism, if there are any measurable goals stated against which the effectiveness of the changing in law and security can be measured. The only scale known so far is the number of dead people due to terrorist attacks. This number has been on the rise since 9/11. This doesn't tell us anything about Terrorism at all. The definitions of what Terrorism is change too often to give meaningful numbers. It might have been that the numbers are rising because the definition of Terrorism gets more allencompassing. It might have been because the reporting of terrorist acts got more complete in the last years. It might also have to do with the fact that the Terrorism as defined today is really rising.
So War on Terrorism is at best a misleading term, and the probability for you to die in bad weather, in a car
Embed them into some gizmo that shouldn't take to much power because of what ever reason limits the possible energy consumtion. Imagine complex controler boxes for engines in explosive environments, where you don't want too much heat from the controler, because it could blast off the stuff you want to control.
There have been quite different ways to generate a 'real' equivalent for money in the current sense. At first it was something that was valuable for its properties, like a certain amount of grain, domestic animals or something similar of general use.
Because the value of those is slowly degrading (food doesn't last forever), and because it can become quite bulky for larger sums, people took metals or stones as more durable and compact ways to express values. Thus we have flint stone acting as money, sea shells or ingots of copper, silver and gold. The latter had the big advantage that they were quite compact for the value they expressed, and they could easily be weighted, molten and reshaped, differently than flint stones or jewels, whose value is dependend on their size and not necessarily linear to their weight.
But metal has the disadvantage that the purity is not easily to determine. Thus some states started to put up laws where the purity of the metal ingots was defined, and the ingots, if they met the requirements, where stamped with the seal of the state. This was the begin of coined money, and it's career is still not over yet.
The chinese at first had the idea that the seal itself can express a value, if it is there to guarantee that you get the certified value back in other valuable items. So they invented paper money, where the seal of the Emperor was there to state that this piece of paper can be exchanged at the imperial treasure chamber for gold coins of the certified value.
This was later adapted by the Italians, who invented the cheque and the giro banking to avoid carrying around large amounts of coined money between the different money institutions. But the real breakthrough came with the issue of "deposit bills" by the revolutionary gouvernement during the French Revolution. Because the gouvernement was short of coined money, it gave out papers certifying the deposit of a certain amount of money to the State Treasury to everyone depositing the money. Those deposit bills could be exchanged like the real coins, because the Treasury guaranteed that they could be reexchanged to the coins at every time.
Because the deposit bills were easier to handle than the coins (they were way lighter, and you could get them at any value), they didn't get exchanged too often for coined money, and soon the french gouvernement realised that they could give out far more deposit bills than they had coined money in the Treasury. Johann Wolfgang Goethe made a mockery out of this in the first scene of his tragedy "Faust II", where Mephistopheles hands out treasury bills for hidden treasuries buried in the ground and not discovered yet.
Other governments adapted those deposit or treasury bills, and with similar rules, because they allowed the governments to get valuable coins in the Treasury without actually reducing the buying power of the population. Soon they also replaced the smaller coined money, made from silver or copper, with other coins made from non precious metals like nickel. To enforce the adaption of the bills and the nickel money, they guaranteed the equivalence of payment. A payment done with Treasury bills was considered the same as a payment done with gold coins. But they still maintained the second guarantee, that the Treasury bills could always be exchanged for coined gold at the Treasury.
But because this maintenance proved to be a hindrance for fiscal policies with interest rates, and because no one could really calculate how much gold the Treasury chamber has to keep as a bare minimum in stock to exchange it for bills handed in, and because the requests for such exchanges were declining to near zero, one government after another gave up on the "gold for bills" guarantee. Now virtually every country has a "legal value" (the ability to legally pay your debt with it) policy for the money.
Governments or their respective Treasuries are able to give out more treasury bills by printing them anew or reduce the amount by keeping them or destroying the
Money value comes from the fact that you can pay your debt with it.
For the government a debt is paid for if you hand over the money to cover it. So after you proved that you had in fact handed over the bills and coins, no judge can force you with the letter of the law to further serve your debts. This makes money immensely valuable for you to have.
Money thus is the means to end your debt. The interest rate is the relative cost for your debt. High interest rates make debts more expensive, low interest rates make them cheaper. The interest rates posted by the Federal Reserve Bank are the prices it tags on their own lending and debiting. Because of the big market impact it also influences the prices other lending and debiting institutes (vulgo: banks) put on their services.
The government can't "print" money. They have to get the money from the Federal Reserve Bank. But the government can lend money from the Federal Reserve bank by selling certificates of indebtedness to the Federal Reserve Bank. The Fed pays for those certificates with coins and bills, which the government then spends to whatever the lawmakers decided to spend it on. To regain the certificates, the government has to collect enough coins and bills to buy them back. Quite often the times when the government is spending money and the time when the money comes back via taxes and fees are quite different, so this makes sense to do.
If the government tries to sell too many new certificates, and hands over less money to buy the old certificates back, the Fed increases the price by increasing the interest rate. But the Fed also buys certificates of indebtedness from other institutions like banks. So the price for Fed money will increase for those too. And they have to lend the money for higher prices to their customers, otherwise they would lose money on it. And if the price for money is to high for bank customers, they don't buy it.
The Fed could keep the price low for the money by keeping the interest rates low. Then non-U.S. people and institutions are trying to get low cost money from the Fed, and because they don't need U.S.$ at home, they have to sell the U.S. money for the money they need at home. But only people who need U.S.$ will sell foreign money for it. U.S.$ get spend for US products and services and for crude oil and other raw materials. If too many people lend cheap U.S.$ from the Fed, they get less U.S. products and services and less crude oil and raw material per 1 U.S.$. So they might be not willing to sell too much of their own money for U.S.$. Thus prices for U.S. products and services, for crude oil and foreign currency are increasing, and we either get inflation in the U.S.A., high oil prices at the international markets or the price tag for the U.S.$ gets down, and other currencies become increasingly expensive. Currently we have a low price tag on the U.S.$ and high oil prices. This means too much money gets borrowed from the Fed.
Not so much debunked as viewed on from a different angle. For all velocities much smaller than the speed of light (v << c), Newton's mechanics are quite accurate. A. Einstein (and before him H. A. Lorentz) took great care to put the formulas for Special and Universal Relativity in a way that Newton's formulas remain correct for (v/c)->0. There are some assumptions which are not correct for v->c. There is no universal inertial system, everything is related to the position of the observer (that's why Einsteins theories are called 'Relativity Theories'). Mass and Time are no basic physical concepts as thought by Newton, but they behave this way if the velocities related to the observer are small compared to light speed.
Hm... I have about two or three of those bulbs at maximum burning at the same time. And then about 2-4 hours daily, depending on the season. So with 60W bulbs I am consuming ~300 and 700Wh a day. A computer runing at 100W average will clock in at 2400Wh after a day, quite a difference.
First: Both MP3s I marked under 7) are copyrighted by someone else. So they are not original to us. Second: Both MP3s and their respective original tracks were not commercially distributed, so they didn't fell under one of 1)-5) of the original post.
I consider them "my friends music" because the performance of those songs was originally from my friends.
Each about 3:30mins... the usual track length. I don't listen to music very often. And then it's mostly the one from the local radio station anyway. I own about 100 CDs, but the last time I bought one could easily be 3 years ago.
6) Roughly what percent of your music collection is your own music?
7) Roughly what percent of your music collection is your friends own music?
So for me this comes down to:
5) 75% (6 MP3s, sent to my by friends, because they wanted me to hear those songs.) 7) 25% (2 MP3s, the one was mixed by a friend of mine who is sound engineer, the other one was performed by another friend of mine)
Ok, this boils down to eight pieces of music stored on my computer:)
First: It is in the economic interest of an assurance company to reduce the risk for themselves to have to pay for damages. So they have an interest in reducing your risk for you by counselling and giving you hints how to improve your security. You are free to ignore their advise, but then your premium will rise. Thus they generate an economic incentive for you to increase your overall security.
Second: If a tree falls on your house it depends on hundreds of factors if you get something and how much. Why did the tree fell? Storms? Lightning? Water floating under the roots? How frequent are such conditions? How old was the tree? Was the tree healthy, or where there lots of dead wood? Were there already other damage claims because of incidents involving the tree? Did a counsellor from the assurance company tell you it would be better to cut the tree because of possible damage?
Basicly it boils down to the old risk assesment questions: What's the possible damage? What's the expectation for the frequence of damages? What's the average damage, the maximum damage?
Your assurance premium strongly depends on the answers to those questions. And the assurance company will tell you which changes to your house and its environment lower your risk and thus lower your premium.
As long as knowledgable people have the attitude that victims of crime deserve what they get, realistic attempts to control such crimes are discouraged. Some slashdot types enjoy the superior feeling we get when we hear of the woes of those not in our tech elite.
It's the same attitude an assurance company has about you when it comes to securing your home. They tell you that certain types of locks are insecure, and that you should lock your home, and not letting the bathroom window open. And they refuse to pay when they have a wellfounded suspection that the burglars came in because of weak locks and open windows.
It's the same "you deserve it" attitude. If you are going to use a tool, please inform yourself beforehand about possible risks. Please read the manual, make sure you are not endangering other people. Don't demand your assurance company to pay for things that got worse because of your ignorance. If you don't feel apt enough to secure your computer yourself, at least ask someone with more knowledge to have a look. But be aware, that there are risk and take precaution.
In theory you are right. The association of the tower in the Rhine with mice has to do with the fact, that the terms for "toll" (Maut) and "mouse" (Maus) are very similar in German. So the "Mausturm" was in fact a "Mautturm" (toll tower). It's probably founded on the remainings of a frankonian fortress (6th century), and it's unique position in the Rhine made it strategically important. Behind the Maeuseturm starts a 100mls long, narrow valley with difficult and deep currents, where the Rhine breaks through a mountain range. The famous Loreley rock is not far away.
The nearby town of Bingen was on paper a Free Town (freie Reichsstadt), meaning that it had to be loyal only to the Emperor. But the archbishops of Mainz managed to get the town in a close dependency to their diocesy and managed to draw the profits to them, probably to do with their control over the toll stations through the countryside, including the Maeuseturm in the Rhine.
On the other hand Hatto II was archbishop only for two or three years (968-970), which hints a sudden and probably non-natural death.
This story is just reattributed to Vlad. It was originally a story about Hatto II of Mainz, who was Archbishop there between 968 and 970 (those dates are provable facts). He also was said to have invited all poor in his diocesy to a huge meal, and he also commanded the doors to be closed and the hall to be burned down.
But when the hall sunk to ashes, a big tribe of mice broke out of the ruins and started to hunt Archbishop Hatto. He tried to have the mice squashed, killed, blocked, nothing helped. So he fled out of Mainz down the Rhine. Near the town of Bingen he asked a ferryman to row him over to a small island with a fortified tower built on it. He ran into the tower and blocked the door. But the mice, being millions of them, were swimming through the waters of the Rhine, reaching the island, entering the tower and eating Archbishop Hatto.
The tower at the island near Bingen can still be visited, it's called the Maeuseturm (lit.: Mice Tower) since then. For further references check a short descripton of the site. Other sources attribute the story to Archbishop Hatto I, a predecessor of Hatto II.
No, computers don't need meaning to handle data. Computers need syntax and rules how to act at syntactic structures. The semantic web is founded on the hope that enough syntax thrown at huge amounts of data turns magically into semantics.
It's based on the assumption that all semantics can be explained by syntax. So far this has not been proven yet, and all attempts to get there went stuck somewhere and turned out something different, sometimes useful (Chomsky's grammars), sometimes not so useful.
The semantic web would have to deal with the laziness of people who can't be bothered to write meaningful ALT attributes to tags. It can try to guess on some of the semantics, but it can also easily be fooled. Everyone who ever tried to use content filters for an internet connection knows what I am talking about. There are lots of false positives rejected and hundreds of questionable sites run through, because the syntax of a site alone doesn't help with evaluation the semantics (the meaning) of this site.
why do files which were saved in word get formatted badly when using a differnt copy (same version, sp etc) of office.
According to my theory this would happen when the file in memory was already corrupt. If you can't open it later on the same machine after being rebooted, then you can be pretty sure that something like this happened. A variable, let's say a counter, that is currently set at 100 and thus causes the program to jump over the bogus parts can be set initially at zero the next time you fire up Word and then let Word run into the corrupt data.
also, do you think the memory dump thing was a hashed up way of trying to prevent reverse engineering?
No, it was just a clever way to save on coding time. Thus you didn't need to invent a separate file format, you just had the file mapped into memory and were able to fiddle around. Autosave was then just storing changed memory pages back into the file. I don't thing Microsoft deliberately wanted to make reverse engineering complicated. It was a not completely unwelcome byproduct of the way the memory-file mapping was laid out in the design process, and it is now haunting the developers of MS Office because they have to reverse engineer their own earlier versions.
i thought office files used xml now?
MS Office is able to store (part of) the data in an XML format and read it back into memory. It's coming with the ability to export into HTML and read in HTML pages, it's basicly a more generalized version of the same functionality.
The main problem with Microsoft's formats is that they are basicly memory dumps of the actual data heap. To have a program read those memory dumps it has to follow the memory structure of Microsoft Office, which is not easy even for Microsoft, because they change their binaries from time to time, thus making their own product slightly incompatible to their format.
In the most cases it's very odd combinations of different features used in a document that causes the incompatibilities, often they aren't that easy to reproduce. I had MS Office dying in serveral versions due to Word-Documents, which where written in one version of Word, later converted to a newer version and converted back to the old one (this happens quite easily if you are working on the same document at different workplaces with different versions of MS Office installed.)
Programs that are just trying to make sense from the dumps without trying to mimick the memory structure of MS Office have on the one side an easier task because they can't run into memory leaks, dangling pointers or otherwise corrupt data in memory. They interprete the data as an odd structure on file, not in memory. So often those corrupt Word documents could be saved by reading them into Open Office and saving them again in Word format. On the other hand they are often at loss with structures that in some magic way work with MS Office because of some not-quite-bug-not-quite-feature program part. With those situations at hand you may loose some formatting or some contents of your Word files. So it's always recommended to proofread your document after opening it in something else than Word.
But you should also proofread them when you are opening them with just another version of Word, even with a different Service Pack level of the same major release. You never know which bug was fixed where and which odd behaviour which accidentically made your document format right doesn't work no longer.
Slashdot Mirror
However the sales contract has words to the effect of Novell retaining copyrights etc. EXCEPT those necessary for SCO to enforce their ownership of the Unix business. And it seems pretty clear that's the hook SCO is hanging their claims on - that they DID get enough of the copyrights to go after Linux.
Not even that. The contract states that Novell retains the copyrights as such, but allows SCO to automatically license the (secondary) rights without further payment as soon as they need them to pursue their business (which was at the point selling UNIX licenses to customers). And the contract also forbids Novell to sell UNIX licenses as long as SCO is selling them.
To me it looks like an exclusive sublicensing contract for SCO, so SCO was (according to the contract) the only company allowed to actually license UNIX, even though the copyrights itself remained at Novell, and SCO just got every necessary license to do the UNIX business. This looks like a construct quite similar to the way Author's Right works in Europe. The Author's Right allways stays with the author (no "work for hire", where the original rights go to the hiring company), but the author then licenses the secondary rights (selling copies, adapting for screening, merchandise etc.pp.) to an editor in exchange for royalities.
On the other hand: IANAL, and I know even less about the US Copyright Act.
But it's a geographic term, so I reject it.
On the other hand: We got their fossils, because they were so big. We don't know how large the insects were in average... most of the smaller ones never got into fossil state anyway.
That's the same problem with dinosaurs. The smallest one we know of are about chicken size. We don't know smaller ones, but smaller ones could have tended to be devoured by other animals completely, their bones crushed and destroyed in a much smaller time, so less time for conserving accidents to happen, and their remaining structures so fragile that they are more easily overlooked.
There are quite large insects today... bugs of 5" length, butterflies with 1 foot diameter (admiral's butterfly), scolopenders (ok... not insects, but still...) of 2 feet length... But with other flying animals around (mostly birds), the ecological niche for large flying animals is occupied already, differently than 300 mio years ago, when those large insects had the air for them alone.
Furthermore it has been scientificially established that in a larger group of animals (lets say a hord of rats) only the beta males are going to press said drug button. In the experiments I know of it wasn't a drug button, it was a button which stimulated the brain directly, but that doesn't change the conclusions.
The alpha male was the first one to try the button and the first one to repeat it several times. But after some time only the beta males were running for the button and hitting it to get their thrill. The alpha male was quite uninterested in the button. Winners seem not to take drugs (for a longer time). Sadly it's because they are winners that they don't take drugs, not vice versa. Not taking drugs doesn't necessarily make you a winner. You may end up as the only beta male not being high at least some times.
So making a single monkey addicted to a drug doesn't tell you anything about how a group of monkeys would react on such a drug.
The list of countries where either the government or the popular opinion supports George W. Bush and wishes him being reelected includes:
Japan (Only the administration, the populace prefers Kerry over Bush with 43-23)
Australia
Russia (again only the government. The popular opinion is 20-10 for Kerry. I would call this completely meaningless with 70% answering "no idea".)
Iran (yes, the Mullah regime)
Philippines (The only country where G.W.Bush has the majority of the populace behind him with 57%)
Poland (A meagre 31%, while Kerry is at 26%.)
Nigeria
It does NOT include Great Britain and Italy, whose governments officially endorse George W. Bush's policies. Here George W. Bush's approval rate is around 15%, slightly above the European average. There might be others, but I don't have any data about them (for the arab world the approval rate for George W. Bush is about 2%. Only the populace of 2 out of 13 polled arab countries support the U.S. war on terrorism.)
You are spreading something that's called a "meme". A meme is a piece of information, that is not necessarily true or false. It just has to be convincing to survive. So the best strategy for a meme to avoid extinction is:
a) Include the necessity to duplicate the meme ("Tell others!")
b) Mention dire consequences if not accepted as true ("You will burn in hell! Your house will be destroyed! Your family will abandon you!")
c) Make it impossible to prove it false by not defining how the absence of the problem can be discovered. Works also if you attribute the absence of the problem as a direct consequence of the awareness of the problem.
d) In connection with c) make it so allencompassing that you have to look virtually everywhere to avoid the predicted consequences of b).
That's for instance how most religions work: They require preaching to the unbelieving, and they cite eternal damnation if you don't follow their advise. And they have one allmighty God, Olymp or allencompassing Principle, thus including both thesis and antithesis, so even disproving the thesis still holds the antithesis valid ("God loves you all and you are his children, even though you don't believe in him. But you can convert anytime you want, and everything will be ok."). And whatever bad happens it is always being explained by either "it got that bad because we weren't religious enough" or "it could have been worse, but our prayers saved us."
That's how Anti-Terrorism works: It requires to inform everyone about the imminate danger and the bad guys out there ("Alarm Level Orange/Red"), it talks about imminent danger of a terrorist attack without any proof, but demands the surrender of personal freedom. After 9/11, has there been any terrorist attack on US soil? Has any of the "thwarted" attacks been proven in court? All people convicted in connection with counterterrorism actions I know of were convicted of visum fraud, financial fraud or other non-terroristic activity (But here the d) principle works fine: They must be terrorists, because they illegally tried to enter the US/gain money/extort social help...) And finally, if pressed about the success in the War on Terrorism, every official will point to exactly the absence of any terrorist attack since 9/11 on US soil. I estimate there would have been exactly the same number of attacks or attack attempts in the US if none of the measures were taken, but I can't prove it because there was no "alternate model".
There was another example for a thouroughly successfull meme: Y2K. There have been billions of dollars spend on fixing the problem, and the few occurences of the problem afterwards were of so little consequences that no one was really hurt. Compared with other bugs discovered at the same time, which had more dire consequences, the Y2K was laughable, but it got the most press. Being a developper myself working on Y2K errors at the time I estimate the number of reported Y2K problems being about a tenth or less compared with the other bugs I was working on. And none of the Y2K problems caused the system to stop working, but several others were stopping the whole business when discovered.
I will start to believe in the success of the War on Terrorism, if there are any measurable goals stated against which the effectiveness of the changing in law and security can be measured. The only scale known so far is the number of dead people due to terrorist attacks. This number has been on the rise since 9/11. This doesn't tell us anything about Terrorism at all. The definitions of what Terrorism is change too often to give meaningful numbers. It might have been that the numbers are rising because the definition of Terrorism gets more allencompassing. It might have been because the reporting of terrorist acts got more complete in the last years. It might also have to do with the fact that the Terrorism as defined today is really rising.
So War on Terrorism is at best a misleading term, and the probability for you to die in bad weather, in a car
Embed them into some gizmo that shouldn't take to much power because of what ever reason limits the possible energy consumtion. Imagine complex controler boxes for engines in explosive environments, where you don't want too much heat from the controler, because it could blast off the stuff you want to control.
There have been quite different ways to generate a 'real' equivalent for money in the current sense. At first it was something that was valuable for its properties, like a certain amount of grain, domestic animals or something similar of general use.
Because the value of those is slowly degrading (food doesn't last forever), and because it can become quite bulky for larger sums, people took metals or stones as more durable and compact ways to express values. Thus we have flint stone acting as money, sea shells or ingots of copper, silver and gold. The latter had the big advantage that they were quite compact for the value they expressed, and they could easily be weighted, molten and reshaped, differently than flint stones or jewels, whose value is dependend on their size and not necessarily linear to their weight.
But metal has the disadvantage that the purity is not easily to determine. Thus some states started to put up laws where the purity of the metal ingots was defined, and the ingots, if they met the requirements, where stamped with the seal of the state. This was the begin of coined money, and it's career is still not over yet.
The chinese at first had the idea that the seal itself can express a value, if it is there to guarantee that you get the certified value back in other valuable items. So they invented paper money, where the seal of the Emperor was there to state that this piece of paper can be exchanged at the imperial treasure chamber for gold coins of the certified value.
This was later adapted by the Italians, who invented the cheque and the giro banking to avoid carrying around large amounts of coined money between the different money institutions. But the real breakthrough came with the issue of "deposit bills" by the revolutionary gouvernement during the French Revolution. Because the gouvernement was short of coined money, it gave out papers certifying the deposit of a certain amount of money to the State Treasury to everyone depositing the money. Those deposit bills could be exchanged like the real coins, because the Treasury guaranteed that they could be reexchanged to the coins at every time.
Because the deposit bills were easier to handle than the coins (they were way lighter, and you could get them at any value), they didn't get exchanged too often for coined money, and soon the french gouvernement realised that they could give out far more deposit bills than they had coined money in the Treasury. Johann Wolfgang Goethe made a mockery out of this in the first scene of his tragedy "Faust II", where Mephistopheles hands out treasury bills for hidden treasuries buried in the ground and not discovered yet.
Other governments adapted those deposit or treasury bills, and with similar rules, because they allowed the governments to get valuable coins in the Treasury without actually reducing the buying power of the population. Soon they also replaced the smaller coined money, made from silver or copper, with other coins made from non precious metals like nickel. To enforce the adaption of the bills and the nickel money, they guaranteed the equivalence of payment. A payment done with Treasury bills was considered the same as a payment done with gold coins. But they still maintained the second guarantee, that the Treasury bills could always be exchanged for coined gold at the Treasury.
But because this maintenance proved to be a hindrance for fiscal policies with interest rates, and because no one could really calculate how much gold the Treasury chamber has to keep as a bare minimum in stock to exchange it for bills handed in, and because the requests for such exchanges were declining to near zero, one government after another gave up on the "gold for bills" guarantee. Now virtually every country has a "legal value" (the ability to legally pay your debt with it) policy for the money.
Governments or their respective Treasuries are able to give out more treasury bills by printing them anew or reduce the amount by keeping them or destroying the
Money value comes from the fact that you can pay your debt with it.
For the government a debt is paid for if you hand over the money to cover it. So after you proved that you had in fact handed over the bills and coins, no judge can force you with the letter of the law to further serve your debts. This makes money immensely valuable for you to have.
Money thus is the means to end your debt. The interest rate is the relative cost for your debt. High interest rates make debts more expensive, low interest rates make them cheaper. The interest rates posted by the Federal Reserve Bank are the prices it tags on their own lending and debiting. Because of the big market impact it also influences the prices other lending and debiting institutes (vulgo: banks) put on their services.
The government can't "print" money. They have to get the money from the Federal Reserve Bank. But the government can lend money from the Federal Reserve bank by selling certificates of indebtedness to the Federal Reserve Bank. The Fed pays for those certificates with coins and bills, which the government then spends to whatever the lawmakers decided to spend it on. To regain the certificates, the government has to collect enough coins and bills to buy them back. Quite often the times when the government is spending money and the time when the money comes back via taxes and fees are quite different, so this makes sense to do.
If the government tries to sell too many new certificates, and hands over less money to buy the old certificates back, the Fed increases the price by increasing the interest rate. But the Fed also buys certificates of indebtedness from other institutions like banks. So the price for Fed money will increase for those too. And they have to lend the money for higher prices to their customers, otherwise they would lose money on it. And if the price for money is to high for bank customers, they don't buy it.
The Fed could keep the price low for the money by keeping the interest rates low. Then non-U.S. people and institutions are trying to get low cost money from the Fed, and because they don't need U.S.$ at home, they have to sell the U.S. money for the money they need at home. But only people who need U.S.$ will sell foreign money for it. U.S.$ get spend for US products and services and for crude oil and other raw materials. If too many people lend cheap U.S.$ from the Fed, they get less U.S. products and services and less crude oil and raw material per 1 U.S.$. So they might be not willing to sell too much of their own money for U.S.$. Thus prices for U.S. products and services, for crude oil and foreign currency are increasing, and we either get inflation in the U.S.A., high oil prices at the international markets or the price tag for the U.S.$ gets down, and other currencies become increasingly expensive. Currently we have a low price tag on the U.S.$ and high oil prices. This means too much money gets borrowed from the Fed.
Not so much debunked as viewed on from a different angle. For all velocities much smaller than the speed of light (v << c), Newton's mechanics are quite accurate. A. Einstein (and before him H. A. Lorentz) took great care to put the formulas for Special and Universal Relativity in a way that Newton's formulas remain correct for (v/c)->0.
There are some assumptions which are not correct for v->c. There is no universal inertial system, everything is related to the position of the observer (that's why Einsteins theories are called 'Relativity Theories'). Mass and Time are no basic physical concepts as thought by Newton, but they behave this way if the velocities related to the observer are small compared to light speed.
Why worse? Then it's just the law. And following the law they shouldn't have handed out ANY details of their customers.
With data protection laws in place you don't necessarily need a privacy policy.
However, it's a Nissan, and their engineers actually understand what they're doing.
;)
You know, Nissan is partly owned (40%?) by Renault and the Nissan cars share some components with the Renaults
Hm... I have about two or three of those bulbs at maximum burning at the same time. And then about 2-4 hours daily, depending on the season. So with 60W bulbs I am consuming ~300 and 700Wh a day. A computer runing at 100W average will clock in at 2400Wh after a day, quite a difference.
First: Both MP3s I marked under 7) are copyrighted by someone else. So they are not original to us. Second: Both MP3s and their respective original tracks were not commercially distributed, so they didn't fell under one of 1)-5) of the original post.
I consider them "my friends music" because the performance of those songs was originally from my friends.
Each about 3:30mins... the usual track length. I don't listen to music very often. And then it's mostly the one from the local radio station anyway. I own about 100 CDs, but the last time I bought one could easily be 3 years ago.
Your are missing
:)
6) Roughly what percent of your music collection is your own music?
7) Roughly what percent of your music collection is your friends own music?
So for me this comes down to:
5) 75% (6 MP3s, sent to my by friends, because they wanted me to hear those songs.)
7) 25% (2 MP3s, the one was mixed by a friend of mine who is sound engineer, the other one was performed by another friend of mine)
Ok, this boils down to eight pieces of music stored on my computer
First: It is in the economic interest of an assurance company to reduce the risk for themselves to have to pay for damages. So they have an interest in reducing your risk for you by counselling and giving you hints how to improve your security. You are free to ignore their advise, but then your premium will rise. Thus they generate an economic incentive for you to increase your overall security.
Second: If a tree falls on your house it depends on hundreds of factors if you get something and how much.
Why did the tree fell? Storms? Lightning? Water floating under the roots? How frequent are such conditions? How old was the tree? Was the tree healthy, or where there lots of dead wood? Were there already other damage claims because of incidents involving the tree? Did a counsellor from the assurance company tell you it would be better to cut the tree because of possible damage?
Basicly it boils down to the old risk assesment questions: What's the possible damage? What's the expectation for the frequence of damages? What's the average damage, the maximum damage?
Your assurance premium strongly depends on the answers to those questions. And the assurance company will tell you which changes to your house and its environment lower your risk and thus lower your premium.
And there was me thinking it was all about replacing SAP R/3 with SSH... (And yes, you can run SAPgui through an SSH tunnel. No problem here.)
As long as knowledgable people have the attitude that victims of crime deserve what they get, realistic attempts to control such crimes are discouraged. Some slashdot types enjoy the superior feeling we get when we hear of the woes of those not in our tech elite.
It's the same attitude an assurance company has about you when it comes to securing your home. They tell you that certain types of locks are insecure, and that you should lock your home, and not letting the bathroom window open. And they refuse to pay when they have a wellfounded suspection that the burglars came in because of weak locks and open windows.
It's the same "you deserve it" attitude. If you are going to use a tool, please inform yourself beforehand about possible risks. Please read the manual, make sure you are not endangering other people. Don't demand your assurance company to pay for things that got worse because of your ignorance. If you don't feel apt enough to secure your computer yourself, at least ask someone with more knowledge to have a look. But be aware, that there are risk and take precaution.
It was 'dirt cleans out the stomach' with my parents.
In theory you are right. The association of the tower in the Rhine with mice has to do with the fact, that the terms for "toll" (Maut) and "mouse" (Maus) are very similar in German. So the "Mausturm" was in fact a "Mautturm" (toll tower). It's probably founded on the remainings of a frankonian fortress (6th century), and it's unique position in the Rhine made it strategically important. Behind the Maeuseturm starts a 100mls long, narrow valley with difficult and deep currents, where the Rhine breaks through a mountain range. The famous Loreley rock is not far away.
The nearby town of Bingen was on paper a Free Town (freie Reichsstadt), meaning that it had to be loyal only to the Emperor. But the archbishops of Mainz managed to get the town in a close dependency to their diocesy and managed to draw the profits to them, probably to do with their control over the toll stations through the countryside, including the Maeuseturm in the Rhine.
On the other hand Hatto II was archbishop only for two or three years (968-970), which hints a sudden and probably non-natural death.
This story is just reattributed to Vlad. It was originally a story about Hatto II of Mainz, who was Archbishop there between 968 and 970 (those dates are provable facts). He also was said to have invited all poor in his diocesy to a huge meal, and he also commanded the doors to be closed and the hall to be burned down.
But when the hall sunk to ashes, a big tribe of mice broke out of the ruins and started to hunt Archbishop Hatto. He tried to have the mice squashed, killed, blocked, nothing helped. So he fled out of Mainz down the Rhine. Near the town of Bingen he asked a ferryman to row him over to a small island with a fortified tower built on it. He ran into the tower and blocked the door. But the mice, being millions of them, were swimming through the waters of the Rhine, reaching the island, entering the tower and eating Archbishop Hatto.
The tower at the island near Bingen can still be visited, it's called the Maeuseturm (lit.: Mice Tower) since then. For further references check a short descripton of the site. Other sources attribute the story to Archbishop Hatto I, a predecessor of Hatto II.
No, computers don't need meaning to handle data. Computers need syntax and rules how to act at syntactic structures. The semantic web is founded on the hope that enough syntax thrown at huge amounts of data turns magically into semantics.
It's based on the assumption that all semantics can be explained by syntax. So far this has not been proven yet, and all attempts to get there went stuck somewhere and turned out something different, sometimes useful (Chomsky's grammars), sometimes not so useful.
The semantic web would have to deal with the laziness of people who can't be bothered to write meaningful ALT attributes to tags. It can try to guess on some of the semantics, but it can also easily be fooled. Everyone who ever tried to use content filters for an internet connection knows what I am talking about. There are lots of false positives rejected and hundreds of questionable sites run through, because the syntax of a site alone doesn't help with evaluation the semantics (the meaning) of this site.
why do files which were saved in word get formatted badly when using a differnt copy (same version, sp etc) of office.
According to my theory this would happen when the file in memory was already corrupt. If you can't open it later on the same machine after being rebooted, then you can be pretty sure that something like this happened. A variable, let's say a counter, that is currently set at 100 and thus causes the program to jump over the bogus parts can be set initially at zero the next time you fire up Word and then let Word run into the corrupt data.
also, do you think the memory dump thing was a hashed up way of trying to prevent reverse engineering?
No, it was just a clever way to save on coding time. Thus you didn't need to invent a separate file format, you just had the file mapped into memory and were able to fiddle around. Autosave was then just storing changed memory pages back into the file. I don't thing Microsoft deliberately wanted to make reverse engineering complicated. It was a not completely unwelcome byproduct of the way the memory-file mapping was laid out in the design process, and it is now haunting the developers of MS Office because they have to reverse engineer their own earlier versions.
i thought office files used xml now?
MS Office is able to store (part of) the data in an XML format and read it back into memory. It's coming with the ability to export into HTML and read in HTML pages, it's basicly a more generalized version of the same functionality.
The main problem with Microsoft's formats is that they are basicly memory dumps of the actual data heap. To have a program read those memory dumps it has to follow the memory structure of Microsoft Office, which is not easy even for Microsoft, because they change their binaries from time to time, thus making their own product slightly incompatible to their format.
In the most cases it's very odd combinations of different features used in a document that causes the incompatibilities, often they aren't that easy to reproduce. I had MS Office dying in serveral versions due to Word-Documents, which where written in one version of Word, later converted to a newer version and converted back to the old one (this happens quite easily if you are working on the same document at different workplaces with different versions of MS Office installed.)
Programs that are just trying to make sense from the dumps without trying to mimick the memory structure of MS Office have on the one side an easier task because they can't run into memory leaks, dangling pointers or otherwise corrupt data in memory. They interprete the data as an odd structure on file, not in memory. So often those corrupt Word documents could be saved by reading them into Open Office and saving them again in Word format. On the other hand they are often at loss with structures that in some magic way work with MS Office because of some not-quite-bug-not-quite-feature program part. With those situations at hand you may loose some formatting or some contents of your Word files. So it's always recommended to proofread your document after opening it in something else than Word.
But you should also proofread them when you are opening them with just another version of Word, even with a different Service Pack level of the same major release. You never know which bug was fixed where and which odd behaviour which accidentically made your document format right doesn't work no longer.