There are places where it's still very legitimate, like high performance crypto libraries, video processing, graphics engines, that sort of thing. Typically you have a reference implementation in C or some other portable language and the assembler is conditionally compiled in, so it works on other platforms but you only get the extra performance boost on that particular platform. It's a niche but so is kernel and driver development, it still makes sense to have some people specialize and do those specific tasks. I wouldn't go it as a career though, there's way, way too many developers from the "bad old days" who know all about shaving two bits and four instructions off a calculation.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way. Very little of the speed of our fastest probes come from propulsion, primarily we slingshot them around the large planets. The weight doesn't matter as it's microscopic compared to the planet, the speed is almost wholly determined by the size of the sling. Unless you have a secret plan to make Jupiter grow 100 times bigger, we need something completely different. Nuclear pulse rockets is probably the closest, but even they will probably take hundreds of years and is a pretty much completely untested design. Like, if you want a probe to return data in your lifetime you'd better work on immortality first.
If plagues are ravaging, who lives and dies seemingly random then I'd call it a form of mental self-defense, it won't attack me because I'm pious and those who died had somehow sinned and deserved it. Imagine if people suddenly started dying in large numbers, but you could find no virus, no bacteria, no radiation, no nothing and healthy people would just drop dead seemingly at random. Would you start to get religious? That finally God had come for some long overdue clean-up, a bit of the old Sodom and Gomorrah days?
There might still be many that call themselves religious, but I consider the intensity to be on a strongly downwards trend. Because we see that pretty much everyone, no matter what religion or how much they live in "unholy" ways are about the same. There's no particularly favored groups that have less disease, injury or tragedy in their lives than the rest. The cause of death is for the most part known, there's the odd exception but the vast majority we know that they die from e.g. cancer. It doesn't mean we can cure it, but we know what causes it.
Of course you can say that God hides in the corners and gave the bad people cancer or the odd case of self-healing we can't explain. But that's a completely different and subtle God lurking in the corners and pulling hidden strings, not this powerful omnipotent commander of life and death. Like, if you have that power why use it in the most roundabout way possible? For many people it's now some nice ceremonies of naming (baptism), adulthood (confirmation), relationship (marrige) and death (funeral), without any real expectation that God will do anything for you.
Politicians are not so mindless as they appear, they just know what's the right thing to say. Even when they know they have to keep running the ship against disaster to stay in office, they'll do it. That they "didn't see it coming" is a helluva lot better excuse than saying "yep I saw it coming, but I did it anyway". They're not that different from an employee keeping his head down until the project is a total failure $10 millions later instead of speaking up and getting laid off. It actually makes very little difference if a politician ends his political career on good or bad terms.
Which is going to be the big issue here,most people have a 5 day work week and they can't just skip one day of work each week. So in practice, they have to ship their kids somewhere or have someone come watch them - but 30 babysitters are way more expensive that one teacher - or you'll have older kids at home unsupervised, which will have plenty issues of its own. So yeah it saves the school money, but at the cost of the parents...
Computer graphics systems have used this terminology since the 80s
And stopped using them in the 90s, I don't think a young person today has ever seen a 16 bit color device nor know WTF it is, even the geeky ones. Or maybe the 00s for mobile devices I guess. That there once was a time when computers didn't have real colors is like hearing there used to be black & white TVs and movies, it's like back in the stone age some time and we're cave men.
No, the point of the GPL is that it forces people to acknowledge that the value a company adds is the work of their engineers/support staff/designers. Not the illusory holding of some "intellectual property" which brings revenue by itself only if they become patent trolls.
Many closed source companies realize their value is in the people, not the IP. The problem is that open source puts all the cost on the edges. If it does what you want, it's free as in beer. If you need something developed, you carry 100% of the costs. Closed source companies can distribute that cost over many customers that each pay 1% of the development cost. In open source any attempt at crowdsourcing funding becomes a waiting game, hoping someone else will want it more and pay for it. With closed source you have to pay your share when you buy a license, you never get it for free just by waiting.
Minimum wage is $7-8/hour most states, and good developers rarely work for that. Let's say maybe $15/hour, and you want a fairly small feature of about 10 hours of work including design, implementation and testing. That's $150 and the cost of a full Office Home and Student 2010 license, just to fix one tiny little thing. It doesn't matter that it's probably 1000 other people who'd pay 15 cents for that feature, you'll never get coordinated. And you could say I pay for my pet feature, they each pay for their pet feature and we will get 1000 features, but in reality the person who doesn't participate gets all the other 999 anyway.
And that's being kind, a real professional working ad hoc assignments would easily charge $100+/hour. How many hours of his services could you afford before you could buy some pro tool that already has that feature? Not many, even if it's called Photoshop or some other ungodly priced software.
Something tells me you'll have a rude wakeup call if you get out of school and start working for some big business. FTP is still an extremely common way of transferring files in batch scripts and such.
Re:such is the life of a bump hunter
on
No Higgs Just Yet
·
· Score: 1
I guess you missed the other kind of bumps you might pursue in grad school, at least you missed the joke...
The almighty dollar *is* Monopoly money. Paper. No intrinsic worth. Trillions of them in circulation. Less purchasing power every time the Fed hits "Go."
True, but if you were to exchange your paycheck to gold the instant you got it - or at least your monthly surplus - you'd find that your US dollars go a lot further than Zimbabwean dollars. Nobody said you had to have your savings in dollars, money is a lot better to handle in daily use than weights of copper, silver or gold but nobody says you have to sit on it. If you don't like gold then real estate or something else tangible, minus a housing crash or two that should be a pretty safe way to store your savings.
If we already had proof that it does or doesn't exist, we wouldn't need to go looking. That's what science is, to go looking for the unknown and the unexplained and you can't do that without observation. And of course if we're spending BILLIONS we spend them where we think there's something interesting, not just trying things at random. And that's the whole difference, faith is happy just to be faith. A scientist may believe in a model but he always wants to test it against reality. You are quite clearly showing your ignorance since there's some rather hard limitations on what the Higgs has to be in order to be as predicted, possibly we'll find something completely different or nothing at all but then it won't be Higgs.
Well, I might not be a lawyer but at least I can read English. The last sentence protects everyone downstream from the violator, nothing more and nothing less. If Alice distributes to Bob who has violated the license, then Bob's distribution right is also terminated. So if Bob distributes to Carol her license would normally be invalid too, since there's no legal chain of distribution from Alice to Carol. It's a bit like stolen property, if Bob stole it from Alice and sold it to Carol then Carol doesn't own it - it's still stolen property even though she bought it. What that sentence says is that Carol doesn't have to worry about Bob, her license is as good as if she got it from the original author directly. Only her own failure to comply with the license can terminate it. It doesn't say anything at all about the violator itself.
I don't see anything in section 4 that permanently bars you from acquiring another license. The license you got, it's terminated. And any new licenses you get are also terminated as long as you're not in compliance. But paragraph 6 is pretty clear, Each time you redistribute the Program (...), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor so I can download it five times and I have five licenses. It doesn't make much sense for the GPL, but if I pay Microsoft five times for MS Office, I own five licenses with five license keys. Paragraph four is rather clear, a violation terminates your rights under this License, that is only that specific license.
So yes, I'd put good money on that any past violation can be pasted over. You have still been in violation of copyright law and could face $750-150.000 statutory damages for that, but there's nothing that'll prevent you from getting another license. And if you violate it again, you're liable for another fine and so on. And even if it was truly permanent, you could created a new legal entity, sell all your assets to it minus your banishment and then it's rendered useless anyway. There's lots of ways to tiptoe around it if it was ever seriously used that way.
It's a nice theory in a employment market that's saturated. What happens when there's real unemployment in low cost countries? You produce more locally and say "Thank you US, but we don't need your high price goods and services". India and China aren't low-tech countries anymore, there's very little they couldn't make themselves. It might be that we in the western world can no longer charge as large a premium on our labor, hopefully the gap will be closed softly with our salaries stagnating and theirs growing, not some sudden and ugly market adjustment. Of course from a purely selfish POV I'd wish it wouldn't happen, but I know there's a lot of smart, hard-working people in low cost countries too. That the western worker is so much better than everyone else is a bit of hubris and any real differences that can be attributed to the education system is closing. In all honestly, it's fair if we all get paid for what we do not what country we happen to be born in - some get the almighty dollar, others monopoly money simply because they live in a poor country.
This might work given the audience (...) This isn't aimed at the corporate blackberry users. BBM is the new pager (remember those?) - the messaging of choice for low class drug dealers and their customers.
Actually I was thinking it the other way around, that it could work in the corporate market so that RIM could say that they do have a music service, even if it sucks. I didn't even know BlackBerry had non-corporate customers, I've never seen anyone else with one - ever.
What management needs to know is fairly simple: who are their best 20% of coders, and who are their worst 20%.
There's really no such thing as a double blind peer review system if I know who's been working that code or I can recognize the coder's function/variable naming, style and commentary. Maybe if you have a large pool of coders this is possible, but in a smaller company it'd only cause noise I think. Don't forget that the manager usually can't tell if the reviews are honest, if you say it's working but has poor structure / design / maintainability / performance / whatever he'll probably buy it. There's a reason we have meta-moderation here at slashdot, you might need something similar.
Also, you never know how much these people have really screwed up or been screwed over in design meetings, I've been told to implement things in ways I wouldn't want to but it's my job and so I've tried. You could ding me on the code review, but the critic would be sorely misplaced.
Buying discontinued obsolete software and hardware combinations is almost always wrong, at any price. That's why no one should buyt computers on Craigslist
Well, if I've replaced it with something better then I won't be using it even if it's a working computer as such so the value proposition still makes sense. I get to unload a box I wouldn't use, they get an upgrade for their even more obsolete computer real cheap. Believe it or not, there's people that still find new "value" PCs far too expensive. And there's people that really need a lot of horsepower who'll sell their old stuff long before it's really obsolete - to a non-power user it's still more than adequate.
I will never understand why they didn't give that a standard shortcut, even an obscure one like Ctrl-Shift-V. Same with Excel, often I want to paste just the value, not every bit about formatting and whatnot. Personally my solution is notepad, I paste and copy it from there since it's faster than the "Paste Special" menu and I'm too lazy to set up a custom shortcut everywhere.
What's worse is that a $5 jump in the price of a hard drive will mean computers will go up by about $200, and manufacturers (the few that are left) will say that they have to raise prices because "of the rise in component cost".
That's because people don't react well to creeping prices, which is rather natural in a society where wages and inflation is slowly increasing the cost of everything. You use the excuse available to raise the price and lump all that "natural" increase into it as well.
You can particularly see this with grocery products. That 1kg big bag of fries you used to buy? It'll be 900g, 800g, 700g, 600g, 500g and then they'll introduce a new 1kg supersize bag. All to keep prices "stable" in the eyes of the customers, because they're paying less attention to that than price hikes.
That something is patented doesn't mean it's fully researched, developed and made into a manufacturable design. There's a lot of "even if we were to invest money into it, and even if we were to succeed, it's still be patented by someone else who'd bury us" that keeps companies away. And even if patents expire, it's amazing what you can do by patenting minor enhancements and variations, even if they would eventually get invalidated it'll create a lot of legal costs, hassle and risk premium on the investment.
Instead of finding good ways of working that most people would like to use, we'll just remove all other ways of working. On top of that for everyone else apps and mobile is something that comes in addition to, not instead of the desktop. Why OSS seems so busy destroying the desktop I don't know, but at least Microsoft and Apple still seems to keep a normal desktop OS. I switched back from KDE to Windows and it seems more and more like the right thing to do.
The DMCA take-down notices are to be sent to the providers that are hosting the content. The search engines are not hosting this content, and sending them take-down notices is a heavy-handed abuse of the law. So either John misunderstands the DMCA or is willfully abusing it.
Or perhaps you're the one without a clue. DMCA takedowns apply to both hosting and search engines. Read it yourself here, I'll quote the most important bits:
(d) Information Location Tools. -- A service provider shall not be liable (...) for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider referring or linking users to an online location containing infringing material or infringing activity (...) if the service provider (...) upon notification of claimed infringement (...) responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity (...)
Short story: I was a consultant and the PC hadn't been in use in about a month. What happened? Installs and reboots and more installs and more reboots, forced AV scans and whatnot. Mandatory, automatic and unstoppable. After that one extreme incident, the client made sure to boot and log in to that PC before I came, easily shaved 15-30 minutes off their bill on average. Employee PCs were usually woken and updated remotely at night though, wasn't an issue for them.
Agreed. I have always had a hard time stomaching the theory that dark matter and dark energy exist. It seems far too much like aether, i.e. something made up to fill a gap in knowledge without much evidence backing it up.
The problem is that the universe is pretty good at ignoring people's bowel movements, a lot of things are completely unintuitive. If I look at a wall it looks damn solid to me, my gut feeling would be that radio and wireless can't possibly work. And if you told me there are particles that'll pass through thousands of miles of earth and stone and lava without even caring that it's there, I'd say you were ready for a room with padded walls if only it wasn't true. In short, past experience has shown us that this is an area where the universe has a habit of not acting the way people expect.
That said, we do know our understanding of gravity is incomplete at the quantum level, we probably will get a better understanding of it as we go along. But the unexplained gravitational effect seems variable, lumped together just like real matter and not always directly in proportion to it. I could accept that we might have had to adjust gravity by some sort of factor but it seems a bit too erratic to be just a formula adjustment. I at least am pretty confident that we've not found all the particles yet and that this will be at least part of the explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
If you know Latvian and medieval French, you're clearly too smart to shop there.
There are places where it's still very legitimate, like high performance crypto libraries, video processing, graphics engines, that sort of thing. Typically you have a reference implementation in C or some other portable language and the assembler is conditionally compiled in, so it works on other platforms but you only get the extra performance boost on that particular platform. It's a niche but so is kernel and driver development, it still makes sense to have some people specialize and do those specific tasks. I wouldn't go it as a career though, there's way, way too many developers from the "bad old days" who know all about shaving two bits and four instructions off a calculation.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way. Very little of the speed of our fastest probes come from propulsion, primarily we slingshot them around the large planets. The weight doesn't matter as it's microscopic compared to the planet, the speed is almost wholly determined by the size of the sling. Unless you have a secret plan to make Jupiter grow 100 times bigger, we need something completely different. Nuclear pulse rockets is probably the closest, but even they will probably take hundreds of years and is a pretty much completely untested design. Like, if you want a probe to return data in your lifetime you'd better work on immortality first.
If plagues are ravaging, who lives and dies seemingly random then I'd call it a form of mental self-defense, it won't attack me because I'm pious and those who died had somehow sinned and deserved it. Imagine if people suddenly started dying in large numbers, but you could find no virus, no bacteria, no radiation, no nothing and healthy people would just drop dead seemingly at random. Would you start to get religious? That finally God had come for some long overdue clean-up, a bit of the old Sodom and Gomorrah days?
There might still be many that call themselves religious, but I consider the intensity to be on a strongly downwards trend. Because we see that pretty much everyone, no matter what religion or how much they live in "unholy" ways are about the same. There's no particularly favored groups that have less disease, injury or tragedy in their lives than the rest. The cause of death is for the most part known, there's the odd exception but the vast majority we know that they die from e.g. cancer. It doesn't mean we can cure it, but we know what causes it.
Of course you can say that God hides in the corners and gave the bad people cancer or the odd case of self-healing we can't explain. But that's a completely different and subtle God lurking in the corners and pulling hidden strings, not this powerful omnipotent commander of life and death. Like, if you have that power why use it in the most roundabout way possible? For many people it's now some nice ceremonies of naming (baptism), adulthood (confirmation), relationship (marrige) and death (funeral), without any real expectation that God will do anything for you.
Politicians are not so mindless as they appear, they just know what's the right thing to say. Even when they know they have to keep running the ship against disaster to stay in office, they'll do it. That they "didn't see it coming" is a helluva lot better excuse than saying "yep I saw it coming, but I did it anyway". They're not that different from an employee keeping his head down until the project is a total failure $10 millions later instead of speaking up and getting laid off. It actually makes very little difference if a politician ends his political career on good or bad terms.
Which is going to be the big issue here ,most people have a 5 day work week and they can't just skip one day of work each week. So in practice, they have to ship their kids somewhere or have someone come watch them - but 30 babysitters are way more expensive that one teacher - or you'll have older kids at home unsupervised, which will have plenty issues of its own. So yeah it saves the school money, but at the cost of the parents...
Computer graphics systems have used this terminology since the 80s
And stopped using them in the 90s, I don't think a young person today has ever seen a 16 bit color device nor know WTF it is, even the geeky ones. Or maybe the 00s for mobile devices I guess. That there once was a time when computers didn't have real colors is like hearing there used to be black & white TVs and movies, it's like back in the stone age some time and we're cave men.
No, the point of the GPL is that it forces people to acknowledge that the value a company adds is the work of their engineers/support staff/designers. Not the illusory holding of some "intellectual property" which brings revenue by itself only if they become patent trolls.
Many closed source companies realize their value is in the people, not the IP. The problem is that open source puts all the cost on the edges. If it does what you want, it's free as in beer. If you need something developed, you carry 100% of the costs. Closed source companies can distribute that cost over many customers that each pay 1% of the development cost. In open source any attempt at crowdsourcing funding becomes a waiting game, hoping someone else will want it more and pay for it. With closed source you have to pay your share when you buy a license, you never get it for free just by waiting.
Minimum wage is $7-8/hour most states, and good developers rarely work for that. Let's say maybe $15/hour, and you want a fairly small feature of about 10 hours of work including design, implementation and testing. That's $150 and the cost of a full Office Home and Student 2010 license, just to fix one tiny little thing. It doesn't matter that it's probably 1000 other people who'd pay 15 cents for that feature, you'll never get coordinated. And you could say I pay for my pet feature, they each pay for their pet feature and we will get 1000 features, but in reality the person who doesn't participate gets all the other 999 anyway.
And that's being kind, a real professional working ad hoc assignments would easily charge $100+/hour. How many hours of his services could you afford before you could buy some pro tool that already has that feature? Not many, even if it's called Photoshop or some other ungodly priced software.
Something tells me you'll have a rude wakeup call if you get out of school and start working for some big business. FTP is still an extremely common way of transferring files in batch scripts and such.
I guess you missed the other kind of bumps you might pursue in grad school, at least you missed the joke...
The almighty dollar *is* Monopoly money. Paper. No intrinsic worth. Trillions of them in circulation. Less purchasing power every time the Fed hits "Go."
True, but if you were to exchange your paycheck to gold the instant you got it - or at least your monthly surplus - you'd find that your US dollars go a lot further than Zimbabwean dollars. Nobody said you had to have your savings in dollars, money is a lot better to handle in daily use than weights of copper, silver or gold but nobody says you have to sit on it. If you don't like gold then real estate or something else tangible, minus a housing crash or two that should be a pretty safe way to store your savings.
If we already had proof that it does or doesn't exist, we wouldn't need to go looking. That's what science is, to go looking for the unknown and the unexplained and you can't do that without observation. And of course if we're spending BILLIONS we spend them where we think there's something interesting, not just trying things at random. And that's the whole difference, faith is happy just to be faith. A scientist may believe in a model but he always wants to test it against reality. You are quite clearly showing your ignorance since there's some rather hard limitations on what the Higgs has to be in order to be as predicted, possibly we'll find something completely different or nothing at all but then it won't be Higgs.
Well, I might not be a lawyer but at least I can read English. The last sentence protects everyone downstream from the violator, nothing more and nothing less. If Alice distributes to Bob who has violated the license, then Bob's distribution right is also terminated. So if Bob distributes to Carol her license would normally be invalid too, since there's no legal chain of distribution from Alice to Carol. It's a bit like stolen property, if Bob stole it from Alice and sold it to Carol then Carol doesn't own it - it's still stolen property even though she bought it. What that sentence says is that Carol doesn't have to worry about Bob, her license is as good as if she got it from the original author directly. Only her own failure to comply with the license can terminate it. It doesn't say anything at all about the violator itself.
I don't see anything in section 4 that permanently bars you from acquiring another license. The license you got, it's terminated. And any new licenses you get are also terminated as long as you're not in compliance. But paragraph 6 is pretty clear, Each time you redistribute the Program (...), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor so I can download it five times and I have five licenses. It doesn't make much sense for the GPL, but if I pay Microsoft five times for MS Office, I own five licenses with five license keys. Paragraph four is rather clear, a violation terminates your rights under this License, that is only that specific license.
So yes, I'd put good money on that any past violation can be pasted over. You have still been in violation of copyright law and could face $750-150.000 statutory damages for that, but there's nothing that'll prevent you from getting another license. And if you violate it again, you're liable for another fine and so on. And even if it was truly permanent, you could created a new legal entity, sell all your assets to it minus your banishment and then it's rendered useless anyway. There's lots of ways to tiptoe around it if it was ever seriously used that way.
It's a nice theory in a employment market that's saturated. What happens when there's real unemployment in low cost countries? You produce more locally and say "Thank you US, but we don't need your high price goods and services". India and China aren't low-tech countries anymore, there's very little they couldn't make themselves. It might be that we in the western world can no longer charge as large a premium on our labor, hopefully the gap will be closed softly with our salaries stagnating and theirs growing, not some sudden and ugly market adjustment. Of course from a purely selfish POV I'd wish it wouldn't happen, but I know there's a lot of smart, hard-working people in low cost countries too. That the western worker is so much better than everyone else is a bit of hubris and any real differences that can be attributed to the education system is closing. In all honestly, it's fair if we all get paid for what we do not what country we happen to be born in - some get the almighty dollar, others monopoly money simply because they live in a poor country.
So does all FSF projects, if that's the new definition of free then tons of vital tools are non-free.
This might work given the audience (...) This isn't aimed at the corporate blackberry users. BBM is the new pager (remember those?) - the messaging of choice for low class drug dealers and their customers.
Actually I was thinking it the other way around, that it could work in the corporate market so that RIM could say that they do have a music service, even if it sucks. I didn't even know BlackBerry had non-corporate customers, I've never seen anyone else with one - ever.
What management needs to know is fairly simple: who are their best 20% of coders, and who are their worst 20%.
There's really no such thing as a double blind peer review system if I know who's been working that code or I can recognize the coder's function/variable naming, style and commentary. Maybe if you have a large pool of coders this is possible, but in a smaller company it'd only cause noise I think. Don't forget that the manager usually can't tell if the reviews are honest, if you say it's working but has poor structure / design / maintainability / performance / whatever he'll probably buy it. There's a reason we have meta-moderation here at slashdot, you might need something similar.
Also, you never know how much these people have really screwed up or been screwed over in design meetings, I've been told to implement things in ways I wouldn't want to but it's my job and so I've tried. You could ding me on the code review, but the critic would be sorely misplaced.
Buying discontinued obsolete software and hardware combinations is almost always wrong, at any price. That's why no one should buyt computers on Craigslist
Well, if I've replaced it with something better then I won't be using it even if it's a working computer as such so the value proposition still makes sense. I get to unload a box I wouldn't use, they get an upgrade for their even more obsolete computer real cheap. Believe it or not, there's people that still find new "value" PCs far too expensive. And there's people that really need a lot of horsepower who'll sell their old stuff long before it's really obsolete - to a non-power user it's still more than adequate.
I will never understand why they didn't give that a standard shortcut, even an obscure one like Ctrl-Shift-V. Same with Excel, often I want to paste just the value, not every bit about formatting and whatnot. Personally my solution is notepad, I paste and copy it from there since it's faster than the "Paste Special" menu and I'm too lazy to set up a custom shortcut everywhere.
What's worse is that a $5 jump in the price of a hard drive will mean computers will go up by about $200, and manufacturers (the few that are left) will say that they have to raise prices because "of the rise in component cost".
That's because people don't react well to creeping prices, which is rather natural in a society where wages and inflation is slowly increasing the cost of everything. You use the excuse available to raise the price and lump all that "natural" increase into it as well.
You can particularly see this with grocery products. That 1kg big bag of fries you used to buy? It'll be 900g, 800g, 700g, 600g, 500g and then they'll introduce a new 1kg supersize bag. All to keep prices "stable" in the eyes of the customers, because they're paying less attention to that than price hikes.
That something is patented doesn't mean it's fully researched, developed and made into a manufacturable design. There's a lot of "even if we were to invest money into it, and even if we were to succeed, it's still be patented by someone else who'd bury us" that keeps companies away. And even if patents expire, it's amazing what you can do by patenting minor enhancements and variations, even if they would eventually get invalidated it'll create a lot of legal costs, hassle and risk premium on the investment.
Instead of finding good ways of working that most people would like to use, we'll just remove all other ways of working. On top of that for everyone else apps and mobile is something that comes in addition to, not instead of the desktop. Why OSS seems so busy destroying the desktop I don't know, but at least Microsoft and Apple still seems to keep a normal desktop OS. I switched back from KDE to Windows and it seems more and more like the right thing to do.
The DMCA take-down notices are to be sent to the providers that are hosting the content. The search engines are not hosting this content, and sending them take-down notices is a heavy-handed abuse of the law. So either John misunderstands the DMCA or is willfully abusing it.
Or perhaps you're the one without a clue. DMCA takedowns apply to both hosting and search engines. Read it yourself here, I'll quote the most important bits:
(d) Information Location Tools. -- A service provider shall not be liable (...) for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider referring or linking users to an online location containing infringing material or infringing activity (...) if the service provider (...) upon notification of claimed infringement (...) responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity (...)
Short story: I was a consultant and the PC hadn't been in use in about a month. What happened? Installs and reboots and more installs and more reboots, forced AV scans and whatnot. Mandatory, automatic and unstoppable. After that one extreme incident, the client made sure to boot and log in to that PC before I came, easily shaved 15-30 minutes off their bill on average. Employee PCs were usually woken and updated remotely at night though, wasn't an issue for them.
Agreed. I have always had a hard time stomaching the theory that dark matter and dark energy exist. It seems far too much like aether, i.e. something made up to fill a gap in knowledge without much evidence backing it up.
The problem is that the universe is pretty good at ignoring people's bowel movements, a lot of things are completely unintuitive. If I look at a wall it looks damn solid to me, my gut feeling would be that radio and wireless can't possibly work. And if you told me there are particles that'll pass through thousands of miles of earth and stone and lava without even caring that it's there, I'd say you were ready for a room with padded walls if only it wasn't true. In short, past experience has shown us that this is an area where the universe has a habit of not acting the way people expect.
That said, we do know our understanding of gravity is incomplete at the quantum level, we probably will get a better understanding of it as we go along. But the unexplained gravitational effect seems variable, lumped together just like real matter and not always directly in proportion to it. I could accept that we might have had to adjust gravity by some sort of factor but it seems a bit too erratic to be just a formula adjustment. I at least am pretty confident that we've not found all the particles yet and that this will be at least part of the explanation.