I don't know if it's a major thing, but the article didn't mention 'all solar cells top out at 5%' (it's actually 6% as the article claims). What the article says is this:
Today's best plastic solar cells capture only about six per cent.
Maybe it's nothing, but that quote is literally what it says. Are Silicon solar sells plastic? It seems that the referenced 14% efficient cells use a metallic substrate somewhere in there which may preclude it from being 'painted on' as the original article claims can be done.
My question is, would they have spent money on the CD if the option to download wasn't there? I know when I was in college and high school, I didn't buy a heck of a lot of CD's, and downloading was not an option.
Downloads only corolate to lost sales if the person downloading would have bought the CD, but decided not to because it was downloadable for free. If the person would never have bought it, the potential revenue is $0 regardless if they download it or not.
You got far more out of it than I did, and apparently find that the actions of the Elders are the horrific aspects of it. To me, what they wound up doing is not horrific, merely sad. They themselves are caring people that made a choice to enforce their isolation up to the point of killing other people. The only thing they ever killed was animals. While that is pretty messed up, it falls under pity, not fear for me.
All the 'horror' aspects that I saw were surrounding the the creatures, the music, the suspense, etc. Shyamalan never took the camera and used it to draw question to the motives of the Elders. Upon finding out it was them all along explained a great deal, and did so too early in the movie. My gripe with the movie was that he revealed that information too soon, before the errant boy made his move.
That is my interpretation. As with all movies, your interpretation may vary, and is just as valid as mine.
One genre in which telling the 'punchline' ruins the movie for you: Mystery. Also, Horror (read: The Village. Great movie... until I got to the 'punchline'. Very disappointing).
I'm not saying the answer is Linux. If the movie industry was in the habit of making cars and people were ripping them off, hang those people by their necks. However, entertainment as 'property' is an incorrect analogy and copyright infringement is not 'theft'. There is not a direct corolation between someone downloading/watching a movie for free and them ever going to buy it themselves. Each download does not constitute a direct loss in sales. There are many movies that I'd own a copy of... if they were free. They just are not worth the money to buy because they're second rate movies, or just did not amuse me as much as others did, and I can't afford every tiny little thing I would ever want to get. Hell, there are even movies I'd love to get my hands on that I would pay money for, but they are no longer for sale or increasingly rare.
While I think this guy is an idiot, remember that article concerning the One Man Star Wars show? He goes through all 3 of the original movies, telling you the story almost verbatum. While yes, this may actually make you want to go watch it, you can also walk away from it going "Ok, I know the story now, I don't need to go see it."
And frankly, I don't know what 'people' you refer to, but I'm a 'people', and I go to the theater for the experience. I can and have held myself from going to movies I thought I wanted to see but thought were second rate. $9 * 2 (myself and fiancee) vs $3.49 6 months later at blockbuster. Such a tough call. Even still, there are movies that I thought better of even after that 6 month wait, and still haven't rented to see, as I heard the general 'jist' of the story.
Again, intellectual property is a misnomer. Once you tell it to me, am I now holding onto your property in my head, since I know your story/music, or am I holding onto my experience generated from your performance?
Here's the funny thing about music and entertainment. I go watch a movie, I go listen to a concert or album. I have been entertained. I in turn go to one of my friends and retell the story (I'm not infringing on copyright, since I'm not displaying their work), and said friend decides that that particular movie/album was told well enough from my telling that they don't need to go see/hear it, but was entertained enough by my telling to gain some amusement from it. Now, tell me where the content's creator gets compensated in that situation? The entertainment my friend experienced is a direct result of the content that I went and paid for, but they received no compensation for it.
Now, I admit that that situation, while legal, is not the same as me making a copy of that movie and giving it to my friend, which is illegal. It does go to illustrate a flaw in the notion of:
Guy does work which you benefit from (ie entertaining you), guy expects reward for benefitting you,...
The very notion of intellectual property is flawed. Much like Software is copied many many times (CD to hard disk, hard disk to memory ad infinitum), a performance that we experience gets 'copied' into our memories. We, as living creatures, live by our experiences/memories, and unless the MPAA and RIAA feel that they need to find a way to be compensated for everyone that their work touches, something needs to give.
I'm starting to think that, instead of getting all up in arms over someone seeing their movie that didn't pay for it (oh.. walking by an open theater as you go to another one and seeing segments of it), they should operate similar to Linux companies. It is not the content they charge for, but the experience/service. People still go to big screen movie theaters because there are some elements of the environment which just cannot be duplicated in a small living room environment. People go for something to do on a Friday night. People go to see a larger than life X-wing come tearing across the screen (and the entirety of the viewer's field of vision). People go to be immersed in another story, another life, even for just a while. They don't go for the sole reason of viewing the movie. In fact, based on how expensive and how 'hit or miss' good movies are, some people have stopped going to the theater because they expect disappointment instead of satisfaction.
It's damn hard to be compensated appropriately for something that adds an experience to a person's life. They need to refocus their efforts to really make people want to spend their hard earned money on the experience instead of being content to wait to catch it at a pittance, or free.
This applies more to the RIAA than the MPAA, as movie sales have not taken a nosedive before the MPAA decided to start doing all this legal action. Their reasoning is more out of principle than an actual reduction in revenue.
They sure try and market those crippled disks like CD's, though. They mix them in with normal CD's, they presume to tell the customer that (except for the fine print) this will play in the same player a CD plays in, and it even looks exactally like a regular CD. It's just that, unless it's a different size, shape, obviously stamped with the type of disk it is, or seperated as "not a CD" for a sales rack, it constitutes false advertising and misleads the customer to believe they're buying a CD, not some proprietary crap that may or may not work.
Just think, what would happen if they sold DVD music albums amungst the CD music, but didn't make it clearly apparent on the outside to a reasonable person (read: fine print on the back of the case or absense of an emblem is not clearly labeled)? That's pretty much what happens now.
They weren't cheaper for a long time. Even now, I imagine I can come up with a $10-15 VCR (not like I'd want to buy one). Cheapest DVD player that I've seen now is $30 (again, wouldn't touch that for the world). However thing is, you get what you pay for. If you pay nothing, you can expect to get nothing. If you pay a little more, one expects to have more features that you'll actually use (hense, more value to the user).
I'm personally pleased with the DVD player I have. It wasn't bottom rung, but it does what I want. Just FYI, my VCR was cheaper by over half.
So what you're telling me is that a GFCI will probably stop a short circuiting device from electrocuting you or starting a fire (a concern with public access power sockets), but you can still overload it by plugging in 30 laptops or so into one circuit. Sounds to me like exactally the device to provide safety in public power outlets. Doesn't need to limit the power flow, per sae, it just needs to stop something bad from happening, like fire or death.
Knew there was an appropriate name for those kinds of sockets, too. For the life of me, I couldn't recall it. Thanks.
My appologies. While I do my best to ensure my spelling is accurate, I'm a computer geek, not an English professor. I had wondered about that word, but blindly assumed that the prior usage of the word was correct.
Why not simply cover your sockets with "You want my power? Sod off!" - signs?
Wait, wait, I know this one! Umm... because the grandparent poster is a bitter ol' bastard that feels that, instead of doing a more logical and proper thing such as not installing sockets or installing sockets with locked covers in public areas, it is proper, right, justified, and legal to destroy the equipment that a customer wishes to use while frequenting his establishment.
Let's not let logic, business ethics, legality, or common sense actually enter into the picture. That just clouds things. I, as a business owner, would certainly want the customer to stand at the door, throw money into the pot, and walk away. For added profit, I won't even provide any services or benefits.
Sitting in San Francisco International Airport one trip, I had the misfortune of having to wait for my flight to arrive. Having nothing else to do, I pulled out my Laptop (having been drained of much of it's power already) and plugged it into a local socket. Funny thing about that socket, it was one of those localized ones that has it's own circuit breaker built in, similar to the ones you find in bathrooms. In the event my laptop, god forbid, had drawn too much power, it would've likely (if they designed it smartly) tripped the circuit breaker in the plug itself, and only that circuit breaker.
I could have reset the switch myself by simply pushing the reset button on the socket, had it come to that. Seems like a pretty darn smart way to localize a power socket that the public may be using.
To heck with taking control of them, I just want the devices discreet and seperate so that, god forbid, my DVD player take a dump on me, I can still watch TV, watch a VHS tape, play a game on a console, or look up my email on my computer. The 'One Box Does It All' mentality may simplify what you have to carry or buy, but it also represents a single point of failure for a large number of services. Getting it repaired, especially if it's out of warrenty, can be a major pain in the ass.
(Only one device I've ever really had repaired was my Minidisc player, twice, and that was under CircuitCity's own extended warrenty. Took weeks to get it back, though thankfully it did come back fixed, or at least with an explaination as to a point of failure like the power adaptor. TV, Microwave, my Clie.. it's almost cheaper to just buy a new one since it is generally designed to just barely outlive it's warrenty)
No, in that instance, it's not theft as much as it is collaboration. This happened to me as well when I was doing a few programming classes in college. We did peer review on a team of each other's programs to ensure functionality, stability, and design. The net effect is, though, that the programs of each of the members, even though they were individual assignments, tended to blur and use components of each other's works.
Collaboration isn't cheating, unless the instructions are specifically to do it by yourself. Cheating is the typical 'I saw what they did, so I'm going to do it myself as well without their knowledge or consent and claim it was my own.' Collaboration likely needs the qualification to the teacher that "we worked together to create this program".
The problem with LCD monitors is that, for display on computers, they do not display all resolutions with the same clarity. LCD's have something called a 'native' resolution. That is to say that that resolution is what the LCD was designed to run at, quite likely being it's peak/top resolution. Anything lower than that and the LCD has to do "interpolation" of the pixels to cluster together enough actual pixel 'cells' to form one pixel for that resolution. What this generally does to the display is, while being 'in focus', the picture seems slightly blurry.
Why this isn't a problem with CRT's, I have not investigated, but they do not suffer the same flaw. Reset a CRT monitor to any resolution it supports and the picture will be in focus and clear.
With Plasma TV's or LCD TV's, I can see this as not being a problem. Why? They simply design the LCD panel to have it's native resolution at the same size that the standard TV signal will be receiving (640x480 for standard, forget what it is for HDTV). Result is that the picture looks clear and people conclude that LCD/Plasma TV's are just as clear at all times as CRT's, even if this isn't quite the case in all situations.
You can call a DVD player "designed", but yet you can't point to a naturally-occurring DVD player growing wild on some jungle or being mined from the earth.
Actually, I'd go more for the analogy of a previous article. Are planetary nebulae shaped as they are because of some underlying cause (reason/design) or due to sheer chance? We didn't know, it was a guess, and you believed what you wanted. Unlike religion, however, this particular question does have an answer, as they have apparently discovered.
Still, what if they had found that no magnetic fields actually shaped such nebulae? With only one universe to look at, how can we tell if it was designed or not without a frame of reference or known quantity to compare it to?
Actually, a better comparison is code theft from another source. Consider that you're trying to make a webserver. Well, Apache does it already and does so pretty well, so let's use most of the code and ideas from there.
Code reuse is more like "I wrote a bunch of C++ classes for basic data structures back in [insert intro class here], but I need to make use of it in an assignment for [advanced class]. I'll just use what I wrote before, rather than reinvent the whole class again." That is more appropriate, and still validates your own work, simply work and understanding that you did long before the class began.
I agree with most of your point, however, just a terminology correction:
Fair use is a copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials forpurposes of commentary and criticism.
Ref: Standford University Library Reference page
Time shifting is the recording of television shows to some storage medium to be viewed at a time convenient to the consumer.
Ref: Wikipedia's Entry on Time Shifting
What you refer to as fair use is actually called Time Shifting, and is what was decided by the Betamax court case. Fair use is a completely different concept all together.
I'm sorry, but the legal right of fair use or timeshifting or whatever allows you to record anything else off your incoming TV signals allows you to record whatever baseball game you get, regardless of what those tards say. Just because they say it doesn't make it legal. What is illegal is to redistribute the broadcast, a right that you, as a customer, do not possess as you are not the content's creator.
Please note the distinction. Recording from your TV and Redistributing that recording are not synonomous. One is legal, one is not.
I've actually had that happen. An ex-roommate wound up making some commentary about the manner in which we parted ways, and all his friends commented about how bad I must've been and how sorry they were that he had to live with me. Only thing is that while I admit I was not the best roommate, neither was he and wound up doing much the same as I did. That just never came out as valid since once we parted ways, he managed to be immaculate about his affairs.
Took a few years just to sort out the animosity between us to be on speaking terms all because of that incident.
I got to thinking the other day that eventually IPv6 is inevitable. The length of time before we get it is the question. Here's why...
With the upcoming technologies, you have T-Mobile seeking to do wireless hotspots all over the place, you have WiFi Max attempting to make a name for itself, you have cellular networking. Vontage seeks to make a VoIP mobile phone with Wifi (note an addressing problem here as you roam). Asside from cellular networking, which is essentially one large wifi network you're connecting to, unless you're interfacing with one network with lots of nodes on it, you will have the need to roam from network to network while retaining connectivity as best you can. IPv4 is insufficient to do this without dropped connections.
Hopefully there are sane judges and juries that understand the notion that if you inform a software company of a flaw and they fail to fix it for over a year, that if an exploit ever does become public, the fault lies with the software company (that did nothing to remedy the problem, dispite having far more than ample time to do so) instead of the discoverer (that did the responsible thing by reporting the flaw to the maker of the software).
I'm a programmer, but I'm not a Microsoft MVP. I wager that a good number of very good programmers aren't MVP's. To me, it seems like you must first be a Microsoft MVP before you can have the option to access Windows' source code. That is a small subset of the group of all programmers I refered to by the name 'Joe Schmoe'.
Unless the source code for Windows is as easily available as the source code for Linux, I really don't consider that open source.
Re:RTFA (You Are A Crack Addict)
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Life Interrupted
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Here's a few reasons why multitasking is generally necessary for some aspects of life:
1) 24 hours in the day, approx 8 of which are downtime/sleep. Most of us also portion out 9 or so to earning our keep, and a couple hours get lost due to necessary evils (travel, taking a breather, movement in general). That usually leaves about 5 hours of time during which you can do your own thing. You can push that figure upwards (scrape off hours of sleep, skip work, arrange things so that your wasted couple of hours are more like 30 minutes). However, when you think about it, 5 hours really isn't that long a time to do much during the week.
2) Multiple interests. Myself, I love to play music (piano, clarinet, guitar -- still learning the last one), play video games (PC, PS2), program applications, maintain my network, watch some TV shows, etc. Not the least of those interests is keeping up with friends and going out to do things with them. Now, of course there is the whole 'priority' thing going on here of which I want to do more, but regardless, the list is fairly expansive.
These two things lead to a problem. How do I do as many things as I want to do in the limited time that I have available? It's true that my 'weekday' listing only allows roughly 5 hours of free time to myself, and that it ignores the roughly 14 hours I get on a weekend day, it still shows that the time that I have available to me to do all the things I want to do is limited. Some things take more time than I can allow for on a weekday. Some things that I want to do are low priority because they're new and atypical, yet I still really want to do them.
This can be summed up very easily in a bastardized phrase I learned from Economics. Limited Resources for Unlimited Wants. I want to do far more than I have time for, if I were to do them back to back. As some of those wants are even time dependant (keeping up with friends is a good one for that), if those are not done, then the opportunity is lost. The only answer that I can come up with is multitasking. Be it combining tasks into one (a simple method) or doing multiple tasks at once (true multitasking), that seems to me to be the only way to attend to as many of the wants as I can for the given time period.
Even with multitasking, I know I will not have time for everything I want to do, but at least I will be able to do more of them and not miss out on time-dependant tasks. I personally do not see this view as delusional or logically flawed. My approach to the problem may be different than the one you may choose, but it is still valid.
P.S. Dispite being a different individual than the parent of your post, while doing one thing at a time is not (to me) a 'complete waste of precious time', it is not using that time to it's fullest, either. If you have the capacity to do multiple things at once, and you do not do that, it can be viewed as wasting time.
Windows is not Open Source as most people use the term. Windows even goes so far as to call it's program Shared Source, which means you can look, but you cannot touch. I imagine there are even provisions in there that forbid you from working on competing open source projects such as Linux.
Of course, Windows is only Open Source once you pony up some dough, or have significant buying power in order to make Microsoft feel it's worth it. Joe Schmoe developer isn't going to be seeing Windows' source any time soon. If you doubt that, go download the source for us so we can see how easy it is.
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Today's best plastic solar cells capture only about six per cent.
Maybe it's nothing, but that quote is literally what it says. Are Silicon solar sells plastic? It seems that the referenced 14% efficient cells use a metallic substrate somewhere in there which may preclude it from being 'painted on' as the original article claims can be done.
My question is, would they have spent money on the CD if the option to download wasn't there? I know when I was in college and high school, I didn't buy a heck of a lot of CD's, and downloading was not an option.
Downloads only corolate to lost sales if the person downloading would have bought the CD, but decided not to because it was downloadable for free. If the person would never have bought it, the potential revenue is $0 regardless if they download it or not.
You got far more out of it than I did, and apparently find that the actions of the Elders are the horrific aspects of it. To me, what they wound up doing is not horrific, merely sad. They themselves are caring people that made a choice to enforce their isolation up to the point of killing other people. The only thing they ever killed was animals. While that is pretty messed up, it falls under pity, not fear for me.
All the 'horror' aspects that I saw were surrounding the the creatures, the music, the suspense, etc. Shyamalan never took the camera and used it to draw question to the motives of the Elders. Upon finding out it was them all along explained a great deal, and did so too early in the movie. My gripe with the movie was that he revealed that information too soon, before the errant boy made his move.
That is my interpretation. As with all movies, your interpretation may vary, and is just as valid as mine.
One genre in which telling the 'punchline' ruins the movie for you: Mystery. Also, Horror (read: The Village. Great movie... until I got to the 'punchline'. Very disappointing).
I'm not saying the answer is Linux. If the movie industry was in the habit of making cars and people were ripping them off, hang those people by their necks. However, entertainment as 'property' is an incorrect analogy and copyright infringement is not 'theft'. There is not a direct corolation between someone downloading/watching a movie for free and them ever going to buy it themselves. Each download does not constitute a direct loss in sales. There are many movies that I'd own a copy of... if they were free. They just are not worth the money to buy because they're second rate movies, or just did not amuse me as much as others did, and I can't afford every tiny little thing I would ever want to get. Hell, there are even movies I'd love to get my hands on that I would pay money for, but they are no longer for sale or increasingly rare.
While I think this guy is an idiot, remember that article concerning the One Man Star Wars show? He goes through all 3 of the original movies, telling you the story almost verbatum. While yes, this may actually make you want to go watch it, you can also walk away from it going "Ok, I know the story now, I don't need to go see it."
And frankly, I don't know what 'people' you refer to, but I'm a 'people', and I go to the theater for the experience. I can and have held myself from going to movies I thought I wanted to see but thought were second rate. $9 * 2 (myself and fiancee) vs $3.49 6 months later at blockbuster. Such a tough call. Even still, there are movies that I thought better of even after that 6 month wait, and still haven't rented to see, as I heard the general 'jist' of the story.
Again, intellectual property is a misnomer. Once you tell it to me, am I now holding onto your property in my head, since I know your story/music, or am I holding onto my experience generated from your performance?
See: Dictionary.Com's definition of Doped, entry 4 (Electronics)
Still is pretty funny, though.
Now, I admit that that situation, while legal, is not the same as me making a copy of that movie and giving it to my friend, which is illegal. It does go to illustrate a flaw in the notion of:
Guy does work which you benefit from (ie entertaining you), guy expects reward for benefitting you, ...
The very notion of intellectual property is flawed. Much like Software is copied many many times (CD to hard disk, hard disk to memory ad infinitum), a performance that we experience gets 'copied' into our memories. We, as living creatures, live by our experiences/memories, and unless the MPAA and RIAA feel that they need to find a way to be compensated for everyone that their work touches, something needs to give.
I'm starting to think that, instead of getting all up in arms over someone seeing their movie that didn't pay for it (oh.. walking by an open theater as you go to another one and seeing segments of it), they should operate similar to Linux companies. It is not the content they charge for, but the experience/service. People still go to big screen movie theaters because there are some elements of the environment which just cannot be duplicated in a small living room environment. People go for something to do on a Friday night. People go to see a larger than life X-wing come tearing across the screen (and the entirety of the viewer's field of vision). People go to be immersed in another story, another life, even for just a while. They don't go for the sole reason of viewing the movie. In fact, based on how expensive and how 'hit or miss' good movies are, some people have stopped going to the theater because they expect disappointment instead of satisfaction.
It's damn hard to be compensated appropriately for something that adds an experience to a person's life. They need to refocus their efforts to really make people want to spend their hard earned money on the experience instead of being content to wait to catch it at a pittance, or free.
This applies more to the RIAA than the MPAA, as movie sales have not taken a nosedive before the MPAA decided to start doing all this legal action. Their reasoning is more out of principle than an actual reduction in revenue.
They sure try and market those crippled disks like CD's, though. They mix them in with normal CD's, they presume to tell the customer that (except for the fine print) this will play in the same player a CD plays in, and it even looks exactally like a regular CD. It's just that, unless it's a different size, shape, obviously stamped with the type of disk it is, or seperated as "not a CD" for a sales rack, it constitutes false advertising and misleads the customer to believe they're buying a CD, not some proprietary crap that may or may not work.
Just think, what would happen if they sold DVD music albums amungst the CD music, but didn't make it clearly apparent on the outside to a reasonable person (read: fine print on the back of the case or absense of an emblem is not clearly labeled)? That's pretty much what happens now.
They weren't cheaper for a long time. Even now, I imagine I can come up with a $10-15 VCR (not like I'd want to buy one). Cheapest DVD player that I've seen now is $30 (again, wouldn't touch that for the world). However thing is, you get what you pay for. If you pay nothing, you can expect to get nothing. If you pay a little more, one expects to have more features that you'll actually use (hense, more value to the user).
I'm personally pleased with the DVD player I have. It wasn't bottom rung, but it does what I want. Just FYI, my VCR was cheaper by over half.
So what you're telling me is that a GFCI will probably stop a short circuiting device from electrocuting you or starting a fire (a concern with public access power sockets), but you can still overload it by plugging in 30 laptops or so into one circuit. Sounds to me like exactally the device to provide safety in public power outlets. Doesn't need to limit the power flow, per sae, it just needs to stop something bad from happening, like fire or death.
Knew there was an appropriate name for those kinds of sockets, too. For the life of me, I couldn't recall it. Thanks.
My appologies. While I do my best to ensure my spelling is accurate, I'm a computer geek, not an English professor. I had wondered about that word, but blindly assumed that the prior usage of the word was correct.
Thanks for the correction.
Wait, wait, I know this one! Umm... because the grandparent poster is a bitter ol' bastard that feels that, instead of doing a more logical and proper thing such as not installing sockets or installing sockets with locked covers in public areas, it is proper, right, justified, and legal to destroy the equipment that a customer wishes to use while frequenting his establishment.
Let's not let logic, business ethics, legality, or common sense actually enter into the picture. That just clouds things. I, as a business owner, would certainly want the customer to stand at the door, throw money into the pot, and walk away. For added profit, I won't even provide any services or benefits.
Step 1. Deny customers perks
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!
It could work!
Sitting in San Francisco International Airport one trip, I had the misfortune of having to wait for my flight to arrive. Having nothing else to do, I pulled out my Laptop (having been drained of much of it's power already) and plugged it into a local socket. Funny thing about that socket, it was one of those localized ones that has it's own circuit breaker built in, similar to the ones you find in bathrooms. In the event my laptop, god forbid, had drawn too much power, it would've likely (if they designed it smartly) tripped the circuit breaker in the plug itself, and only that circuit breaker.
I could have reset the switch myself by simply pushing the reset button on the socket, had it come to that. Seems like a pretty darn smart way to localize a power socket that the public may be using.
To heck with taking control of them, I just want the devices discreet and seperate so that, god forbid, my DVD player take a dump on me, I can still watch TV, watch a VHS tape, play a game on a console, or look up my email on my computer. The 'One Box Does It All' mentality may simplify what you have to carry or buy, but it also represents a single point of failure for a large number of services. Getting it repaired, especially if it's out of warrenty, can be a major pain in the ass.
(Only one device I've ever really had repaired was my Minidisc player, twice, and that was under CircuitCity's own extended warrenty. Took weeks to get it back, though thankfully it did come back fixed, or at least with an explaination as to a point of failure like the power adaptor. TV, Microwave, my Clie.. it's almost cheaper to just buy a new one since it is generally designed to just barely outlive it's warrenty)
No, in that instance, it's not theft as much as it is collaboration. This happened to me as well when I was doing a few programming classes in college. We did peer review on a team of each other's programs to ensure functionality, stability, and design. The net effect is, though, that the programs of each of the members, even though they were individual assignments, tended to blur and use components of each other's works.
Collaboration isn't cheating, unless the instructions are specifically to do it by yourself. Cheating is the typical 'I saw what they did, so I'm going to do it myself as well without their knowledge or consent and claim it was my own.' Collaboration likely needs the qualification to the teacher that "we worked together to create this program".
The problem with LCD monitors is that, for display on computers, they do not display all resolutions with the same clarity. LCD's have something called a 'native' resolution. That is to say that that resolution is what the LCD was designed to run at, quite likely being it's peak/top resolution. Anything lower than that and the LCD has to do "interpolation" of the pixels to cluster together enough actual pixel 'cells' to form one pixel for that resolution. What this generally does to the display is, while being 'in focus', the picture seems slightly blurry.
Why this isn't a problem with CRT's, I have not investigated, but they do not suffer the same flaw. Reset a CRT monitor to any resolution it supports and the picture will be in focus and clear.
With Plasma TV's or LCD TV's, I can see this as not being a problem. Why? They simply design the LCD panel to have it's native resolution at the same size that the standard TV signal will be receiving (640x480 for standard, forget what it is for HDTV). Result is that the picture looks clear and people conclude that LCD/Plasma TV's are just as clear at all times as CRT's, even if this isn't quite the case in all situations.
Actually, I'd go more for the analogy of a previous article. Are planetary nebulae shaped as they are because of some underlying cause (reason/design) or due to sheer chance? We didn't know, it was a guess, and you believed what you wanted. Unlike religion, however, this particular question does have an answer, as they have apparently discovered.
Still, what if they had found that no magnetic fields actually shaped such nebulae? With only one universe to look at, how can we tell if it was designed or not without a frame of reference or known quantity to compare it to?
Actually, a better comparison is code theft from another source. Consider that you're trying to make a webserver. Well, Apache does it already and does so pretty well, so let's use most of the code and ideas from there.
Code reuse is more like "I wrote a bunch of C++ classes for basic data structures back in [insert intro class here], but I need to make use of it in an assignment for [advanced class]. I'll just use what I wrote before, rather than reinvent the whole class again." That is more appropriate, and still validates your own work, simply work and understanding that you did long before the class began.
Fair use is a copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials forpurposes of commentary and criticism.
Ref: Standford University Library Reference page
Time shifting is the recording of television shows to some storage medium to be viewed at a time convenient to the consumer.
Ref: Wikipedia's Entry on Time Shifting
What you refer to as fair use is actually called Time Shifting, and is what was decided by the Betamax court case. Fair use is a completely different concept all together.
I'm sorry, but the legal right of fair use or timeshifting or whatever allows you to record anything else off your incoming TV signals allows you to record whatever baseball game you get, regardless of what those tards say. Just because they say it doesn't make it legal. What is illegal is to redistribute the broadcast, a right that you, as a customer, do not possess as you are not the content's creator.
Please note the distinction. Recording from your TV and Redistributing that recording are not synonomous. One is legal, one is not.
I've actually had that happen. An ex-roommate wound up making some commentary about the manner in which we parted ways, and all his friends commented about how bad I must've been and how sorry they were that he had to live with me. Only thing is that while I admit I was not the best roommate, neither was he and wound up doing much the same as I did. That just never came out as valid since once we parted ways, he managed to be immaculate about his affairs.
Took a few years just to sort out the animosity between us to be on speaking terms all because of that incident.
I got to thinking the other day that eventually IPv6 is inevitable. The length of time before we get it is the question. Here's why...
With the upcoming technologies, you have T-Mobile seeking to do wireless hotspots all over the place, you have WiFi Max attempting to make a name for itself, you have cellular networking. Vontage seeks to make a VoIP mobile phone with Wifi (note an addressing problem here as you roam). Asside from cellular networking, which is essentially one large wifi network you're connecting to, unless you're interfacing with one network with lots of nodes on it, you will have the need to roam from network to network while retaining connectivity as best you can. IPv4 is insufficient to do this without dropped connections.
Hopefully there are sane judges and juries that understand the notion that if you inform a software company of a flaw and they fail to fix it for over a year, that if an exploit ever does become public, the fault lies with the software company (that did nothing to remedy the problem, dispite having far more than ample time to do so) instead of the discoverer (that did the responsible thing by reporting the flaw to the maker of the software).
I'm a programmer, but I'm not a Microsoft MVP. I wager that a good number of very good programmers aren't MVP's. To me, it seems like you must first be a Microsoft MVP before you can have the option to access Windows' source code. That is a small subset of the group of all programmers I refered to by the name 'Joe Schmoe'.
Unless the source code for Windows is as easily available as the source code for Linux, I really don't consider that open source.
Here's a few reasons why multitasking is generally necessary for some aspects of life:
1) 24 hours in the day, approx 8 of which are downtime/sleep. Most of us also portion out 9 or so to earning our keep, and a couple hours get lost due to necessary evils (travel, taking a breather, movement in general). That usually leaves about 5 hours of time during which you can do your own thing. You can push that figure upwards (scrape off hours of sleep, skip work, arrange things so that your wasted couple of hours are more like 30 minutes). However, when you think about it, 5 hours really isn't that long a time to do much during the week.
2) Multiple interests. Myself, I love to play music (piano, clarinet, guitar -- still learning the last one), play video games (PC, PS2), program applications, maintain my network, watch some TV shows, etc. Not the least of those interests is keeping up with friends and going out to do things with them. Now, of course there is the whole 'priority' thing going on here of which I want to do more, but regardless, the list is fairly expansive.
These two things lead to a problem. How do I do as many things as I want to do in the limited time that I have available? It's true that my 'weekday' listing only allows roughly 5 hours of free time to myself, and that it ignores the roughly 14 hours I get on a weekend day, it still shows that the time that I have available to me to do all the things I want to do is limited. Some things take more time than I can allow for on a weekday. Some things that I want to do are low priority because they're new and atypical, yet I still really want to do them.
This can be summed up very easily in a bastardized phrase I learned from Economics. Limited Resources for Unlimited Wants. I want to do far more than I have time for, if I were to do them back to back. As some of those wants are even time dependant (keeping up with friends is a good one for that), if those are not done, then the opportunity is lost. The only answer that I can come up with is multitasking. Be it combining tasks into one (a simple method) or doing multiple tasks at once (true multitasking), that seems to me to be the only way to attend to as many of the wants as I can for the given time period.
Even with multitasking, I know I will not have time for everything I want to do, but at least I will be able to do more of them and not miss out on time-dependant tasks. I personally do not see this view as delusional or logically flawed. My approach to the problem may be different than the one you may choose, but it is still valid.
P.S. Dispite being a different individual than the parent of your post, while doing one thing at a time is not (to me) a 'complete waste of precious time', it is not using that time to it's fullest, either. If you have the capacity to do multiple things at once, and you do not do that, it can be viewed as wasting time.
Windows is not Open Source as most people use the term. Windows even goes so far as to call it's program Shared Source, which means you can look, but you cannot touch. I imagine there are even provisions in there that forbid you from working on competing open source projects such as Linux.
Of course, Windows is only Open Source once you pony up some dough, or have significant buying power in order to make Microsoft feel it's worth it. Joe Schmoe developer isn't going to be seeing Windows' source any time soon. If you doubt that, go download the source for us so we can see how easy it is.