My kids were watching the Scooby-Doo 2 movie the other day. There's a scene where Daphne activates a fingerprint activated lock by dusting the scanner with blush powder (highlighting the latent fingerprint from its last use) then using a pore-strip over her own finger to provide the right body temperature/capacitance/whatever without her fingerprint confusing the sensor.
I was amused to see that the technology's weaknesses had made it to the Scooby-Doo level already. I don't know if that exact combination would work, but I've heard of similar successful attacks.
DNA now that is good, and it is something difficult to duplicate.
I dunno, DNA wants to duplicate, although that's not what you meant.
In terms of different individuals having the same DNA, talk to identical twins. About all DNA tests can really do is disprove that someone with non-matching DNA is guilty. DNA "matches" don't compare 100% of the DNA (even if they did, that doesn't rule out twins), and close relatives may well "match" also (and the fewer comparison points, the less-close the relative that could still "match").
If you make everything a crime, then everyone is a criminal.
Bingo.
Insert Ferris's monologue from "Atlas Shrugged" here.
(Oh, alright, here:
"Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris.
"We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it...
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
"Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.
"Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
IBM has only promised not to sue over their ODF patents. Sun has only promised not to sue over their ODF patents.
These promises are legally binding. If IBM or Sun were to attempt to sue someone over these (alleged) patents, the defendant could raise the defenses of promissory estoppel and laches.
On the other hand, Microsofts promises to fix MS-OOXML are empty. What are you going to do, sue them if they don't? Similarly, Microsoft's "promise" about not suing over use of their patents to implement MS-OOXML compliant software comes with a long list of conditions, caveats and exceptions, which boil down to them not suing if you're only developing the software for your own amusement, and only then if it's 100% compliant. If you share or sell that software, or actually use it for anything, or it's not 100% compliant, they've reserved the right to sue your ass off.
In what way is the relationship of a user with his tool of any benefit to the tool? How can any non-living object be said to derive a benefit from anything?
For example, it would be correct to say "That man and his pacemaker share a symbiotic relationship".
See, you're doing it yourself. That's just animism, although perhaps unconcious animism.
What does the pacemaker get out of it? If it were an organism, gaining a warm place to live and an energy supply tapped from the host in exchange for its pacemaking, that would indeed be a symbiotic relationship. Since the pacemaker is just a machine -- a tool --, it's not.
(If the (mechanical) pacemaker doesn't get anything from it, does that mean the man is a parasite of the pacemaker? Ridiculous.)
It's a fancy toaster, guys, get over yourselves. It's like having a symbiotic relationship with a swiss army knife.
I'd expect this kind of mystical crap from people who don't understand technology and view it all through Clarke's 3rd Law filters ("indistinguishable from magic"), just as any other primitives do when imbuing things they don't understand with mystical spirits. So is Dextre the god of space robotics now? I weep for the NASA that used to be.
It doesn't. Grandparent misspoke, he should have said that all(?) Earth life except primates evolved from Thrint foodyeast. Primates evolved from the survivors of a failed Pak colonization attempt.
Of course it's entirely possible that Pak evolved from foodyeast too, in which case the GP is correct.
And it can hardly be coincidence that you fail to mention its atomic number is also 42!
Not only that, but when you multiply six by nine (in base ten), you get 54 -- which is the average number of neutrons in a molybdenum nucleus. (Is there anyone here that does not know that 6x9=42 in base 13?)
I'd say that the Vorkosigan stories are harder sci-fi than most. Sure, you've got to allow Bujold faster-than-light travel/communications, but everything else is pretty consistent. It's a far cry from space opera, even if it doesn't have rivets. A lot of her stories revolve (indirectly) around biology, and there she's on pretty solid (if speculative) ground.
If you want to restrict "hard" sci-fi to stuff that doesn't break any laws of physics (or any other science) as we currently understand them, then you're pretty much talking about what I think these days is called "Mundane SF" -- a phrase which to me is an oxymoron.
You're ignoring the quite significant number of people who wouldn't buy a Mac unless there's Office for it.
I'm sure there are some people like that. Can you cite a source for that number being "quite significant"?
(Even if it were, that thought process guarantees Microsoft a sale of Office. While no doubt they'd rather have both, I'm sure they'd happily take a multi-hundred dollar sale of Office at the expense of, what, $50 tops for an OEM pre-install sale of Windows on the few percent of the market that Apple hardware represents. That's a riskier proposition for Linux, because (a) there's no data on how many people would buy Office for Linux if it were even available, and (b) 90% (or whatever the non-Apple share of the PC market is) is a much bigger potential hit to Windows sales than 10% is.)
Only in the initial purchase of hardware, which is not the context of the discussion. The great(n)-grandparent post wondered why Microsoft would create a version of Office for Mac but not for Linux.
Once the Mac sale is made, making Office available for it increases the potential pool of Office sales without hurting Windows sales. Making Office available for Linux could have a severe impact on Windows sales. If it were possible to install OS X on a (non-Apple) PC that might otherwise run Windows, Microsoft might well reconsider making Office available for it (especially if this could cut into the pre-install market, but Jobs is unlikely to ever allow that).
Years later, Xbox is pretty much the center of the console market.
No it ain't, unless you're defining that market as the subset of the real console market focused on games that could as easily by played on a PC. Probably the real center of the market (in unit sales) is the Nintendo Wii with its innovative controller. (Just checked online; February '08 sales for Wii were 432,000 vs Xbox 360's 254,600).
The games available for the Wii are attracting people that would never consider your traditional console games (especially not first-person shooters). There was something in the newspaper recently about bowling leagues of all things built up around the Wii's virtual bowling game, made up of the kind of AARP crowd that Xbox doesn't cater to.
OS X is much more of a competitor to Windows than Linux,
No. You can't (legally or easily) load OS X onto your generic or HP, Dell or Lenovo PC. OS X only runs on Apple hardware, therefore it does not compete with Windows in the non-Apple hardware space. Linux does.
Citizens with valid and accurate papers are perfectly capable of entering a federal building with evil intent.
Heck, citizens with valid papers and evil intent don't even need to enter a federal building to cause harm. Timothy McVeigh just parked his Ryder truck full of ANFO in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City.
The bit about preventing non-RealID holders from entering federal buildings has nothing to do with securing the buildings and everything to do with extorting compliance with RealID.
There is no Controller, only a model (the DB) and the View (the document). You fetch the data from the database and mailmerge it.
Who or what is "you" in this case? That's the Controller. Something has to control which data is selected from the model and how it is viewed. There's always a controller, but sometimes it's horribly intertwined with one or both of the other parts.
Sorry, they can't throttle a protocol without selectively looking at the content of the packets they're transmitting. To Comcast it should all be TCP/IP (or UDP) packets. If they're throttling Torrent-flavored (or FTP or HTTP) TCP/IP packets, then they're selecting based on content.
In my industry, alphas are pretend feature complete, with tons of obvious problems.
Then please, tell us your industry so that the rest of us can steer clear of it, and anything that software might influence.
Betas should also be actually feature complete, with the only issues remaining being bugs
See, some of us grew up with the concept that eliminating or avoiding bugs was more important than adding features. After all, what the hell good is a bell or a whistle on something that never runs long enough to make use of said bells or whistles? Clearly marketing-run companies have a different viewpoint, which is why software (or hardware, for that matter, and not just in the computer field) from marketing-run companies is often crap.
But the beta process is there to eliminate the brave earlier adopter problems
No, see, that's what an alpha release is for. Beta releases are supposed to be damned near final, what in these days of release grade inflation is now called a "release candidate". This is why "/.'ers like to discount MS's beta process as a bunch of rubbish"; because for those of us that remember, it is.
"And traditionally it has worked as an alpha process"
It's not as simple as that. Lasers aren't like really powerful flashlights, there are qualitatively different effects when something is hit by an intense laser beam vs just being hit by an intense beam of incoherent light.
Look up "laser supported detonation", for one example. And white paint or foil reflecting 70% of the energy doesn't help much if the other 30% burns/boils/detonates that layer in a fraction of a second.
But tell you what, we'll let you build a wall out of branches and sod and then you stand behind it while someone fires a multi-megawatt laser at it. Nothing to worry about, right?
That's a nice POV you've got here, but it conveniently ignore the "well regulated" part. Well regulated. Regular forces. See the pattern?
Talk to the Supreme Court, its their POV. Also refer to what "regulated" meant in common usage in the 18th century; it doesn't mean what you think it means.
Regular forces are what's referred to as a "standing army", something the Constitution has some very particular things to say about.
Slashdot Mirror
My kids were watching the Scooby-Doo 2 movie the other day. There's a scene where Daphne activates a fingerprint activated lock by dusting the scanner with blush powder (highlighting the latent fingerprint from its last use) then using a pore-strip over her own finger to provide the right body temperature/capacitance/whatever without her fingerprint confusing the sensor.
I was amused to see that the technology's weaknesses had made it to the Scooby-Doo level already. I don't know if that exact combination would work, but I've heard of similar successful attacks.
DNA now that is good, and it is something difficult to duplicate.
I dunno, DNA wants to duplicate, although that's not what you meant.
In terms of different individuals having the same DNA, talk to identical twins. About all DNA tests can really do is disprove that someone with non-matching DNA is guilty. DNA "matches" don't compare 100% of the DNA (even if they did, that doesn't rule out twins), and close relatives may well "match" also (and the fewer comparison points, the less-close the relative that could still "match").
Bingo.
Insert Ferris's monologue from "Atlas Shrugged" here.
(Oh, alright, here:
-- Ayn Rand, 'Atlas Shrugged' (1957))
How has having the network being owned by a Corporation stopped comms being illegally spied on by the US Gov?
See Qwest for one (and perhaps the only) example.
IBM has only promised not to sue over their ODF patents. Sun has only promised not to sue over their ODF patents.
These promises are legally binding. If IBM or Sun were to attempt to sue someone over these (alleged) patents, the defendant could raise the defenses of promissory estoppel and laches.
On the other hand, Microsofts promises to fix MS-OOXML are empty. What are you going to do, sue them if they don't? Similarly, Microsoft's "promise" about not suing over use of their patents to implement MS-OOXML compliant software comes with a long list of conditions, caveats and exceptions, which boil down to them not suing if you're only developing the software for your own amusement, and only then if it's 100% compliant. If you share or sell that software, or actually use it for anything, or it's not 100% compliant, they've reserved the right to sue your ass off.
That would be George Washington Carver Rodrigues LaFitte, the black Hispanic Frenchman who invented a method of storing binary data ao a peanut?
"While he was living in St. Petersberg, so it was clearly a Russian inwention."
-- Ensign Chekov
"A relationship of mutual benefit or dependence."
In what way is the relationship of a user with his tool of any benefit to the tool? How can any non-living object be said to derive a benefit from anything?
For example, it would be correct to say "That man and his pacemaker share a symbiotic relationship".
See, you're doing it yourself. That's just animism, although perhaps unconcious animism.
What does the pacemaker get out of it? If it were an organism, gaining a warm place to live and an energy supply tapped from the host in exchange for its pacemaking, that would indeed be a symbiotic relationship. Since the pacemaker is just a machine -- a tool --, it's not.
(If the (mechanical) pacemaker doesn't get anything from it, does that mean the man is a parasite of the pacemaker? Ridiculous.)
Symbiotic relationship? Man/machine partnership? Ambassadors? Hand-in-robotic-hand? WTF?
It's a fancy toaster, guys, get over yourselves. It's like having a symbiotic relationship with a swiss army knife.
I'd expect this kind of mystical crap from people who don't understand technology and view it all through Clarke's 3rd Law filters ("indistinguishable from magic"), just as any other primitives do when imbuing things they don't understand with mystical spirits. So is Dextre the god of space robotics now? I weep for the NASA that used to be.
It doesn't. Grandparent misspoke, he should have said that all(?) Earth life except primates evolved from Thrint foodyeast. Primates evolved from the survivors of a failed Pak colonization attempt.
Of course it's entirely possible that Pak evolved from foodyeast too, in which case the GP is correct.
And it can hardly be coincidence that you fail to mention its atomic number is also 42!
Not only that, but when you multiply six by nine (in base ten), you get 54 -- which is the average number of neutrons in a molybdenum nucleus. (Is there anyone here that does not know that 6x9=42 in base 13?)
Hmm...
Also, this makes me wonder what those eukaryotes were doing for the first 2 billion years.
Mostly "not existing". Eukaryotes didn't appear until around 1.5 to 2 billion years ago -- about 2 billion years after prokaryotes arose.
You're right, my bad. It's been a while since I read a Vorkosigan, Bujold isn't writing enough of them ;-)
In the Vorkosigan saga (I know, not hard sci-fi)
I'd say that the Vorkosigan stories are harder sci-fi than most. Sure, you've got to allow Bujold faster-than-light travel/communications, but everything else is pretty consistent. It's a far cry from space opera, even if it doesn't have rivets. A lot of her stories revolve (indirectly) around biology, and there she's on pretty solid (if speculative) ground.
If you want to restrict "hard" sci-fi to stuff that doesn't break any laws of physics (or any other science) as we currently understand them, then you're pretty much talking about what I think these days is called "Mundane SF" -- a phrase which to me is an oxymoron.
You're ignoring the quite significant number of people who wouldn't buy a Mac unless there's Office for it.
I'm sure there are some people like that. Can you cite a source for that number being "quite significant"?
(Even if it were, that thought process guarantees Microsoft a sale of Office. While no doubt they'd rather have both, I'm sure they'd happily take a multi-hundred dollar sale of Office at the expense of, what, $50 tops for an OEM pre-install sale of Windows on the few percent of the market that Apple hardware represents. That's a riskier proposition for Linux, because (a) there's no data on how many people would buy Office for Linux if it were even available, and (b) 90% (or whatever the non-Apple share of the PC market is) is a much bigger potential hit to Windows sales than 10% is.)
OS X absolutely is a competitor to Windows
Only in the initial purchase of hardware, which is not the context of the discussion. The great(n)-grandparent post wondered why Microsoft would create a version of Office for Mac but not for Linux.
Once the Mac sale is made, making Office available for it increases the potential pool of Office sales without hurting Windows sales. Making Office available for Linux could have a severe impact on Windows sales. If it were possible to install OS X on a (non-Apple) PC that might otherwise run Windows, Microsoft might well reconsider making Office available for it (especially if this could cut into the pre-install market, but Jobs is unlikely to ever allow that).
You think buying a PS3 makes sense? Instead of a standalone player?
You tell me.
Prices from walmart.com just now:
Sony BDP-300 BluRay player: $378.88 (sale price)
Sony PS3 40GB game console: $399.00
Five percent more for a game console with BD player vs just a BD player? Why not?
(Now, when/if BD player prices ever come down to something reasonable, that logic changes.)
Years later, Xbox is pretty much the center of the console market.
No it ain't, unless you're defining that market as the subset of the real console market focused on games that could as easily by played on a PC. Probably the real center of the market (in unit sales) is the Nintendo Wii with its innovative controller. (Just checked online; February '08 sales for Wii were 432,000 vs Xbox 360's 254,600).
The games available for the Wii are attracting people that would never consider your traditional console games (especially not first-person shooters). There was something in the newspaper recently about bowling leagues of all things built up around the Wii's virtual bowling game, made up of the kind of AARP crowd that Xbox doesn't cater to.
OS X is much more of a competitor to Windows than Linux,
No. You can't (legally or easily) load OS X onto your generic or HP, Dell or Lenovo PC. OS X only runs on Apple hardware, therefore it does not compete with Windows in the non-Apple hardware space. Linux does.
Citizens with valid and accurate papers are perfectly capable of entering a federal building with evil intent.
Heck, citizens with valid papers and evil intent don't even need to enter a federal building to cause harm. Timothy McVeigh just parked his Ryder truck full of ANFO in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City.
The bit about preventing non-RealID holders from entering federal buildings has nothing to do with securing the buildings and everything to do with extorting compliance with RealID.
There is no Controller, only a model (the DB) and the View (the document). You fetch the data from the database and mailmerge it.
Who or what is "you" in this case? That's the Controller. Something has to control which data is selected from the model and how it is viewed. There's always a controller, but sometimes it's horribly intertwined with one or both of the other parts.
Sorry, they can't throttle a protocol without selectively looking at the content of the packets they're transmitting. To Comcast it should all be TCP/IP (or UDP) packets. If they're throttling Torrent-flavored (or FTP or HTTP) TCP/IP packets, then they're selecting based on content.
In my industry, alphas are pretend feature complete, with tons of obvious problems.
Then please, tell us your industry so that the rest of us can steer clear of it, and anything that software might influence.
Betas should also be actually feature complete, with the only issues remaining being bugs
See, some of us grew up with the concept that eliminating or avoiding bugs was more important than adding features. After all, what the hell good is a bell or a whistle on something that never runs long enough to make use of said bells or whistles? Clearly marketing-run companies have a different viewpoint, which is why software (or hardware, for that matter, and not just in the computer field) from marketing-run companies is often crap.
But the beta process is there to eliminate the brave earlier adopter problems
No, see, that's what an alpha release is for. Beta releases are supposed to be damned near final, what in these days of release grade inflation is now called a "release candidate". This is why "/.'ers like to discount MS's beta process as a bunch of rubbish"; because for those of us that remember, it is.
"And traditionally it has worked as an alpha process"
There, fixed that for you.
It's not as simple as that. Lasers aren't like really powerful flashlights, there are qualitatively different effects when something is hit by an intense laser beam vs just being hit by an intense beam of incoherent light.
Look up "laser supported detonation", for one example. And white paint or foil reflecting 70% of the energy doesn't help much if the other 30% burns/boils/detonates that layer in a fraction of a second.
But tell you what, we'll let you build a wall out of branches and sod and then you stand behind it while someone fires a multi-megawatt laser at it. Nothing to worry about, right?
That's a nice POV you've got here, but it conveniently ignore the "well regulated" part.
Well regulated. Regular forces. See the pattern?
Talk to the Supreme Court, its their POV. Also refer to what "regulated" meant in common usage in the 18th century; it doesn't mean what you think it means.
Regular forces are what's referred to as a "standing army", something the Constitution has some very particular things to say about.