Furthermore, 7% would pay $20M to go to the Space Station
Isn't it wonderful that so many governments of the world have harmoniously combined to build us a novelty hotel for everyone to visit in a prime piece of real estate?
Oh, wait. What was that massively blown out investment supposed to be for again?
Not true... there are so many more factors to take into consideration when it comes to earthquakes. The depth, the type (rollers are much worse), the distance, etc.
I couldn't agree more.
We had a 6.9 here on the 21st of August last year, and people barely felt a thing. A few months before that there was a bigger one (somewhere in the 7's) that's unfortunately rolled off the linked page. Again, not much was felt at all.
There wasn't any notable damage in either of them. This could partly be put down to the very strict local building codes that are there in anticipation of a big Earthquake being due, but that hardly made a difference in these cases.
5.2 doesn't mean anything. There could be a very destructive 5.2 earthquake, or all the other factors could combine to make it almost invisible.
Min. req. these days for comet hunting is about a 20" or 22" obsession scope.
Until he died earlier this year, Yuji Hyakutake found comets with his 25x150 binoculars. Even then though, usually it's rewarding just tracking down and finding these things that the professionals find. Having a big telescope doesn't hurt, but it's not absolutely necessary. What really helps is keen eyesight, a certain amount of patience and experience, and an extremely good knowledge of what the sky and background stars should look like in whatever region you're looking.
Big telescopes aren't that much of a big thing, either. I know several people with 20"+ telescopes on homebuilt dobsonian mounts... and they are monster amateur telescopes, with the main significant expenses being the mirror and the time to build it. Apart from that it's just having somewhere to put it. I'm not suggesting that it's something for everyone, but it's hardly out of reach, either.
Amateurs looking at the SOHO images on the Web have found 76 percent of the 428 new comets that have turned up in SOHO images.
This is hardly unusual. When it comes down to it, amateurs do more than 76 percent of virtually everything practical in astronomy already. Professionals frequently work with amateurs to get and confirm results, and a lot of professional astronomers also do things as amateurs (for fun) when they're not working. Then amateurs keep up with the professional findings, and everyone gets something out of it.
Astronomy is probably one of the only sciences left where amateur hobbyists can and do still contribute so much useful effort towards it.
There's just not enough funding for astronomy and space science to do anywhere near everything that can be done. For example, to get time on any big telescope, a professional has to write up a massive report and convince a board that it's worth researching what they want to do. They often have to book it many months or years in advance for possibly one or two nights of viewing. If there are circumstances like bad weather, it's often just treated as bad luck.
That's about the state of professional astronomy. The resources are so limited that there's a massive reliance on data submitted by and work done by amateurs. Professionals can't watch all the sky all the time. Lots of supernovae, comets and asteroids in the past have been discovered by amateurs from their back yard, reported, and confirmed by professionals before (sometimes) being studied further.
I don't know why you'd want to sit in front of a computer studying photographs all the time when you can go out with a telescope. It's so much more fun and rewarding to be actually doing something, and you actually meet people when you get involved, which is more than most people get from sitting in front of a computer. But I probably feel that way because I'm an amateur astronomer.
The basic idea behind the ACM code of ethics, which was first developed in the 1960's (but has been amended many times since) is to avoid being specific or definitive in any way. There are good reasons for this that were published in an ACM paper titled "Rules for Ethics in Information Processing", by Donn B. Parker in the ACM journal for March, 1968, describing the reasons that the code of ethics was designed how it is.
If you look at the code of ethics carefully, there are virtually no declarations in the entire thing that state "thou shalt not" or "thou shalt". If there's anything that says that, it puts the judgement of what it means on the member themselves.
When it comes down to it, the code of ethics is more of a requirement that ACM members use their common sense and do what they truly believe is right and ethical in a way that is within reason acceptable to society. Every single person has their own idea of what is ethical, and the boundaries are very fuzzy. As soon as you start drawing lines, you create as many problems as you solve.
It has been used in the past to kick people out of the organisation. I think one of the first times it was used was to dismiss a member who'd put workarounds in some banking software so that his own account had certain financial advantages over everyone else's... or something similar. He was put before a committee representing ACM, he couldn't ethicly justify what he'd done in a way that satisfied the committee, and so he was thrown out.
The ACM paper above is a good read about why it isn't a good idea to have a strict code of ethics. Personally I think the ACM approach is a good way to do it.
There are several good reasons to study Pluto ASAP, not the least of which is the changing of the seasons. It's not really a Pluto mission as much as it's a Kuiper Belt mission. Among other things:
The Kuiper Belt is believed to be very representative of where comets come from, so studying Kuiper objects will give a much better insight into comets and what they are. This could also help with plans for any opssible doomsday-avoiding strategy. (I'll leave it up to you whether you consider that important or not.)
Pluto isn't just a Kuiper Belt object, it's also the one that we know most about having tracked and studied it from Earth since it was discovered in 1930. Any information returned can be correlated with existing information.
The plan isn't just to study Pluto. It also includes flying past several other Kuiper Belt objects.
JPL's had some high profile failures lately, and maybe that's why you think there's a lot that can go wrong. But New Horizons is a flyby mission, and by JPL standards it's easy, and it's been done heaps of times before 100% successfully. There's probably a much better chance today of this thing working than there is in the next Mars rovers working.
And anyway, how much would scuttling this mission help to explore Mars, which compared to this tiny mission already has a massive armada of effort and funding going into it? Maybe we'd get there a couple of months faster.. except we wouldn't anyway because the optimal launch window would stay where it was.
If the law firms and large corporations aren't going to risk it, perhaps someone with enough resources could take it to court playing devil's advocate for the DMCA.
Force it to be tested at higher courts and be ruled unconstitutional so that corporations can't keep using it to bully people around without having to test it.
Even the most die-hard Microsoft supporters will admit that Linux is viable on the desktop right now.
Even the most die-hard Linux supporters will admit that Windows is viable on the desktop right now. Unfortunately it has to be better before most people will consider it a reasonable alternative. It also needs better marketing, because effective (not necessarily honest) marketing is so often what decides the purchasing decisions that people and businesses make. Whether or not GNU fans want to sell their soul and push boundaries to gain market share is another issue, though.
Microsoft supporters usually cite "migration costs" or "training costs", or other shortsighted reasons why people should not switch to Linux.
This is shortsighted because corporations and organisations come and go -> If switching costs is the only thing in favor of Windows, then it will lose slowly, but steadily.
I'll agree that it's shortsighted, but I also don't see a serious difference between Linux supporters citing "software purchasing costs", which for the most part is just a fixed cost in the first place. Once you've bought it, you have it.
I've had Win98 on one of my boxes for three years, I've installed the updates when they came along, and it hasn't cost me much more than what I paid for it. It's the ongoing maintenance that's the big cost to a lot of businesses. Linux usually requires much higher paid and harder to find staff than Windows requires...
Yes it's partly because of the education system and the Microsoft monopoly and the unfair popularity of winmodems from companies that don't release alternative drivers, but it's true. And it's unlikely to be too difficult to put together an argument showing this to be more expensive than the occasional Microsoft upgrade.
Personally I like using linux/bsd/unix/whatever more than Windows. But I think it's naive to talk about free software as an inevitable dinosaur that will soon rise up and thwart Microsoft out of existence. Five years ago, people were saying that exactly that would happen within months, and people never stop saying it. It also never really happens.
When it comes down to it, Microsoft is full of very smart (albeit cut-throat competitive) business people who, whatever you might read around slashdot, are not stupid. Microsoft could be split in half and it'd still come out on top one way or another. This doesn't mean that Microsoft doesn't make mistakes or that people won't switch away from Microsoft products; all of that is just part of the calculated risk taking that any business does. But it's not going to collapse under its own stupidity any time soon.
But this article draws statistics from all over the place - are you saying that all of the (tens) of them are biased sources? Have you read the article?
Yes I have, although I haven't crawled through it several times in meticulous detail. All I'm really trying to say is that whatever overall point you're trying to prove, there will normally be a truckload of statistics that will support it if used and presented selectively and in the right way. All that needs to be done is to adjust the argument to fit the statistics that are available.
Only a large business can afford to do a proper evaluation, for most SMEs it's much easier and quicker to use evaluations that someone else has done.
I won't argue against that as it's completely true. On the other hand, I wouldn't trust this article for a reasonable evaluation of open source verses closed source any more than I'd trust the Microsoft marketing department to provide a reasonable evaluation.
It's disappointing that the marketing and selling points dominate when managers make decisions. Unfortunately that's what the two opposing viewpoints idea results in -- the loss of lots of actually useful information through commercial lobbying. But for better or worse that's exactly what this article contributes to, imho.
Basically statistics and anecdotes can be used to prop up either side of the argument if one so chose.
I was about to say exactly the same thing before realising you've already said it, so instead I'll just support your comment.
The "real data" in this article is nothing more than statistics that are being presented from a biased source whose primary intention is to prove a point rather than fairly weigh out two options. It wouldn't be difficult to find alternative "real data" that supported Microsoft and other closed source alternatives in the same way. In effect it doesn't say much useful about whether OSS is better than closed source.
Any given business really needs to evaluate the options for itself before it can know what the most appropriate option is. Maybe they'll decide open source is a good choice, it it might not be, but at least they would have done a proper evaluation instead of living off the lobbying that's now coming from both sides.
If this article is useful for anything, it might be to convince someone that OSS shouldn't be thought of as a write-off that's not worth considering.
I'll concede that there are lots of people buying telescopes today compared with what there were a while ago, but as someone who's on the organising committee of an astronomical society, most of the people I see doing this are people who wouldn't have had one at all some time ago. The main reason they purchased a cheap telescope from a dealer, who incidently knew nothing about astronomy or telescopes, is because they also knew very little about astronomy. There are occasional exceptions, but when you buy a cheap telescope, you're usually sacrificing quality optics, and many who joined the society later discovered that the they'd purchased wasn't everything they wanted in the end.
On the other hand, nearly everyone who obtained a telescope after being a member for a few months has found it much more economical to either build their own, or have someone else do it. This doesn't mean they always do, because sometimes people want a more expensive commercial scope for doing more advanced stuff. There's so much you can do with a homebuilt dobsonian though, that most people have one at some point.
The seven or eight telescope building experts in the region probably each know more about telescope building than all of the commercial dealers put together. In most cases, they're in their own part time business of grinding high quality mirrors (or lenses) which they on-sell to amateur astronomers keen on building the rest of the scope themselves. People go to them because they provide higher quality equipment than most cheap machine-made equipment.
It does not take a genius to figure out that "$150 a textbook" or "$15 a CD" is not the fair market price, nor does it take a genius to figure out that such price gouging depends on the active collusion of sellers to the customer's disadvantage.
Maybe I've had different experience, but on some occasions I think it is reasonable to expect a large amount to be charged for a text book. Mostly because they're so often specialist books that cost a lot to produce (not just authoring, but layout, general publishing and organising, etc), and in the end there could be very few copies sold. The most successful textbooks are the ones that get chosen as course material, meaning lots of people suddenly want it. I won't comment on the professors writing their own texts, since I mostly agree with that bit.
But anyway, having said that, the mass marketed popular books that lots of people buy sell for anything from about $9.95 up. So by this analogy it should be reasonable for mass marketed popular CD's to sell for about $2, whereas less common niche market music might sell for a bit more.
I think there's a technical fault going on with at least some international Yahoo sites at the moment.
I've just been to check my marketing preferences, and there were no options listed. The page was there, a check-all link was on the page, and there was a save button, but there weren't any options listed.
Furthermore I went to check the terms of service. I was told that I'd have to agree to a new terms of service for Australia and New Zealand "described below", but apart from that statement there was a blank page with an Accept/Deny button at the bottom. All I can conclude is that there's been a technical error or they've withdrawn their terms of service. (I'm betting on the former for obvious reasons.)
It is 100% reversible if you have the one-time-pad that caused the all-zero output to be generated. Assuming the method was XOR, the one-time-pad in this case would have coincidently been the exact inverse of the original message.
This is how one-time-pads work, and it's how they've been proven to be unbreakable if it's completely random and used in a flawless way that prevents outsiders from seeing the pad. (That's where the biggest problem is, and what makes them inconvenient.)
Having a one-time-pad that was generated by an algorithm is quite dodgy. Straight away it opens up the possibility of someone finding a way to figure out the algorithm and inputs that have been used to generate the pad.
Given enough example pads to work with, don't rule out someone spotting a pattern and figuring it out. Looking for recurring patterns that were generated by algorithms has been one of the most successful ways of breaking cryptography in the past.
Even if your driver's license, medical record, credit card and passport are all on one card, that doesn't mean that the police and immigration officials can read your medical history or that the doctor can see how many tickets you've received or how much money you have.
I'm always a bit skeptical about the security of digital ID cards when you're relying on the person reading the card to not-be-able-to-read certain information, since it's always possible that they've altered their equipment or (if necessary) they've arranged to obtain certain encryption keys from other organisations allowing them to get information they shouldn't have.
One thing I'd really like to see is for the information available at any time to be controlled by the person with the card, and directly from the card. So if I want to make sure my digital photograph was hidden I could adjust a setting on the card and it would block that information from any reader unconditionally.
It wouldn't solve issues like the storing of obtained information in central databases, but it'd be a good start.
Well firstly like others have pointed out, Antares is nothing like 500,000 light years away. That's a 1000-fold error and lazy journalism on CNN's part.
As for when it's going to happen, the stellar time scale is so big compared with what we're used to that it really comes down to a guess. This is figured out based on studying other stars and coming up with theories about the life cycles that they follow... and the theories are always being revised and revised and revised as more information pours in.
Antares is a red giant star that's used up all it's hydrogen, and now it's fusing together heavier and heavier elements, and starting to run out. It might die tommorrow or it might die a million years from now. All that's known at the moment is that it's very near to the end of its life cycle, and that it's massive enough such that when it dies it'll likely go out with a very big bang, probably about as bright for a while as the rest of the Galaxy put together. (We see this happen with stars in other galaxies every so often when an unknown star that couldn't be seen individually suddenly lights up out of nowhere.)
I can't say much for the rest, but most astronomers I know, me included, would put G first, as long as 'explore' doesn't necessarily mean 'colonise' or even visit. (Given they're astronomers I'm sure it's predictible so far.)
They would then proceed to slash the budget of the International Space Station which for the last few years has been a massive drain on space exploration funding for no obvious scientific benefit that can't be achieved more efficiently in some other way.
The main benefit of the ISS is for political and international relations, and that's the budget slice that it should be diverting.
I just wanted to say thanks heaps for writing it. I've been following SVG for about the last year or so, but at the moment it's very difficult to get hold of documentation about it apart from the official W3C specifications. It's great to finally see some books coming out finally, and especially since I'm now working at a place where I'm trying to convince my boss to go down the SVG route.
It's good to see the Mozilla developers taking it up and the next thing I'm hoping for is that Microsoft will start supporting it natively in IE so there's no plugin required. It's a bit awkward though that there's currently only about seven references to SVG in the entire MSDN.
I haven't looked it up, but from what I understand it's perfectly okay to sell a region-specific DVD player. On the other hand, there's nothing the big publishers can do to prevent you from taking your DVD player to the shop downtown and having it de-regionised to play DVD's for other regions, I've definitely seen shops and electrical technicians advertising that particular service in the past. Region encoding was in some way ruled as an anticompetitive practice, I think, but I don't have it as firsthand information.
I'm guessing but it probably came in about the same time that all the parallel importing restrictions were lifted a decade or so ago. They were temporarily put back for movie material a few weeks ago by the Labour government on the grounds of "protecting local cinema" from all of the currently released movies coming in on parallel-imported DVD's at the same time. That said, I'm not sure whether that actually involves de-regionising of DVD players or if it's actually just importing the videos and DVD's to New Zealand in the first place. I suspect it's only the latter.
I noticed the other week that Wellington library even advises on the shelves that some marked DVD's they loan might not play in region 4 players, so if it's not legal (but I think it is) then I guess there's some significant civil disobedience coming from local government employees.
Can anyone with a better understanding expand on this?
It's not so much the fraud possibility that concerns me, since I think it's at least reasonable to assume that most companies won't go out of their way to break the law so obviously.
I'm more worried about the fact that they might be storing it at all. Whenever another company stores personal information about me, it means that I'm required to trust someone else to look after it properly. For every other entity who has personal information about someone, there's another entity that it can be stolen from.
VX2 has been trying hard to go unnoticed but even if they hadn't, why should anyone have to assume that the security on their system won't be cracked? Even if it does seem that they're taking reasonable precautions, nobody should feel obligated to trust them.
All it takes is for one wrong person to get bulk personal information and do a little data mining, and five years from now your name, address and estimated income could be on a regionally sorted list being sold on the black market.
Well according to the Wired story given above, AudioGalaxy stopped including it due to unpaid bills of Onflow Corporation, who were including it in their third party add-in to AG Satellite. It wasn't removed because of any complaints, although perhaps there wasn't much opportunity to react to complaints anyway.
If this is true then I guess it could mean that AudioGalaxy didn't know what they were including at the time, which I don't personally think is an acceptable excuse but it might explain why the installation opt-out screen allowed opting out of other third party spyware but didn't even mention this one.
Luckily the story's not completely past its use-by date, since there are lots of people out there who still have vx2.dll installed. I found it on my windows partition the other day when I saw the story on k5.
And to get vx2 to disassociate your personal data
on
Spyware in Audio Galaxy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
..from you, you can fill in this online form. Any volunteers? By the look of it, I don't think I'll personally be filling in that form anytime soon.:)
This thing was really nasty with how much it spies on a user's everyday activities, and I was surprised that slashdot didn't report it sooner. There's the word of a very dubious company's word that they'll purge any bank account numbers that they accidently collect from keylogging your online forms to get them before you submit over an SSL connection, but they might as well be storing and mining all of the email you write to people.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it wonderful that so many governments of the world have harmoniously combined to build us a novelty hotel for everyone to visit in a prime piece of real estate?
Oh, wait. What was that massively blown out investment supposed to be for again?
Wow. Have you considered writing a letter to Business Week stating all of this?
I couldn't agree more.
We had a 6.9 here on the 21st of August last year, and people barely felt a thing. A few months before that there was a bigger one (somewhere in the 7's) that's unfortunately rolled off the linked page. Again, not much was felt at all.
There wasn't any notable damage in either of them. This could partly be put down to the very strict local building codes that are there in anticipation of a big Earthquake being due, but that hardly made a difference in these cases.
5.2 doesn't mean anything. There could be a very destructive 5.2 earthquake, or all the other factors could combine to make it almost invisible.
Until he died earlier this year, Yuji Hyakutake found comets with his 25x150 binoculars. Even then though, usually it's rewarding just tracking down and finding these things that the professionals find. Having a big telescope doesn't hurt, but it's not absolutely necessary. What really helps is keen eyesight, a certain amount of patience and experience, and an extremely good knowledge of what the sky and background stars should look like in whatever region you're looking.
Big telescopes aren't that much of a big thing, either. I know several people with 20"+ telescopes on homebuilt dobsonian mounts... and they are monster amateur telescopes, with the main significant expenses being the mirror and the time to build it. Apart from that it's just having somewhere to put it. I'm not suggesting that it's something for everyone, but it's hardly out of reach, either.
This is hardly unusual. When it comes down to it, amateurs do more than 76 percent of virtually everything practical in astronomy already. Professionals frequently work with amateurs to get and confirm results, and a lot of professional astronomers also do things as amateurs (for fun) when they're not working. Then amateurs keep up with the professional findings, and everyone gets something out of it.
Astronomy is probably one of the only sciences left where amateur hobbyists can and do still contribute so much useful effort towards it.
There's just not enough funding for astronomy and space science to do anywhere near everything that can be done. For example, to get time on any big telescope, a professional has to write up a massive report and convince a board that it's worth researching what they want to do. They often have to book it many months or years in advance for possibly one or two nights of viewing. If there are circumstances like bad weather, it's often just treated as bad luck.
That's about the state of professional astronomy. The resources are so limited that there's a massive reliance on data submitted by and work done by amateurs. Professionals can't watch all the sky all the time. Lots of supernovae, comets and asteroids in the past have been discovered by amateurs from their back yard, reported, and confirmed by professionals before (sometimes) being studied further.
I don't know why you'd want to sit in front of a computer studying photographs all the time when you can go out with a telescope. It's so much more fun and rewarding to be actually doing something, and you actually meet people when you get involved, which is more than most people get from sitting in front of a computer. But I probably feel that way because I'm an amateur astronomer.
The basic idea behind the ACM code of ethics, which was first developed in the 1960's (but has been amended many times since) is to avoid being specific or definitive in any way. There are good reasons for this that were published in an ACM paper titled "Rules for Ethics in Information Processing", by Donn B. Parker in the ACM journal for March, 1968, describing the reasons that the code of ethics was designed how it is.
If you look at the code of ethics carefully, there are virtually no declarations in the entire thing that state "thou shalt not" or "thou shalt". If there's anything that says that, it puts the judgement of what it means on the member themselves.
When it comes down to it, the code of ethics is more of a requirement that ACM members use their common sense and do what they truly believe is right and ethical in a way that is within reason acceptable to society. Every single person has their own idea of what is ethical, and the boundaries are very fuzzy. As soon as you start drawing lines, you create as many problems as you solve.
It has been used in the past to kick people out of the organisation. I think one of the first times it was used was to dismiss a member who'd put workarounds in some banking software so that his own account had certain financial advantages over everyone else's... or something similar. He was put before a committee representing ACM, he couldn't ethicly justify what he'd done in a way that satisfied the committee, and so he was thrown out.
The ACM paper above is a good read about why it isn't a good idea to have a strict code of ethics. Personally I think the ACM approach is a good way to do it.
There are several good reasons to study Pluto ASAP, not the least of which is the changing of the seasons. It's not really a Pluto mission as much as it's a Kuiper Belt mission. Among other things:
And anyway, how much would scuttling this mission help to explore Mars, which compared to this tiny mission already has a massive armada of effort and funding going into it? Maybe we'd get there a couple of months faster.. except we wouldn't anyway because the optimal launch window would stay where it was.
If the law firms and large corporations aren't going to risk it, perhaps someone with enough resources could take it to court playing devil's advocate for the DMCA.
Force it to be tested at higher courts and be ruled unconstitutional so that corporations can't keep using it to bully people around without having to test it.
Even the most die-hard Linux supporters will admit that Windows is viable on the desktop right now. Unfortunately it has to be better before most people will consider it a reasonable alternative. It also needs better marketing, because effective (not necessarily honest) marketing is so often what decides the purchasing decisions that people and businesses make. Whether or not GNU fans want to sell their soul and push boundaries to gain market share is another issue, though.
I'll agree that it's shortsighted, but I also don't see a serious difference between Linux supporters citing "software purchasing costs", which for the most part is just a fixed cost in the first place. Once you've bought it, you have it.
I've had Win98 on one of my boxes for three years, I've installed the updates when they came along, and it hasn't cost me much more than what I paid for it. It's the ongoing maintenance that's the big cost to a lot of businesses. Linux usually requires much higher paid and harder to find staff than Windows requires...
Yes it's partly because of the education system and the Microsoft monopoly and the unfair popularity of winmodems from companies that don't release alternative drivers, but it's true. And it's unlikely to be too difficult to put together an argument showing this to be more expensive than the occasional Microsoft upgrade.
Personally I like using linux/bsd/unix/whatever more than Windows. But I think it's naive to talk about free software as an inevitable dinosaur that will soon rise up and thwart Microsoft out of existence. Five years ago, people were saying that exactly that would happen within months, and people never stop saying it. It also never really happens.
When it comes down to it, Microsoft is full of very smart (albeit cut-throat competitive) business people who, whatever you might read around slashdot, are not stupid. Microsoft could be split in half and it'd still come out on top one way or another. This doesn't mean that Microsoft doesn't make mistakes or that people won't switch away from Microsoft products; all of that is just part of the calculated risk taking that any business does. But it's not going to collapse under its own stupidity any time soon.
That's how I feel about it, anyway.
Yes I have, although I haven't crawled through it several times in meticulous detail. All I'm really trying to say is that whatever overall point you're trying to prove, there will normally be a truckload of statistics that will support it if used and presented selectively and in the right way. All that needs to be done is to adjust the argument to fit the statistics that are available.
I won't argue against that as it's completely true. On the other hand, I wouldn't trust this article for a reasonable evaluation of open source verses closed source any more than I'd trust the Microsoft marketing department to provide a reasonable evaluation.
It's disappointing that the marketing and selling points dominate when managers make decisions. Unfortunately that's what the two opposing viewpoints idea results in -- the loss of lots of actually useful information through commercial lobbying. But for better or worse that's exactly what this article contributes to, imho.
I was about to say exactly the same thing before realising you've already said it, so instead I'll just support your comment.
The "real data" in this article is nothing more than statistics that are being presented from a biased source whose primary intention is to prove a point rather than fairly weigh out two options. It wouldn't be difficult to find alternative "real data" that supported Microsoft and other closed source alternatives in the same way. In effect it doesn't say much useful about whether OSS is better than closed source.
Any given business really needs to evaluate the options for itself before it can know what the most appropriate option is. Maybe they'll decide open source is a good choice, it it might not be, but at least they would have done a proper evaluation instead of living off the lobbying that's now coming from both sides.
If this article is useful for anything, it might be to convince someone that OSS shouldn't be thought of as a write-off that's not worth considering.
All that I can honestly say to that is that if the US has such a great software ecosystem, why is there so much inbreeding?
I'll concede that there are lots of people buying telescopes today compared with what there were a while ago, but as someone who's on the organising committee of an astronomical society, most of the people I see doing this are people who wouldn't have had one at all some time ago. The main reason they purchased a cheap telescope from a dealer, who incidently knew nothing about astronomy or telescopes, is because they also knew very little about astronomy. There are occasional exceptions, but when you buy a cheap telescope, you're usually sacrificing quality optics, and many who joined the society later discovered that the they'd purchased wasn't everything they wanted in the end.
On the other hand, nearly everyone who obtained a telescope after being a member for a few months has found it much more economical to either build their own, or have someone else do it. This doesn't mean they always do, because sometimes people want a more expensive commercial scope for doing more advanced stuff. There's so much you can do with a homebuilt dobsonian though, that most people have one at some point.
The seven or eight telescope building experts in the region probably each know more about telescope building than all of the commercial dealers put together. In most cases, they're in their own part time business of grinding high quality mirrors (or lenses) which they on-sell to amateur astronomers keen on building the rest of the scope themselves. People go to them because they provide higher quality equipment than most cheap machine-made equipment.
Maybe I've had different experience, but on some occasions I think it is reasonable to expect a large amount to be charged for a text book. Mostly because they're so often specialist books that cost a lot to produce (not just authoring, but layout, general publishing and organising, etc), and in the end there could be very few copies sold. The most successful textbooks are the ones that get chosen as course material, meaning lots of people suddenly want it. I won't comment on the professors writing their own texts, since I mostly agree with that bit.
But anyway, having said that, the mass marketed popular books that lots of people buy sell for anything from about $9.95 up. So by this analogy it should be reasonable for mass marketed popular CD's to sell for about $2, whereas less common niche market music might sell for a bit more.
I think there's a technical fault going on with at least some international Yahoo sites at the moment.
I've just been to check my marketing preferences, and there were no options listed. The page was there, a check-all link was on the page, and there was a save button, but there weren't any options listed.
Furthermore I went to check the terms of service. I was told that I'd have to agree to a new terms of service for Australia and New Zealand "described below", but apart from that statement there was a blank page with an Accept/Deny button at the bottom. All I can conclude is that there's been a technical error or they've withdrawn their terms of service. (I'm betting on the former for obvious reasons.)
It is 100% reversible if you have the one-time-pad that caused the all-zero output to be generated. Assuming the method was XOR, the one-time-pad in this case would have coincidently been the exact inverse of the original message.
This is how one-time-pads work, and it's how they've been proven to be unbreakable if it's completely random and used in a flawless way that prevents outsiders from seeing the pad. (That's where the biggest problem is, and what makes them inconvenient.)
Having a one-time-pad that was generated by an algorithm is quite dodgy. Straight away it opens up the possibility of someone finding a way to figure out the algorithm and inputs that have been used to generate the pad.
Given enough example pads to work with, don't rule out someone spotting a pattern and figuring it out. Looking for recurring patterns that were generated by algorithms has been one of the most successful ways of breaking cryptography in the past.
I'm always a bit skeptical about the security of digital ID cards when you're relying on the person reading the card to not-be-able-to-read certain information, since it's always possible that they've altered their equipment or (if necessary) they've arranged to obtain certain encryption keys from other organisations allowing them to get information they shouldn't have.
One thing I'd really like to see is for the information available at any time to be controlled by the person with the card, and directly from the card. So if I want to make sure my digital photograph was hidden I could adjust a setting on the card and it would block that information from any reader unconditionally.
It wouldn't solve issues like the storing of obtained information in central databases, but it'd be a good start.
Well firstly like others have pointed out, Antares is nothing like 500,000 light years away. That's a 1000-fold error and lazy journalism on CNN's part.
As for when it's going to happen, the stellar time scale is so big compared with what we're used to that it really comes down to a guess. This is figured out based on studying other stars and coming up with theories about the life cycles that they follow... and the theories are always being revised and revised and revised as more information pours in.
Antares is a red giant star that's used up all it's hydrogen, and now it's fusing together heavier and heavier elements, and starting to run out. It might die tommorrow or it might die a million years from now. All that's known at the moment is that it's very near to the end of its life cycle, and that it's massive enough such that when it dies it'll likely go out with a very big bang, probably about as bright for a while as the rest of the Galaxy put together. (We see this happen with stars in other galaxies every so often when an unknown star that couldn't be seen individually suddenly lights up out of nowhere.)
Nobody knows exactly when it'll happen, though.
I can't say much for the rest, but most astronomers I know, me included, would put G first, as long as 'explore' doesn't necessarily mean 'colonise' or even visit. (Given they're astronomers I'm sure it's predictible so far.)
They would then proceed to slash the budget of the International Space Station which for the last few years has been a massive drain on space exploration funding for no obvious scientific benefit that can't be achieved more efficiently in some other way.
The main benefit of the ISS is for political and international relations, and that's the budget slice that it should be diverting.
(I take it you mean this book.)
I just wanted to say thanks heaps for writing it. I've been following SVG for about the last year or so, but at the moment it's very difficult to get hold of documentation about it apart from the official W3C specifications. It's great to finally see some books coming out finally, and especially since I'm now working at a place where I'm trying to convince my boss to go down the SVG route.
It's good to see the Mozilla developers taking it up and the next thing I'm hoping for is that Microsoft will start supporting it natively in IE so there's no plugin required. It's a bit awkward though that there's currently only about seven references to SVG in the entire MSDN.
I haven't looked it up, but from what I understand it's perfectly okay to sell a region-specific DVD player. On the other hand, there's nothing the big publishers can do to prevent you from taking your DVD player to the shop downtown and having it de-regionised to play DVD's for other regions, I've definitely seen shops and electrical technicians advertising that particular service in the past. Region encoding was in some way ruled as an anticompetitive practice, I think, but I don't have it as firsthand information.
I'm guessing but it probably came in about the same time that all the parallel importing restrictions were lifted a decade or so ago. They were temporarily put back for movie material a few weeks ago by the Labour government on the grounds of "protecting local cinema" from all of the currently released movies coming in on parallel-imported DVD's at the same time. That said, I'm not sure whether that actually involves de-regionising of DVD players or if it's actually just importing the videos and DVD's to New Zealand in the first place. I suspect it's only the latter.
I noticed the other week that Wellington library even advises on the shelves that some marked DVD's they loan might not play in region 4 players, so if it's not legal (but I think it is) then I guess there's some significant civil disobedience coming from local government employees.
Can anyone with a better understanding expand on this?
It's not so much the fraud possibility that concerns me, since I think it's at least reasonable to assume that most companies won't go out of their way to break the law so obviously.
I'm more worried about the fact that they might be storing it at all. Whenever another company stores personal information about me, it means that I'm required to trust someone else to look after it properly. For every other entity who has personal information about someone, there's another entity that it can be stolen from.
VX2 has been trying hard to go unnoticed but even if they hadn't, why should anyone have to assume that the security on their system won't be cracked? Even if it does seem that they're taking reasonable precautions, nobody should feel obligated to trust them.
All it takes is for one wrong person to get bulk personal information and do a little data mining, and five years from now your name, address and estimated income could be on a regionally sorted list being sold on the black market.
Well according to the Wired story given above, AudioGalaxy stopped including it due to unpaid bills of Onflow Corporation, who were including it in their third party add-in to AG Satellite. It wasn't removed because of any complaints, although perhaps there wasn't much opportunity to react to complaints anyway.
If this is true then I guess it could mean that AudioGalaxy didn't know what they were including at the time, which I don't personally think is an acceptable excuse but it might explain why the installation opt-out screen allowed opting out of other third party spyware but didn't even mention this one.
Luckily the story's not completely past its use-by date, since there are lots of people out there who still have vx2.dll installed. I found it on my windows partition the other day when I saw the story on k5.
This thing was really nasty with how much it spies on a user's everyday activities, and I was surprised that slashdot didn't report it sooner. There's the word of a very dubious company's word that they'll purge any bank account numbers that they accidently collect from keylogging your online forms to get them before you submit over an SSL connection, but they might as well be storing and mining all of the email you write to people.
From slashdot:
But from the article:
And from slashdot:
Uh, yeah. Whatever.