Shrook for the Mac has already solved this issue with "distributed checking". Popular sites are checked once every 5 minutes, if the site is updated, everyone gets the latest content, otherwise, nobody touches it.
As another poster has pointed out, banning users who check too frequently is an excellent fallback. A tiny site won't know to install the software, but it won't be an issue for a tiny site.
I've built some web sites, done some software/hardware consultation, etc. Oh, and I take pictures, but that doesn't really bring in any cash.
It can be hard to do work on the side when you're a developer, though. Many (most?) jobs work you like a slave, so you don't have much energy/brain left when you crawl home from work long after dark. If you're lucky enough to have a job that has regular hours (or unlucky enough to be laid off), freelancing can be very exciting.
No no no no. I shouldn't get upset, very few people understand IP law at all, but I get frustrated anyway.
Parody is protected if you are parodying thing x using thing x (or thing y which is in the public domain). The Strawberry Shortcake strip was parodying thing x (American McGee) using thing y (Strawberry Shortcake), so it was not clear-cut.
Now, it's not clear cut that there was actually any trademark infringement. There are multiple tests that you have to pass to have a valid trademark case, and it's pretty tenuous to claim that the strip passes the tests. Be that as it may, it's definitely not 100% clear that PA is not in violation.
(Disclaimer, IANAL, but I hang out with an IP attorney, and I read Ed Felton and Lawrence Lessig's blogs)
10MW won't make a dent I think, but it's a good idea as an experiment. It would be barely 1% of the capacity of one of the nuclear plants up the road.
The main problem with powering Manhattan is not the generation capacity, it's the transmission capacity. During peak load hours, the natural gas generator by my apartment kicks in. Supposedly, if the peak needs of Manhattan were generated off the island, then the wires to the island would melt.
So, power generation in Manhattan doesn't need to be super cheap or super high capacity, it really just needs to be low-pollution and moderately inexpensive. They're not competing with nuclear or coal or large hydro, they're competing with on-demand natural gas, which is nowhere near as cheap.
I too, remember from school that deserts make their own weather. If you filled a desert with a solar farm that absorbed 30% of the solar energy, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it stopped being a desert. Worse, when it starts raining there, whose rain did it used to be?
Actually, many deserts are deserts because mountain ranges block the influx of moisture from the ocean. For example, the Southwestern US and the Atacama desert in Chile. AFAIK, the Sahara is the only desert that's a desert due to local conditions.
Cleaner than oil-fired plants, but there is still the CO2 output.
On the right track, but wrong! First off, where do you think the carbon to make the CO2 came from? The plants! And where did they get it? CO2 in the air! Importantly, the plants that sequestered the carbon are quickly replaced (with more plants), so the carbon cycle is a pretty closed loop here. This is what makes biomass energy (like burning poop-derived methane) renewable. (As opposed to gasoline; we're not pumping dead dinosaurs back into the oil fields.)
But wait, it gets better. Cow flops normally decompose into CO2 and methane, which escapes into the atmosphere. The thing is, methane is a much more effective greenhouse gas than CO2. Therefore, collecting the manure, turning it into methane, and burning the methane is actually cleaner than letting the crap sit in the fields.
[...] P2P file sharing, or freeware DVD drivers [...] Slashdot [...] "don't punish the technology for abuse by the users" [...]
[...] PowerPoint, Excel [...] Slashdot [...] "don't punish the users, it's the fault of these evil software applications" [...]
Because a "technology" is a class of software products, and a "software application" is a singular instance of one or more technologies. Everyone has their peeves with Excel, but the point of the article was that Excel was bad for financial planning since it makes it difficult to deal with uncertainty. The article went on to say that there were other spreadsheet applications that were better than Excel.
As another example, many people feel that email is a good thing, but that sendmail is a bad thing. This is not contradictory.
First of all, it converts waste product into electricity. But secondly, instead of sewage decomposing into methane, it decomposes into C02, which is a much less effective greenhouse gas. Additionally, the resulting by-products make a good, smell-free compost.
I agree that we need Mars, but face it, we can't even keep a useful station in LEO, and we can't even live in the Gobi desert. We need to do a lot more small ecosystem research before we can do anythign useful there. Mars is an excellent goal, but Bush is just blowing smoke with his Mars plan. It's not designed to get us a permanent human settlement anywhere, it's designed to make it look like Bush's vision for the future involves something other than permanent war and abrupt climate change.
The word from my wife (a lawyer) is that law firms used to use wordperfect (because it's better), but they're switching to word (because everyone else want them use it). They are a service industry, after all.
Currently, at least, the answers to #1 and #2 are the same: We can't measure/predict the motion of asteroids accurately enough to aim them at a particular continent. When an asteroid passing within the the radius of the moon's orbit counts as "close," just figuring out where it's going is impossible.
Also (more in line with #2), asteroids are typically very heterogeneous and loosely bound, so if you start pushing on them, pieces will probably start to fall off. This will change the trajectory of the asteroid. You could presumably "get around this" by wrapping it some sort of net-thing, but at that point, you could probably just send up a robot to build gravity-bombs from the moon or something like that.
The issue with giving sensitive data to outsourcing agencies (who give it to outsourcing agencies (who give it to.... is that after a while, the chain of accountability gets pretty tenuous. When it's your client's sensitive information, it's pretty clear that you should protect it. When it's your boss' client's client's... client's boss' sensitive information, you're really disconnected from the parties who would be damaged if the information was disclosed.
Recapping what others have said: * There are plenty on non-virus-related reasons to insist that lusers use Macs. So, in answer to your first question, "no." The virus issues are minor. * There are no viruses that run under MacOSX
So as a test, I mailed myself an application. On the default mail reader under MacOSX, I double-clicked it. Up pops a dialog box:
Warning The attachment "EtherPEG (en0)" is an application. Since applications can contain viruses or be harmful to your computer, be sure this attachment is from a trustworthy sender before saving or opening it.
One of the big reasons that people spread Windows viruses is that poor design and security holes allow non-clever people to easily be infected. With myDoom et al, you double-click the "folder", you get the virus. On MacOS, you have to work at it.
article > you have intellectual-property people who think operating systems article > shouldn't be free in our camp, and you have people over there who article > think operating systems should be free in IBM's camp.
comment > This guy actually believes in a blanket statement like that?
Yes, and he's probably right. Look, people who think that "operating systems shouldn't be free" are people who think that there should not be free operating systems. Ever. So, basically, What Darl is saying is that you have Microsoft (maybe), SCO, and a few outright loonies who got hit by cosmic rays during their econ class on SCO's side, and the entire rest of the world on IBM's side. Sounds about right to me.
Ummmm....think about who we're talking about for a minute before you finish.:-)
Yah, yah. Unable to produce a decent software system? Yes. Evil? Yes. Engage in high-stakes litigation games? Yes. Excruciatingly stupid? Remains to be seen. I mean, if they get bought out, they win.
I'm sorry, but I believe that you're just wrong. Unless SCO knows FOR CERTAIN that their threatened lawsuit has ABSOLUTELY NO merit, they can threaten to sue, and sue, all they want. Perhaps RICO has some provision that if you can prove that SCO doesn't intend to actually sue, then you can bust them. But that's almost impossible, unless the SCO people are excruciatingly stupid. Basically, the US legal system is very much into letting the courts decide, and pretty much doesn't recognize that there are large costs to successfully defending a lawsuit. In some ways it sucks (example: SCO), but in other ways it's good, as it allows flexibility on a case-by-case basis. (As opposed to codifying everything strictly into law, which has many downsides.)
So, I don't know the poster, so I don't really know how much they know about DNS. However, from the article, it sounds like "not much." And yet they set up DNS on Panther Server without much difficulty. If this is true, this is amazing, and means that 90% of people who manage a server should go out and buy as XServe. I've set up DNS using BIND and Active Directory, and it's a huge PITA. And I know a bit about DNS.
There is no such thing as a color CCD. CCDs measure then number of photons that smack them. What you think is a "color CCD" is a CCD with red, green, and blue filters over certain parts of the sensor.
The spirit cameras have switchable filters over them that measure a whole heap of wavelengths. If they had used a CCD with a fixed, three-color filter, then they wouldn't've been able to measure IR, UV, etc. effectively.
What you're looking for is a 'twistup corkscrew,' or the 'ah-so cork puller.'
I have one of these, and while it's quite excellent for traditional corks, you really do need a screwpull, as well. (At least, if you plan on ever spending less than $30 on a bottle of wine.) The "twistup" puller (mine was referred to as a "butler's helper" doesn't work at all on plastic corks, and doesn't work well at all on some kinds of cork corks. Fortunately, these types of corks are generally immune to crumbling, so the screwpull is not a liability.
Slashdot Mirror
As another poster has pointed out, banning users who check too frequently is an excellent fallback. A tiny site won't know to install the software, but it won't be an issue for a tiny site.
I've built some web sites, done some software/hardware consultation, etc. Oh, and I take pictures, but that doesn't really bring in any cash.
It can be hard to do work on the side when you're a developer, though. Many (most?) jobs work you like a slave, so you don't have much energy/brain left when you crawl home from work long after dark. If you're lucky enough to have a job that has regular hours (or unlucky enough to be laid off), freelancing can be very exciting.
No no no no. I shouldn't get upset, very few people understand IP law at all, but I get frustrated anyway.
Parody is protected if you are parodying thing x using thing x (or thing y which is in the public domain). The Strawberry Shortcake strip was parodying thing x (American McGee) using thing y (Strawberry Shortcake), so it was not clear-cut.
Now, it's not clear cut that there was actually any trademark infringement. There are multiple tests that you have to pass to have a valid trademark case, and it's pretty tenuous to claim that the strip passes the tests. Be that as it may, it's definitely not 100% clear that PA is not in violation.
(Disclaimer, IANAL, but I hang out with an IP attorney, and I read Ed Felton and Lawrence Lessig's blogs)
...or any other system with GNU head and tail:
head -c*random byte offset* *file.mp3* | tail -c *small number of bytes*
So, power generation in Manhattan doesn't need to be super cheap or super high capacity, it really just needs to be low-pollution and moderately inexpensive. They're not competing with nuclear or coal or large hydro, they're competing with on-demand natural gas, which is nowhere near as cheap.
> And now let the EEs shoot down my idea (not literally).
They probably won't
But wait, it gets better. Cow flops normally decompose into CO2 and methane, which escapes into the atmosphere. The thing is, methane is a much more effective greenhouse gas than CO2. Therefore, collecting the manure, turning it into methane, and burning the methane is actually cleaner than letting the crap sit in the fields.
As another example, many people feel that email is a good thing, but that sendmail is a bad thing. This is not contradictory.
First of all, it converts waste product into electricity. But secondly, instead of sewage decomposing into methane, it decomposes into C02, which is a much less effective greenhouse gas. Additionally, the resulting by-products make a good, smell-free compost.
Here's a blurb about a biogas plant in Oregon
I agree that we need Mars, but face it, we can't even keep a useful station in LEO, and we can't even live in the Gobi desert. We need to do a lot more small ecosystem research before we can do anythign useful there. Mars is an excellent goal, but Bush is just blowing smoke with his Mars plan. It's not designed to get us a permanent human settlement anywhere, it's designed to make it look like Bush's vision for the future involves something other than permanent war and abrupt climate change.
The word from my wife (a lawyer) is that law firms used to use wordperfect (because it's better), but they're switching to word (because everyone else want them use it). They are a service industry, after all.
Currently, at least, the answers to #1 and #2 are the same: We can't measure/predict the motion of asteroids accurately enough to aim them at a particular continent. When an asteroid passing within the the radius of the moon's orbit counts as "close," just figuring out where it's going is impossible.
Also (more in line with #2), asteroids are typically very heterogeneous and loosely bound, so if you start pushing on them, pieces will probably start to fall off. This will change the trajectory of the asteroid. You could presumably "get around this" by wrapping it some sort of net-thing, but at that point, you could probably just send up a robot to build gravity-bombs from the moon or something like that.
The issue with giving sensitive data to outsourcing agencies (who give it to outsourcing agencies (who give it to .... is that after a while, the chain of accountability gets pretty tenuous. When it's your client's sensitive information, it's pretty clear that you should protect it. When it's your boss' client's client's ... client's boss' sensitive information, you're really disconnected from the parties who would be damaged if the information was disclosed.
Man, I wish I hadn't posted, now I can't mod you up. BTW, parent is "Insightful" more than "Funny".
* There are plenty on non-virus-related reasons to insist that lusers use Macs. So, in answer to your first question, "no." The virus issues are minor.
* There are no viruses that run under MacOSX
So as a test, I mailed myself an application. On the default mail reader under MacOSX, I double-clicked it. Up pops a dialog box:
One of the big reasons that people spread Windows viruses is that poor design and security holes allow non-clever people to easily be infected. With myDoom et al, you double-click the "folder", you get the virus. On MacOS, you have to work at it.
article > you have intellectual-property people who think operating systems
article > shouldn't be free in our camp, and you have people over there who
article > think operating systems should be free in IBM's camp.
comment > This guy actually believes in a blanket statement like that?
Yes, and he's probably right. Look, people who think that "operating systems shouldn't be free" are people who think that there should not be free operating systems. Ever. So, basically, What Darl is saying is that you have Microsoft (maybe), SCO, and a few outright loonies who got hit by cosmic rays during their econ class on SCO's side, and the entire rest of the world on IBM's side. Sounds about right to me.
Yah, yah. Unable to produce a decent software system? Yes. Evil? Yes. Engage in high-stakes litigation games? Yes. Excruciatingly stupid? Remains to be seen. I mean, if they get bought out, they win.
I'm sorry, but I believe that you're just wrong. Unless SCO knows FOR CERTAIN that their threatened lawsuit has ABSOLUTELY NO merit, they can threaten to sue, and sue, all they want. Perhaps RICO has some provision that if you can prove that SCO doesn't intend to actually sue, then you can bust them. But that's almost impossible, unless the SCO people are excruciatingly stupid. Basically, the US legal system is very much into letting the courts decide, and pretty much doesn't recognize that there are large costs to successfully defending a lawsuit. In some ways it sucks (example: SCO), but in other ways it's good, as it allows flexibility on a case-by-case basis. (As opposed to codifying everything strictly into law, which has many downsides.)
So, I don't know the poster, so I don't really know how much they know about DNS. However, from the article, it sounds like "not much." And yet they set up DNS on Panther Server without much difficulty. If this is true, this is amazing, and means that 90% of people who manage a server should go out and buy as XServe. I've set up DNS using BIND and Active Directory, and it's a huge PITA. And I know a bit about DNS.
There is no such thing as a color CCD. CCDs measure then number of photons that smack them. What you think is a "color CCD" is a CCD with red, green, and blue filters over certain parts of the sensor.
./ story for more info.
The spirit cameras have switchable filters over them that measure a whole heap of wavelengths. If they had used a CCD with a fixed, three-color filter, then they wouldn't've been able to measure IR, UV, etc. effectively.
See this
It's called "Overrated"
As has been pointed out before, VideoLAN Client (CVS builds at least) can play iTMS DRM files. It's a DMCA violation, of course, but then again, so is anything worth doing...