I think this must be a Gecko bug, because it gets it wrong but as soon as I start to resize the window it repositions it correctly. (This is Mozilla 1.1 in Win2k, at least.)
From tinkering a bit, the problem appears to be when there's not enough text on the page to fill the entire browser window. If there's a vertical scroll bar the menu works, otherwise the it breaks.
I'm not a BOA customer, but presumably there's an online privacy statement or a terms of use somewhere. It should state what information is collected and how they use it.
Have you read it?
If it doesn't say anything, just phone them up and ask them.
Out of interest, would you object to not being able to play your music at the specific time that someone else is playing a duplicate that you authorised for them to borrow? (Obviously this assumes it were possible to track.)
Well to me personally the difference is that the library has temporarily transferred the rights of listening to the music to the borrower. It can be clearly defined that when one person or entity has paid for the use of the music, and only one person or entity is using that music at any given time.
Software companies, even Microsoft, used to state in their standard EULA's that you were allowed to make several copies of their software as long as it was only being used in one location at any time. These allowances (which imho should be declared as implicit anyway) have now dissapeared from the EULA's -- possibly because the companies believe it's too hard or inefficient for them to enforce. Instead "independent" organisations like the BSA, the MPAA and the RIAA have been formed by the corporate cartels to crack down on and frighten by legal threats anyone doing what the company decides it doesn't like, under the guise of IP law and in a way that they hope will never be decided on at a court that actually matters.
A peer-to-peer information sharing network doesn't naturally have this transferral of rights, because the information isn't moved. It's copied. Letting someone else use it doesn't prevent you from using it at the same time. If you look at a typical peer-to-peer music sharing network, this is exactly what happens. A few people buy something, and their versions of it are duplicated and shared many times between many thousands of people, all of whom are using it simultaneously and independently when often very few people have actually paid for it. Irrespective of how right or wrong anyone might believe it to be, this is nothing like how a library works.
If at all possible, I'd prefer my ISP not to have to receive spam directed at me in the first place -- regardless of whether it stops it there.
The more traffic thrown at my ISP, the higher its costs, and the more I have to pay for my account. (I live outside the US; the Internet isn't heavily subsidised by the govt and traffic ain't free.)
Maybe we should just ditch the traditional email system altogether and go with a new system where it's natural to provide a list of people who are allowed to send you email. Make it an accepted process for any sender to have to get on your list before they can send you anything. People not on the list could contact you, but not without a whole lot more overhead to actually get through.
And why would it be so great to have them back? I just don't see why we they are spending so much money to try to bring back a dead animal, is it an ego thing?
Maybe because it's their money? Most people don't tell you what to do with your money.
I have such difficulty imagining what the high-ups at RIAA are thinking. Crushing diversity and turning broadcasters against them isn't going to help even them one single bit.
It's probably because the RIAA is not in the business of public relations. No matter how much people love or hate the RIAA, it's irrelevant. For 99 out of 100 people it's not going to change their good will or attitude towards a member organisation such as Sony.
It's the same reason the BSA doesn't care about making friends. It's not Sony who beats people up, after all.
That's one of the things I do whenever I give an address to someone I don't trust, but it still doesn't stop other people from giving out a main address that you want to use.
That's one of the irritating and arguably unethical things that sites like crushmaster and someonelikesyou do -- they corner people in such a way that they can't find out if it's you without entering your real address.
There are countless ways that you could have a 1/100 chance of losing a dollar. There's only one way that you could have a very tiny chance of being killed by this asteroid -- and it's likely that there's very little that you can do about it if it was going to.
Worry all that you want, but keep the worrying in perspective, knowing that a reasonable amount of observations are needed before a collision can be confirmed... and if it's not confirmed then there's virtually zero chance that it's going to happen.
Mozilla is not an end user browser, anyway. It was never intended to be, so I'm not sure why this is such an issue for people here. The end user products that should be reviewed are ones like Netscape.
A negative review from an end users perspective that criticises end user issues shouldn't be a cause for the mozilla development team to be worried in the slightest, with the possible exception of bad publicity towards people who don't understand that it's not intended for them.
I know this from a hunch, and therefore you owe me royalties.
If you don't want to pay them then prove to me that you're innocent. Sending me police-verified evidence of an approved ISP's logs should be sufficient.
I thought that first, but on a second reading it doesn't seem so obvious. I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that he's just annoyed at so many music streaming and trading services having been closed down. For all we know, he just wants something to trade non-corporate music.
From what he's said, he could easily just want a system for streaming fully legitimate mp3's, and simply be expressing disgust that the services that used to provide legal music are being shut down by bullies.
Stating that it's "enough to play your tunes to your mates" would also have to count in his favour.
Today's Friday where I live, so my slashdot persona is going to be in a more observational and theoretical mode.
I don't like the way ICANN presently works, but it seems a bit wrong for any government to decide it wants to usurp something independent that lots of others have devoted so much hard work and effort towards, just because it's successful. (On the other hand, I know this happens all the time.) I also don't have a whole lot of respect for the current South African government.
The ideal way for a government to deal with something like this in theory would be to set up its own DNS system in competition that's administered by the government under its own terms. Then it would try to convince people and ISP's, both in SA and everywhere else, to use it instead of the ICANN-authorised one. The biggest problem with doing this is that it could turn out to be risky if not completely impractical. There will probably always be people who will never allow anything other than ICANN to reach their users.
There have been lots of attempts at alternative DNS's set up against ICANN, but most haven't been incredibly successful scale-wise. Most of them haven't had a major organisation or government behind them, though. With the extra resources available though, is it technically feasible that a country could do something like set up an alternative DNS that people would trust if it chose to?
Be very careful
on
Crescent Sunset
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Be very careful if you ever do this. The retina in your eye doesn't have proper nerve endings, so it's quite possible for your eye to be wasting away without it immediately hurting. You may not notice all the damage until much too late.
Well, the question is a good one, so I won't ridicule you for asking it.
Thank you so much for not rideculing me. I can't help but feel entirely in your debt.
It's probably not the booting
on
Mars 1, Japan 0
·
· Score: 2
Without having looked at what's going on in any detail, it could be a combination of things.
If a spacecraft gets stranded without enough power to re-orientate itself, recharging it can be a big problem. If it can't look for whichever guide stars it needs, it might not know which way it's facing and that just adds to the problems.
With any luck, the solar panels might get enogh exposure naturally over several months (through its own momentum) to find out where it is, reset any necessary systems, and so on. This is probably the type of thing they're referring to. It won't be the boot time, it'll be getting the energy to be able to successfully boot.
And thats the point: So far we've only observed Gamma-bursters in young galaxies in the early stages of galaxy formation. Not in old galaxies like our own.
Yes you can argue that and it's very plausible that they might be a factor of a young Universe. I don't completely agree with the reasoning however, and there are other possibilities.
Most notably there are so many more far-away galaxies than nearby galaxies. More recent estimations based on the hubble deep field have placed it at possibly 80 billion galaxies, or at least something on that order. Nearly all of them are an incredibly long way away from us.
Even though there are lots of gamma ray bursters, it's no real surprise that any given event is likely to happen in a far away location from nearly every other point in the Universe. It's already been argued that gamma ray bursts have enough energy that it'll eventually be visible from everywhere no matter how far away it happens. The reason we're seeing so many of them is that we're (arguably) seeing about as far as it's possible to see.
Under this scenario, it's completely possible that gamma ray bursts happen in older galaxies, too. The only reason we haven't seen them yet is because there aren't enough older galaxies nearby to have justified the probability of it happening while we're here to watch. In an estimated 80 billion galaxies, we're only detecting about one burst per day, from an entirely random direction.
If we are seeing every one that happens within these 80 billion galaxies, and if you figure it out on a calculator, a typical galaxy would average a gamma ray burst about every 220 million years... if it was a uniform distribution throughout the life of the Universe.
I have read speculation that the peak gamma ray bursts tends to be *directional*, probably along the poles of the stars in question. If it happens to be pointing at you, you're toast, otherwise, it is survivable.
You could easily be right, and I think I remember hearing a bit about that. It's hard to get reliable information at the moment because nobody even noticed them until a few years ago. (Within the last decade.) And nobody really has an idea of what they are, except that they're massively huge amounts of energy.
BTW, ain't Beatlejuice due to go off soon? It is also really big.
Betelgeuse is getting close to the end of its life and it's expected to go supernova in the next few million years (really big stars only live for tens or hundreds of millions of years, anyway), but it's nowhere near as unusual as eta Carinae. Check out the writeup here:
The brightening remains mysterious, however, because the star is thought to be very close to its "Eddington limit," where light exerts so much outward pressure that gravity is just barely able to hold the star together. So any further brightening should produce an outrush of material. But an expanding burst of gas--although still too small to be seen directly--would cool like gas rushing out of a spray can. The cooling would strengthen the star's infrared signal and turn down the ultraviolet. But the full STIS spectra showed just the opposite pattern.
I guess that more or less demonstrates our present understanding of the Universe.:)
Space.com reports that life in the universe may be more rare than previously thought
I was recently reading up some more on gamma ray bursters, which are a recently discovered thing with explosions (so far only seen a very long way away) that appear to have an amount of energy equivalent to about the rest of the Universe put together.
There was a paper published in 1999 that theoriesed that every gamma ray burst was a galactic scale mass extinction event, and then attempted to extrapolate a rate that they occur locally in the Milky Way, then going on to suggest that because the rate is slowing down, we might be in a transition period for intelligent life appearing. It's all entirely theoretical, but it's an interesting read.
The good news is "at last we're here". The unfortunate bad news if the theory is correct is that because the last burst is somewhat overdue, we might not be here for much longer.
For what it's worth, there's a hugely massive star (eta carinae) about 7,000 to 10,000 light years away that's arguably ready to blow some time in the next million years. (If you're in the southern hemisphere it's a really nice thing to look at with binocs or better.) It's on the fringes of the theoretical limits of how massive a star can be, it's gone past the theoretical limits of the maximum amount of light that a star can possibly emit, and it's been suggested as a possible source of a future gamma ray burst in the Milky Way. Really though, nobody's quite sure what's about to happen. On the other hand we should probably be hoping that we're not nearby when it decides to go.
Is there any reason you think any self respecting court would actually go along with this?
Even with some of the more ludicrous judgements in the past, why would a court believe that something retailing for $80 could suddenly be worth $100,000?
Slashdot Mirror
I think this must be a Gecko bug, because it gets it wrong but as soon as I start to resize the window it repositions it correctly. (This is Mozilla 1.1 in Win2k, at least.)
From tinkering a bit, the problem appears to be when there's not enough text on the page to fill the entire browser window. If there's a vertical scroll bar the menu works, otherwise the it breaks.
Out of interest, how much of your time does it take?
I'm not a BOA customer, but presumably there's an online privacy statement or a terms of use somewhere. It should state what information is collected and how they use it.
Have you read it?
If it doesn't say anything, just phone them up and ask them.
Out of interest, would you object to not being able to play your music at the specific time that someone else is playing a duplicate that you authorised for them to borrow? (Obviously this assumes it were possible to track.)
Well to me personally the difference is that the library has temporarily transferred the rights of listening to the music to the borrower. It can be clearly defined that when one person or entity has paid for the use of the music, and only one person or entity is using that music at any given time.
Software companies, even Microsoft, used to state in their standard EULA's that you were allowed to make several copies of their software as long as it was only being used in one location at any time. These allowances (which imho should be declared as implicit anyway) have now dissapeared from the EULA's -- possibly because the companies believe it's too hard or inefficient for them to enforce. Instead "independent" organisations like the BSA, the MPAA and the RIAA have been formed by the corporate cartels to crack down on and frighten by legal threats anyone doing what the company decides it doesn't like, under the guise of IP law and in a way that they hope will never be decided on at a court that actually matters.
A peer-to-peer information sharing network doesn't naturally have this transferral of rights, because the information isn't moved. It's copied. Letting someone else use it doesn't prevent you from using it at the same time. If you look at a typical peer-to-peer music sharing network, this is exactly what happens. A few people buy something, and their versions of it are duplicated and shared many times between many thousands of people, all of whom are using it simultaneously and independently when often very few people have actually paid for it. Irrespective of how right or wrong anyone might believe it to be, this is nothing like how a library works.
If at all possible, I'd prefer my ISP not to have to receive spam directed at me in the first place -- regardless of whether it stops it there.
The more traffic thrown at my ISP, the higher its costs, and the more I have to pay for my account. (I live outside the US; the Internet isn't heavily subsidised by the govt and traffic ain't free.)
Maybe we should just ditch the traditional email system altogether and go with a new system where it's natural to provide a list of people who are allowed to send you email. Make it an accepted process for any sender to have to get on your list before they can send you anything. People not on the list could contact you, but not without a whole lot more overhead to actually get through.
Maybe because it's their money? Most people don't tell you what to do with your money.
It's probably because the RIAA is not in the business of public relations. No matter how much people love or hate the RIAA, it's irrelevant. For 99 out of 100 people it's not going to change their good will or attitude towards a member organisation such as Sony.
It's the same reason the BSA doesn't care about making friends. It's not Sony who beats people up, after all.
That's one of the things I do whenever I give an address to someone I don't trust, but it still doesn't stop other people from giving out a main address that you want to use.
That's one of the irritating and arguably unethical things that sites like crushmaster and someonelikesyou do -- they corner people in such a way that they can't find out if it's you without entering your real address.
Out of interest, will this finding have any impact on the effectiveness of present day cryptography?
You might be right, but I thought it was intended primarily for bug testers. Or am I only thinking of the builds that were pre-version-1.0?
There are countless ways that you could have a 1/100 chance of losing a dollar. There's only one way that you could have a very tiny chance of being killed by this asteroid -- and it's likely that there's very little that you can do about it if it was going to.
Worry all that you want, but keep the worrying in perspective, knowing that a reasonable amount of observations are needed before a collision can be confirmed... and if it's not confirmed then there's virtually zero chance that it's going to happen.
Mozilla is not an end user browser, anyway. It was never intended to be, so I'm not sure why this is such an issue for people here. The end user products that should be reviewed are ones like Netscape.
A negative review from an end users perspective that criticises end user issues shouldn't be a cause for the mozilla development team to be worried in the slightest, with the possible exception of bad publicity towards people who don't understand that it's not intended for them.
I know this from a hunch, and therefore you owe me royalties.
If you don't want to pay them then prove to me that you're innocent. Sending me police-verified evidence of an approved ISP's logs should be sufficient.
I thought that first, but on a second reading it doesn't seem so obvious. I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that he's just annoyed at so many music streaming and trading services having been closed down. For all we know, he just wants something to trade non-corporate music.
From what he's said, he could easily just want a system for streaming fully legitimate mp3's, and simply be expressing disgust that the services that used to provide legal music are being shut down by bullies.
Stating that it's "enough to play your tunes to your mates" would also have to count in his favour.
Today's Friday where I live, so my slashdot persona is going to be in a more observational and theoretical mode.
I don't like the way ICANN presently works, but it seems a bit wrong for any government to decide it wants to usurp something independent that lots of others have devoted so much hard work and effort towards, just because it's successful. (On the other hand, I know this happens all the time.) I also don't have a whole lot of respect for the current South African government.
The ideal way for a government to deal with something like this in theory would be to set up its own DNS system in competition that's administered by the government under its own terms. Then it would try to convince people and ISP's, both in SA and everywhere else, to use it instead of the ICANN-authorised one. The biggest problem with doing this is that it could turn out to be risky if not completely impractical. There will probably always be people who will never allow anything other than ICANN to reach their users.
There have been lots of attempts at alternative DNS's set up against ICANN, but most haven't been incredibly successful scale-wise. Most of them haven't had a major organisation or government behind them, though. With the extra resources available though, is it technically feasible that a country could do something like set up an alternative DNS that people would trust if it chose to?
Be very careful if you ever do this. The retina in your eye doesn't have proper nerve endings, so it's quite possible for your eye to be wasting away without it immediately hurting. You may not notice all the damage until much too late.
Thank you so much for not rideculing me. I can't help but feel entirely in your debt.
Without having looked at what's going on in any detail, it could be a combination of things.
If a spacecraft gets stranded without enough power to re-orientate itself, recharging it can be a big problem. If it can't look for whichever guide stars it needs, it might not know which way it's facing and that just adds to the problems.
With any luck, the solar panels might get enogh exposure naturally over several months (through its own momentum) to find out where it is, reset any necessary systems, and so on. This is probably the type of thing they're referring to. It won't be the boot time, it'll be getting the energy to be able to successfully boot.
Thanks for the info. Much appreciated.
Yes you can argue that and it's very plausible that they might be a factor of a young Universe. I don't completely agree with the reasoning however, and there are other possibilities.
Most notably there are so many more far-away galaxies than nearby galaxies. More recent estimations based on the hubble deep field have placed it at possibly 80 billion galaxies, or at least something on that order. Nearly all of them are an incredibly long way away from us.
Even though there are lots of gamma ray bursters, it's no real surprise that any given event is likely to happen in a far away location from nearly every other point in the Universe. It's already been argued that gamma ray bursts have enough energy that it'll eventually be visible from everywhere no matter how far away it happens. The reason we're seeing so many of them is that we're (arguably) seeing about as far as it's possible to see.
Under this scenario, it's completely possible that gamma ray bursts happen in older galaxies, too. The only reason we haven't seen them yet is because there aren't enough older galaxies nearby to have justified the probability of it happening while we're here to watch. In an estimated 80 billion galaxies, we're only detecting about one burst per day, from an entirely random direction.
If we are seeing every one that happens within these 80 billion galaxies, and if you figure it out on a calculator, a typical galaxy would average a gamma ray burst about every 220 million years... if it was a uniform distribution throughout the life of the Universe.
Again, it's all theory.
I have read speculation that the peak gamma ray bursts tends to be *directional*, probably along the poles of the stars in question. If it happens to be pointing at you, you're toast, otherwise, it is survivable.
You could easily be right, and I think I remember hearing a bit about that. It's hard to get reliable information at the moment because nobody even noticed them until a few years ago. (Within the last decade.) And nobody really has an idea of what they are, except that they're massively huge amounts of energy.
BTW, ain't Beatlejuice due to go off soon? It is also really big.
Betelgeuse is getting close to the end of its life and it's expected to go supernova in the next few million years (really big stars only live for tens or hundreds of millions of years, anyway), but it's nowhere near as unusual as eta Carinae. Check out the writeup here:
I guess that more or less demonstrates our present understanding of the Universe. :)
What makes you so sure that it hasn't already blown?
I was recently reading up some more on gamma ray bursters, which are a recently discovered thing with explosions (so far only seen a very long way away) that appear to have an amount of energy equivalent to about the rest of the Universe put together.
There was a paper published in 1999 that theoriesed that every gamma ray burst was a galactic scale mass extinction event, and then attempted to extrapolate a rate that they occur locally in the Milky Way, then going on to suggest that because the rate is slowing down, we might be in a transition period for intelligent life appearing. It's all entirely theoretical, but it's an interesting read.
The good news is "at last we're here". The unfortunate bad news if the theory is correct is that because the last burst is somewhat overdue, we might not be here for much longer.
For what it's worth, there's a hugely massive star (eta carinae) about 7,000 to 10,000 light years away that's arguably ready to blow some time in the next million years. (If you're in the southern hemisphere it's a really nice thing to look at with binocs or better.) It's on the fringes of the theoretical limits of how massive a star can be, it's gone past the theoretical limits of the maximum amount of light that a star can possibly emit, and it's been suggested as a possible source of a future gamma ray burst in the Milky Way. Really though, nobody's quite sure what's about to happen. On the other hand we should probably be hoping that we're not nearby when it decides to go.
It's just another theory.
Is there any reason you think any self respecting court would actually go along with this?
Even with some of the more ludicrous judgements in the past, why would a court believe that something retailing for $80 could suddenly be worth $100,000?