The only criticism I have is that the $100 "fee" is actually too small. Spammers who are running those despicable pyramid schemes are likely to make far more than this.
I understand that the law in Washington State, U.S.A. allows people to sue for $500 for each spam with a forged return address that they receive. Your fee should be about this large.
I believe that you have a right to make spammers pay in this way. I pay for my net access at home. Each spam I receive costs me money. Why can't I take action to recover my costs?
To our American friends, good luck fighting this stupid law. (I'm Australian, I know about stupid laws. Internet Censorship, anyone?)
If the stupid law passes, however, here's a bit of fun that you can have. Have a Transfer of Licence Day, which will work like last February's Refund Day, except that a bunch of you get together and swamp a vendor with requests to transfer your licences to each other.
It might work like this. Suppose Fred and Barney both have licences for the same software from Vendor ABC. Fred contacts Vendor ABC for permission to transfer his licence to Barney, and Barney contacts the vendor for permission to transfer his licence to Fred. If enough people do this, a vendor would be swamped with requests, and a significant amount of the vendor's time can be spent fielding these requests. The worst-case scenario for a vendor is the cessation of normal business as they use all their resources handling the requests, in the real-world equivalent of a denial-of-service attack.
Maybe you could organise something similar before the stupid law passes, to demonstrate to vendors how stupid the law will be. Call it a Bogus Transfer of Licence Day.
The stupid law also needs a clause that states that the vendor cannot unreasonably withhold permission to transfer the licence. If I want to sell my computer and all its software to Fred, it would be unreasonable for the vendor to withhold permission, surely?
...and then our elected morons in the Government pass this stupid law.
To understand why this law was passed, you have to understand how the Senate works in Australia.
It is a form of proportional representation. As a result, minor parties often get seats in the Senate. This means that the Government does not have a majority in the Senate, and so to pass legislation, someone who is not with the Government must also vote for it. To pass, legislation needs a majority of votes. With 66 senators, legislation therefore needs 34 votes to pass.
Until June 30, the Senate is made up of 32 Coalition, ~21 Labor, ~9 Democrat, 2 Green and 2 independents. To pass legislation, the Government must enlist the support of some other group.
Politics in Australia is a bit complex at the moment as a result. This is allowing one of the independent Senators to push his own agenda, which has a lot of extremely restrictive views similar to that which passed yesterday.
On July 1, the new senate elected last October take their seats. The balance of power shifts to the Democrats, so we won't see more tightassed legislation like that. But the damage is done.
Suppose you have three galaxies equally spaced in a straight line. Call them A, O and B, with O in the middle. Suppose that these galaxies are far enough apart that galaxies A and B are each receding from O at 75% of the speed of light (c).
How fast is A receding from B?
Did you say 150% of c? Wrong!
Don't forget to take relativity into account. Apparently, the speed is 96% of c. Unfortunately, I forget the formula used to calculate this.
A few years ago, I was taken on a backstage tour of the Melbourne Planetarium. The highlight of the tour was seeing the computer that ran the whole planetarium show.
An Apple ][.
Apparently the software that ran the planetarium show worked well enough on the old Apple that upgrades to newer computers was unnecessary.
The Melbourne Planetarium is closed for the time being while a new museum is being constructed. I don't know if the Apple ][ will find a home in the new planetarium, or if it will move down the hall to become an exhibit in the museum.
It's a shame that it's limited to small business. Telstra (the phone company) would probably like a chance to upgrade the Vic 20's that they may still be using to control some of the telephone network. (I'm not kidding!)
Here's an idea that may help us to fight back against the evil spectre of MS-HTML. Write webcrawler software that searches the web for MS-HTML masquerading as HTML. Build a database of noncompliant web sites, along with a list of e-mail addresses of the authors. E-mail the authors of the web sites to alert them to the problem, and provide solutions.
Most people are unaware that the nonstandard HTML known as MS-HTML even exists, so if people are made aware of the problem they can fix it.
"Proprietary standards" is a contradiction in terms.
It is clear that this whole debacle is just another example of corporate propaganda. It makes you wonder just how many of the alleged "tests" that companies use to promote their products are truly independent tests, and how many are done by companies with the customer breathing down their necks.
As an aside, I remember reading about how the tests were done with about 140 machines running Windoze creating the load on the server. For a truly fair test, I would like to see the tests repeated with 140 Linux machines. Even better would be 140 assorted machines with completely unknown operating system configurations: Windoze95, Windoze98, Linux from various distributions, Macs and so forth. After all, isn't that what happens in the real world?
---
When you read anything on microsoft.com, remember: microsoft.com is the official organ of the Microsoft Corporation politburo
You don't necessarily need a very large telescope to achieve fine resolution. You can achieve the same effect by observing the same object with two widely-spaced telescopes, then combining the observations with a computer. This technique is called interferometry, and astronomers have been doing this for a while with radio telescopes. A group of telescopes is being constructed in Chile so that astronomers can perform interferometry at visible wavelengths.
Doug is right here. The astronomical community have hundreds or perhaps even thousands of stars under observation for planets. To detect a planet, the star must be observed to wobble throughout a whole orbit of the planet.
This is why we are observing a lot of 'hot Jupiters'. It only takes a few days to observe the star through a whole orbit of the planet, and like Doug says, these are the easiest to observe, discover and confirm.
As time passes, you will notice that planets which are discovered later orbit further from the parent star. In five to fifteen years, you'll be seeing reports of discoveries of extrasolar Jupiters at Jupiter's distance from the star, because it takes that long to get the data for a complete orbit. Thirty years of data are needed to spot planets at Saturn's distance.
These are what astronomers are looking for: extrasolar equivalents of Jupiter and Saturn around stars like the Sun. These would be solar systems like our own system, and they will then use the sensitive instruments that will doubtless be available in thirty years to examine these systems for Earthlike worlds.
Slashdot Mirror
"640K should be enough for anyone."
-- Attributed to Bill Gates, c. 1983.
"Linux would fizzle against Windows"
-- Bob Metcalfe, 1999.
I feel that this remark will come back to haunt him.
The only criticism I have is that the $100 "fee" is actually too small. Spammers who are running those despicable pyramid schemes are likely to make far more than this.
I understand that the law in Washington State, U.S.A. allows people to sue for $500 for each spam with a forged return address that they receive. Your fee should be about this large.
I believe that you have a right to make spammers pay in this way. I pay for my net access at home. Each spam I receive costs me money. Why can't I take action to recover my costs?
To our American friends, good luck fighting this stupid law. (I'm Australian, I know about stupid laws. Internet Censorship, anyone?)
If the stupid law passes, however, here's a bit of fun that you can have. Have a Transfer of Licence Day, which will work like last February's Refund Day, except that a bunch of you get together and swamp a vendor with requests to transfer your licences to each other.
It might work like this. Suppose Fred and Barney both have licences for the same software from Vendor ABC. Fred contacts Vendor ABC for permission to transfer his licence to Barney, and Barney contacts the vendor for permission to transfer his licence to Fred. If enough people do this, a vendor would be swamped with requests, and a significant amount of the vendor's time can be spent fielding these requests. The worst-case scenario for a vendor is the cessation of normal business as they use all their resources handling the requests, in the real-world equivalent of a denial-of-service attack.
Maybe you could organise something similar before the stupid law passes, to demonstrate to vendors how stupid the law will be. Call it a Bogus Transfer of Licence Day.
The stupid law also needs a clause that states that the vendor cannot unreasonably withhold permission to transfer the licence. If I want to sell my computer and all its software to Fred, it would be unreasonable for the vendor to withhold permission, surely?
Let's hope the stupid law doesn't pass.
...and then our elected morons in the Government pass this stupid law.
To understand why this law was passed, you have to understand how the Senate works in Australia.
It is a form of proportional representation. As a result, minor parties often get seats in the Senate. This means that the Government does not have a majority in the Senate, and so to pass legislation, someone who is not with the Government must also vote for it. To pass, legislation needs a majority of votes. With 66 senators, legislation therefore needs 34 votes to pass.
Until June 30, the Senate is made up of 32 Coalition, ~21 Labor, ~9 Democrat, 2 Green and 2 independents. To pass legislation, the Government must enlist the support of some other group.
Politics in Australia is a bit complex at the moment as a result. This is allowing one of the independent Senators to push his own agenda, which has a lot of extremely restrictive views similar to that which passed yesterday.
On July 1, the new senate elected last October take their seats. The balance of power shifts to the Democrats, so we won't see more tightassed legislation like that. But the damage is done.
Here's something fun to consider.
Suppose you have three galaxies equally spaced in a straight line. Call them A, O and B, with O in the middle. Suppose that these galaxies are far enough apart that galaxies A and B are each receding from O at 75% of the speed of light (c).
How fast is A receding from B?
Did you say 150% of c? Wrong!
Don't forget to take relativity into account. Apparently, the speed is 96% of c. Unfortunately, I forget the formula used to calculate this.
A few years ago, I was taken on a backstage tour of the Melbourne Planetarium. The highlight of the tour was seeing the computer that ran the whole planetarium show.
An Apple ][.
Apparently the software that ran the planetarium show worked well enough on the old Apple that upgrades to newer computers was unnecessary.
The Melbourne Planetarium is closed for the time being while a new museum is being constructed. I don't know if the Apple ][ will find a home in the new planetarium, or if it will move down the hall to become an exhibit in the museum.
It's a shame that it's limited to small business. Telstra (the phone company) would probably like a chance to upgrade the Vic 20's that they may still be using to control some of the telephone network. (I'm not kidding!)
Here's an idea that may help us to fight back against the evil spectre of MS-HTML. Write webcrawler software that searches the web for MS-HTML masquerading as HTML. Build a database of noncompliant web sites, along with a list of e-mail addresses of the authors. E-mail the authors of the web sites to alert them to the problem, and provide solutions.
Most people are unaware that the nonstandard HTML known as MS-HTML even exists, so if people are made aware of the problem they can fix it.
"Proprietary standards" is a contradiction in terms.
It is clear that this whole debacle is just another example of corporate propaganda. It makes you wonder just how many of the alleged "tests" that companies use to promote their products are truly independent tests, and how many are done by companies with the customer breathing down their necks.
As an aside, I remember reading about how the tests were done with about 140 machines running Windoze creating the load on the server. For a truly fair test, I would like to see the tests repeated with 140 Linux machines. Even better would be 140 assorted machines with completely unknown operating system configurations: Windoze95, Windoze98, Linux from various distributions, Macs and so forth. After all, isn't that what happens in the real world?
---
When you read anything on microsoft.com, remember:
microsoft.com is the official organ of the Microsoft Corporation politburo
You don't necessarily need a very large telescope to achieve fine resolution. You can achieve the same effect by observing the same object with two widely-spaced telescopes, then combining the observations with a computer. This technique is called interferometry, and astronomers have been doing this for a while with radio telescopes. A group of telescopes is being constructed in Chile so that astronomers can perform interferometry at visible wavelengths.
Doug is right here. The astronomical community have hundreds or perhaps even thousands of stars under observation for planets. To detect a planet, the star must be observed to wobble throughout a whole orbit of the planet.
This is why we are observing a lot of 'hot Jupiters'. It only takes a few days to observe the star through a whole orbit of the planet, and like Doug says, these are the easiest to observe, discover and confirm.
As time passes, you will notice that planets which are discovered later orbit further from the parent star. In five to fifteen years, you'll be seeing reports of discoveries of extrasolar Jupiters at Jupiter's distance from the star, because it takes that long to get the data for a complete orbit. Thirty years of data are needed to spot planets at Saturn's distance.
These are what astronomers are looking for: extrasolar equivalents of Jupiter and Saturn around stars like the Sun. These would be solar systems like our own system, and they will then use the sensitive instruments that will doubtless be available in thirty years to examine these systems for Earthlike worlds.