Seriously, Britain seems almost more paranoid about terrorism than the US.
While I think Britain has gone way overboard in its domestic surveillance and control efforts, it does have historical reason to be more paranoid about terrorism -- namely decades of IRA bombings. (The deservedness or not of which is a separate issue.)
You're assuming that one is not free to sell $X worth of Microsoft shares for $X. they Not at all. One is always free to offer to sell shares for whatever one can get -- but if some major former Yahoo shareholders decided to try to sell off their newly-acquired $X worth of Microsoft shares, the market would respond to the increased supply by lowering the bid price. Supply and demand.
No, it ain't, because the value of MS shares varies according to the whim of the market. Now, that could mean that $X worth (nominal, at the instantaneous market price) could be even better than $X, or it could be worse. Certainly if a lot of people thought that "you can just sell them the instant you get them", they'd be worse than cash because the sudden dump of shares for sale on the market would drag the price down. (You've also got to figure in broker fees, etc).
There's also the consideration that if it's MS that's offering the shares, then they're doing it from their own holdings -- thus diluting the value of existing stockholder-held MSFT shares.
All this uncertainty means risk, whis is a factor by which you have to discount the value of those MSFT shares being offered vs the "equivalent" value in cash. Personally, I'd rather just have the cash.
Well, if we're going to throw anecdotal evidence around...;-)
A few months ago I activated the Linux partion on each of my twin 9 year old boys' computers that I'd created when I set them up (older P-IIIs that had Windows on them), and set it up so they could dual-boot.
They love it -- they were already using Firefox and OpenOffice on the Windows side, so that's the same. They got addicted to some of the built in games (especially SuperTux). They'll occasionally boot up in Windows for one of their old "edutainment" games (I haven't bothered testing them under WINE) but generally they prefer Linux (w KDE), and they're pretty fearless about experimenting with it.
From TFA: "to tackle unforeseen natural disasters"
But then it goes on to talk about mostly foreseeable natural disasters. If you live on a flood plain or a low-lying coastal area subject to hurricanes, you're going to get flooded. In an earthquake zone you're going to get earthquakes. Lot of vegetation in an area that has dry spells, fires. And so on.
Legitimately unforeseen natural disasters would be things like a comet impact, volcanoes erupting in downtown LA, or perhaps alien invasion. Oh wait, that last would be an unnatural disaster, wouldn't it? But come to think of it, the ones I just mentioned have all been foreseen too.
I guess I just don't foresee a need for this software. Maybe they should work on software for foreseeable disasters.
You need to improve your reading skills; nowhere in my post did I use the word "solid", or any synonym thereof. (That meant "or any word that means the same thing as solid", in case you were confused.)
All that said, since the original study talked about the "caffeine equivalent" to a cup of coffee, they were probably talking about 100mg of caffeine, this being the number I've usually seen quoted for the caffeine content of a cup of coffee.
Of course, the real caffeine content of a cup of coffee is going to vary all over the place depending on both the size of the cup and the strength of the coffee, as the above post points out.
This page lists caffeine content for various coffees and other stuff. A cup (8oz) of instant coffee ranges from 27 to 173 mg caffeine (93mg avg). 8oz of generic brewed coffee has 102-200 mg (avg 133) caffeine. Starbucks and Einstein Bros come in at around 160 and 150mg per 8oz and Dunkin' Donuts at 103mg/8oz. The FDA limit on caffeine in colas is 71mg/12oz (about 47mg/8oz).
The study talks about caffeine, not coffee. They didn't get the rabbits to drink coffee, just gave them caffeine (the BBC summary doesn't explain how).
Plenty of sources of caffeine. If you really don't want to take it in a drink, just pick up a package of "Wake Ups" or "NoDoz" -- caffeine pills equivalent to a cup of strong coffee each. I used to take those for long all-night driving trips when I didn't want to drink that much coffee or caffeinated soda.
I always like movies of the Sun a lot better when they accurately show how gauzy the Sun actually is, because it's really a ball of gas, not as solid as pictures like that show.
I guess I have to congratulate you on finding several moderators stupid enough to mod that up insightful.
Yeah, the sun is a ball of gas -- a million miles in diameter and with enough pressure in the middle to not only cause fusion but to hold it in by gravitational pressure alone.
Addendum to above -- if the control system you want to hack into hasn't been inadvertently connected to the internet by some idiot (ie, it has air gaps separating all nodes from any internet-connected nodes, and of course no wifi), that's the kind of thing covert ops are good at. It doesn't take much to bridge two networks, and if done in an out-of-the-way spot that could go undetected for years, especially if the bridge just sits there passively listening for a special activation packet.
Computer science is maths. There are no fucking "bangs" in maths
Factorials aside, there are plenty of potential "bangs" in things controlled by computers. If someone is stupid enough (and plenty of people are) to allow any of these to be connected to the 'net, well then...
Consider, for example, power stations, refineries and similar chemical plants, air traffic control systems, (or even regular traffic control systems -- turn all the traffic lights in a city green in all directions, I guarantee you'll get some bangs). Now, you and I know there should be failsafes in such systems to prevent such things, and such systems should not be internet-accessible in the first place. You and I also know that it only takes one idiot to mess something like that up.
The high-tech is creating the 3-D screen in midair and only illuminating the selected parts.
That's where the smoke comes in, as in "it's all done with smoke and mirrors". Although water fog from one of those small ultrasonic foggers is used instead of smoke. For a better image, the water is doped with fluorescent dyes that need activation by two separate UV frequencies to light up; use two projectors and you can light up the voxels (3D pixels) at specific locations in the fog.
"Aye, Captain. We'll detune to the main phaser banks to 'illuminate', raster the beam and feed in the modulation signal via the main plasma conduit." "Well done, Scotty!" "But I must warn ye, Captain, if we pause the image it'll be etched into the side o' the mountain like a giant bas relief..."
At least you know the real world identity of the developers.
Only if you follow the chain of trust of the certs back to somebody you know (and everyone in that chain is really trustworthy).
It wouldn't surprise me at all to see signed malware out there, people tend to click through warnings as though they weren't there, especially so if they've been conditioned to by an OS that pops them up at the slightest provocation. ("Mouse movement detected, Accept or Deny?")
AIR makes it a lot easier for web developers to create apps on the desktop.
No it doesn't.
It makes it easier for web developers to create apps for AIR. If users don't have AIR installed on their desktops, it doesn't do a damn thing for web developers. Same with Flash and other non-standard (ie, proprietary) technologies.
If web developers want to create apps that run on my desktop, they'd better not be expecting third-party proprietary crap there to host it.
I've seen some discussion that the alleged bug in Lotus 1-2-3 never really existed, that Microsoft just made up "backwards compatibility" as an excuse for their own bug.
Shrug. I might even have an old DOS copy of Lotus 1-2-3 around somewhere, but it's not worth my time and effort to find out. At this point it doesn't matter whose fault it was originally, it should have been fixed a long time ago.
Are Groklaw, etc, really suggesting that several standards bodies in several nations are/all/ corrupt? And not one leak? Not one failed, incorruptible whistleblower?
Not at all. It's precisely because of the leaks and whistleblowers that we're aware of the corruption and interference that has taken place. And your "/all/ corrupt" is a strawman -- it doesn't require everyone in the standards body to be corrupted, just a few key individuals with influence over the voting process.
(Now, please put down the Microsoft talking points and step away from the keyboard.)
I don't see how its possible to publicly bribe so many board member in so many countries and get away with it.
See, you've missed half the trick right there. It's not a matter of bribing "so many board members", it's just a matter of getting the committee chairs on your side and having them get creative with the voting or vote recording process. You don't have to bribe all the members (or even most of them) if the chairperson can tell them "'no' votes aren't allowed" for obscure procedural reasons (Germany), or if they ignore an overwhelming 'no' vote (Norway), or if they can say that voting will be extended to allow email votes by those that didn't show up at the meeting -- and any that don't send email will be taken as a 'yes' vote (Poland).
As for swinging committee chairs to your side, here's a pretty good explanation of that process.
Then of course there's just stacking the working groups by having all your Microsoft-Partner business buddies decide to join up and take part.
Why does/. hate OOXML so much? Every time a story is ran about OOXML, everyone on/. seems to scream revolution and blasphemy.
1. It's a 6000-page spec (plus another 1500 or so pages in response to negative comments from the September ballot). For a facetious answer as to why/. hates that, see the results of the current poll about how many books a year slashdotters read.
2. It violates ISO guidelines in that rather than referring to existing standards wherever possible, it invents new (and broken) ones. E.g. MS vs ISO country codes, MS vs ISO date handling (including broken leap years), MS vs ISO color codes, MS vs ISO's math markup, etc, etc.
3. It's under-specified, e.g. tags like 'lineSpaceLikeWord95'.
4. Even assuming it were specified well enough to implement, such implementations would be at risk of Microsoft patents, notwithstanding Micosoft's so-called patent pledge (which amounts to promising not to sue hobbyist programmers who develop 100%-compliant code in their basements, but doesn't extend that promise to anyone else or to anyone sharing or actually using the code).
5. For more, see the thousand or so comments brought to the BRM and not individually addressed, or the hundreds of additional problems found with the spec since the BRM.
While some people probably wouldn't touch MS-OOXML even if it were perfect (and it's a long way from that) simply because it came from Microsoft, the vast majority of its nay-sayers are complaining about it's piss-poor technical quality, and would be doing so no matter who originally authored such a crappy spec.
Anyone who has ever had to try to develop software from a self-contradictory, ambiguous and incomplete specification -- which probably includes a fair percentage of slashdotters -- rightly runs screaming at the thought of this turd achieving ISO blessing. (Ditto for anyone who has ever had to try to use such software in conjunction with some other software a different team developed to the "same" spec.)
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, Britain seems almost more paranoid about terrorism than the US.
While I think Britain has gone way overboard in its domestic surveillance and control efforts, it does have historical reason to be more paranoid about terrorism -- namely decades of IRA bombings. (The deservedness or not of which is a separate issue.)
Most people who kill many characters on FPS are not going to kill real people.
There, fixed that for you. There have been a few notable exceptions.
You're assuming that one is not free to sell $X worth of Microsoft shares for $X.
they
Not at all. One is always free to offer to sell shares for whatever one can get -- but if some major former Yahoo shareholders decided to try to sell off their newly-acquired $X worth of Microsoft shares, the market would respond to the increased supply by lowering the bid price. Supply and demand.
$X worth of MS shares is just as good as $X.
No, it ain't, because the value of MS shares varies according to the whim of the market. Now, that could mean that $X worth (nominal, at the instantaneous market price) could be even better than $X, or it could be worse. Certainly if a lot of people thought that "you can just sell them the instant you get them", they'd be worse than cash because the sudden dump of shares for sale on the market would drag the price down. (You've also got to figure in broker fees, etc).
There's also the consideration that if it's MS that's offering the shares, then they're doing it from their own holdings -- thus diluting the value of existing stockholder-held MSFT shares.
All this uncertainty means risk, whis is a factor by which you have to discount the value of those MSFT shares being offered vs the "equivalent" value in cash. Personally, I'd rather just have the cash.
Well, if we're going to throw anecdotal evidence around... ;-)
A few months ago I activated the Linux partion on each of my twin 9 year old boys' computers that I'd created when I set them up (older P-IIIs that had Windows on them), and set it up so they could dual-boot.
They love it -- they were already using Firefox and OpenOffice on the Windows side, so that's the same. They got addicted to some of the built in games (especially SuperTux). They'll occasionally boot up in Windows for one of their old "edutainment" games (I haven't bothered testing them under WINE) but generally they prefer Linux (w KDE), and they're pretty fearless about experimenting with it.
From TFA: "to tackle unforeseen natural disasters"
But then it goes on to talk about mostly foreseeable natural disasters. If you live on a flood plain or a low-lying coastal area subject to hurricanes, you're going to get flooded. In an earthquake zone you're going to get earthquakes. Lot of vegetation in an area that has dry spells, fires. And so on.
Legitimately unforeseen natural disasters would be things like a comet impact, volcanoes erupting in downtown LA, or perhaps alien invasion. Oh wait, that last would be an unnatural disaster, wouldn't it? But come to think of it, the ones I just mentioned have all been foreseen too.
I guess I just don't foresee a need for this software. Maybe they should work on software for foreseeable disasters.
You need to improve your reading skills; nowhere in my post did I use the word "solid", or any synonym thereof. (That meant "or any word that means the same thing as solid", in case you were confused.)
All that said, since the original study talked about the "caffeine equivalent" to a cup of coffee, they were probably talking about 100mg of caffeine, this being the number I've usually seen quoted for the caffeine content of a cup of coffee.
Of course, the real caffeine content of a cup of coffee is going to vary all over the place depending on both the size of the cup and the strength of the coffee, as the above post points out.
This page lists caffeine content for various coffees and other stuff. A cup (8oz) of instant coffee ranges from 27 to 173 mg caffeine (93mg avg). 8oz of generic brewed coffee has 102-200 mg (avg 133) caffeine. Starbucks and Einstein Bros come in at around 160 and 150mg per 8oz and Dunkin' Donuts at 103mg/8oz. The FDA limit on caffeine in colas is 71mg/12oz (about 47mg/8oz).
Personally, I don't like the taste of the stuff,
The study talks about caffeine, not coffee. They didn't get the rabbits to drink coffee, just gave them caffeine (the BBC summary doesn't explain how).
Plenty of sources of caffeine. If you really don't want to take it in a drink, just pick up a package of "Wake Ups" or "NoDoz" -- caffeine pills equivalent to a cup of strong coffee each. I used to take those for long all-night driving trips when I didn't want to drink that much coffee or caffeinated soda.
I always like movies of the Sun a lot better when they accurately show how gauzy the Sun actually is, because it's really a ball of gas, not as solid as pictures like that show.
I guess I have to congratulate you on finding several moderators stupid enough to mod that up insightful.
Yeah, the sun is a ball of gas -- a million miles in diameter and with enough pressure in the middle to not only cause fusion but to hold it in by gravitational pressure alone.
"Gauzy" my butt.
It's worse that than. Those damn oval buttons keep giving me flashbacks of OpenLook.
Hey Slashdot, the 1980s called, they want their GUI back.
Addendum to above -- if the control system you want to hack into hasn't been inadvertently connected to the internet by some idiot (ie, it has air gaps separating all nodes from any internet-connected nodes, and of course no wifi), that's the kind of thing covert ops are good at. It doesn't take much to bridge two networks, and if done in an out-of-the-way spot that could go undetected for years, especially if the bridge just sits there passively listening for a special activation packet.
Computer science is maths. There are no fucking "bangs" in maths
Factorials aside, there are plenty of potential "bangs" in things controlled by computers. If someone is stupid enough (and plenty of people are) to allow any of these to be connected to the 'net, well then...
Consider, for example, power stations, refineries and similar chemical plants, air traffic control systems, (or even regular traffic control systems -- turn all the traffic lights in a city green in all directions, I guarantee you'll get some bangs). Now, you and I know there should be failsafes in such systems to prevent such things, and such systems should not be internet-accessible in the first place. You and I also know that it only takes one idiot to mess something like that up.
That's funny, I don't see Microsoft on that list anywhere...
isn't there a law about making money off of somebody else's product without their permission?
Sure, that's why independant mechanics aren't allowed to work on your car, and nobody is allowed to sell after-market add-ons. Oh, wait...
The high-tech is creating the 3-D screen in midair and only illuminating the selected parts.
That's where the smoke comes in, as in "it's all done with smoke and mirrors". Although water fog from one of those small ultrasonic foggers is used instead of smoke. For a better image, the water is doped with fluorescent dyes that need activation by two separate UV frequencies to light up; use two projectors and you can light up the voxels (3D pixels) at specific locations in the fog.
"Aye, Captain. We'll detune to the main phaser banks to 'illuminate', raster the beam and feed in the modulation signal via the main plasma conduit."
"Well done, Scotty!"
"But I must warn ye, Captain, if we pause the image it'll be etched into the side o' the mountain like a giant bas relief..."
At least you know the real world identity of the developers.
Only if you follow the chain of trust of the certs back to somebody you know (and everyone in that chain is really trustworthy).
It wouldn't surprise me at all to see signed malware out there, people tend to click through warnings as though they weren't there, especially so if they've been conditioned to by an OS that pops them up at the slightest provocation. ("Mouse movement detected, Accept or Deny?")
AIR makes it a lot easier for web developers to create apps on the desktop.
No it doesn't.
It makes it easier for web developers to create apps for AIR. If users don't have AIR installed on their desktops, it doesn't do a damn thing for web developers. Same with Flash and other non-standard (ie, proprietary) technologies.
If web developers want to create apps that run on my desktop, they'd better not be expecting third-party proprietary crap there to host it.
That's not even counting the various reps from companies that are Microsoft Partners.
I've seen some discussion that the alleged bug in Lotus 1-2-3 never really existed, that Microsoft just made up "backwards compatibility" as an excuse for their own bug.
Shrug. I might even have an old DOS copy of Lotus 1-2-3 around somewhere, but it's not worth my time and effort to find out. At this point it doesn't matter whose fault it was originally, it should have been fixed a long time ago.
Are Groklaw, etc, really suggesting that several standards bodies in several nations are /all/ corrupt? And not one leak? Not one failed, incorruptible whistleblower?
Not at all. It's precisely because of the leaks and whistleblowers that we're aware of the corruption and interference that has taken place. And your "/all/ corrupt" is a strawman -- it doesn't require everyone in the standards body to be corrupted, just a few key individuals with influence over the voting process.
(Now, please put down the Microsoft talking points and step away from the keyboard.)
I don't see how its possible to publicly bribe so many board member in so many countries and get away with it.
See, you've missed half the trick right there. It's not a matter of bribing "so many board members", it's just a matter of getting the committee chairs on your side and having them get creative with the voting or vote recording process. You don't have to bribe all the members (or even most of them) if the chairperson can tell them "'no' votes aren't allowed" for obscure procedural reasons (Germany), or if they ignore an overwhelming 'no' vote (Norway), or if they can say that voting will be extended to allow email votes by those that didn't show up at the meeting -- and any that don't send email will be taken as a 'yes' vote (Poland).
As for swinging committee chairs to your side, here's a pretty good explanation of that process.
Then of course there's just stacking the working groups by having all your Microsoft-Partner business buddies decide to join up and take part.
The end product is about the same.
Why does /. hate OOXML so much? Every time a story is ran about OOXML, everyone on /. seems to scream revolution and blasphemy.
/. hates that, see the results of the current poll about how many books a year slashdotters read.
1. It's a 6000-page spec (plus another 1500 or so pages in response to negative comments from the September ballot). For a facetious answer as to why
2. It violates ISO guidelines in that rather than referring to existing standards wherever possible, it invents new (and broken) ones. E.g. MS vs ISO country codes, MS vs ISO date handling (including broken leap years), MS vs ISO color codes, MS vs ISO's math markup, etc, etc.
3. It's under-specified, e.g. tags like 'lineSpaceLikeWord95'.
4. Even assuming it were specified well enough to implement, such implementations would be at risk of Microsoft patents, notwithstanding Micosoft's so-called patent pledge (which amounts to promising not to sue hobbyist programmers who develop 100%-compliant code in their basements, but doesn't extend that promise to anyone else or to anyone sharing or actually using the code).
5. For more, see the thousand or so comments brought to the BRM and not individually addressed, or the hundreds of additional problems found with the spec since the BRM.
While some people probably wouldn't touch MS-OOXML even if it were perfect (and it's a long way from that) simply because it came from Microsoft, the vast majority of its nay-sayers are complaining about it's piss-poor technical quality, and would be doing so no matter who originally authored such a crappy spec.
Anyone who has ever had to try to develop software from a self-contradictory, ambiguous and incomplete specification -- which probably includes a fair percentage of slashdotters -- rightly runs screaming at the thought of this turd achieving ISO blessing. (Ditto for anyone who has ever had to try to use such software in conjunction with some other software a different team developed to the "same" spec.)