Does anyone know of a whole-house solution for providing clean, voltage-regulated power to an entire house?
Assuming that you've got enough cash, just get a very-big UPS and run your circuit breaker from that. Couple it with an automatic fallover generator, and you can even ignore blackouts. (Your house-UPS could, theoretically, even turn the generator on and off, and monitor the gasoline level...)
Theoretically, energy produced at a central plant and then shipped elsewhere via hydrogen results in more effecieint use of power than millions of seperate, individual power plants.
Last I heard, this is espeically true for gasoline vs. "big oil fired hydrogen plant." Plus, you can clean and maintain the "big oil fired hydrogen plant" a lot easier than the engines of a million cars.
As for the other power sources you listed: solar eventually pays for itself, and bugger on the wildlife. Nuclear waste can be re-used, used in weapons, used in an Orion Drive, etc. Microwave from stellites, while a rather silly idea to begin with, is "dangerous", not "unclean" in your point.
(And what about wind, hydroelectric, thermal disparity, or 'running office worker' power?)
Re:Does anyone see IP issues inthe future?
on
Corel Goes Private
·
· Score: 1
Hmm...
It's not OSS, but if you're looking to switch to a non-MS groupware system, why not try Novell? As of next version the server is going to be kernal-swappable, so it can run on Linux (which is an infinite boon, speaking from experience) and they've got a Groupwise client for Linux & Mac out now, too.
Sure, GW is a PITA--but it does what it does, and no one seems to taget it for viri attacks.
Re:Does anyone see IP issues inthe future?
on
Corel Goes Private
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
With all the problems SCO has been causing, the news about Corel going private makes me sort of uncomfortable.
You misunderstand the stock market.
A publicly-traded company, like SCO or Microsoft, has to issue quarterly earnings reports, and is simply unable to focus on anything but profit. OSS is very, VERY hard to sell to publicly-traded software shops because OSS means that they're spending capital and getting no resources in return. (Publicly-traded hardware shops, like IBM and Apple, or service-shops, like AOL, are much easier sells--they simply write off the OSS programming as "support and maintenance")
Privately-held companies, like Corel will be, are a LOT easier to convince to use OSS. They can issue earnings reports at about any interval they want, they can market themselves in odd ways, and, being free of the whims of the stock market, they can pursue their business plan without worrying too much about hostile takeovers or the tides of politics.
A good release of Wordperfect office and a very stable Linux desktop would make an almost perfect MS replacement. Even though Word is the market-leader in word-processing (which, I wager, is what most users-hours are), Wordperfect still has sufficient mindshare to challenge MS--espeically in the legal field.
Re:Cell Phones, a new weapon of terror
on
Flaming Cellphones
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· Score: 1
(Hey, join/. and get a UID!)
Your Tungsten W, and most other consumer-grade electronics, are limited on airplanes because of their EM interference, not their (im)possibility of causing things to explode. The inside of an airliner never gets as many fuel fumes as a gas station does--and even at the gas station, you have to be pretty stupid and unlucky to spark an ignition with your cell phone.
As for being Palestinian--no, you're not automatically a threat to national security. You might automatically be looked at to see if you are, but I was automatically looked at to see if I was a threat to national security when my government-employed father flew me down to buy a van from him. (One way ticket, purchased by someone else, flight had a fair ammount of fuel onboard--damn, I probably set off more red flags that you do.)
What if I followed you around asking you to join my in-game guild?
Tell the "jerk" that you're not interested, and if you were interested, you'd seek out Chrisitians in real life, not at an MMORPG. They should leave you alone after that.
He just made it up because he's being paid by the hour to say anything that sounds good.
No. He made it up because his job is to argue for an interpretation of laws, contracts, and events that is most favorable to his client. He might even be correct. He's a lawyer, I'm not, you're not. And the/. lawers have had a bad track record predicting the courts recently.
This will go to court, because neither IBM nor SCO are going to back down--and it's not in court yet because they're both taking their time.
How the hell does posting a sign saying "We reserve the right to check bags" make it OK for them to rifle through your belongings?
They're a private place of business. You can always (a) not shop there or (b) not carry any bags in.
And if you're just WALKING through a store--yeah, they probaby should check that shoulder bag you're carrying. Or, just have RFID tags on all of their packaging, and scan you as you walk out.
I love fancy new stuff like this, but as with all tools which render law enforcement work easier, there is an inherit danger that these tools are abused.
WHAT?
This is a skull-identification technolgoy. If you've done something where identifying a skull will hurt you, you should be caught.
Sheesh. Next thing you'll be arguing that giving police first aid kits is a unviable conflict of interest.
Guns are specifically enumerated as a right in the Constitution. P2P file-sharing apps are not. Just as with the VCR, unless a P2P app can be found to have "substantial legal uses", it's probably not good.
It saddens me as a developer that you can't even deign to write a P2P add without the assumption that it will be used for sharing copyrighted materials and thus shut down by the RIAA/MPAA.
Newsflash: most P2P file-transfer apps are used for copyright infringement. Blame the users and Napster--but you still have to live with it.
(Oh, and if you are just working on P2P, take anonymnity out of the picture and RIAA will probably leave you alone. P2P isn't bad, but anonymous P2P is almost certinaly so.)
I urge everyone reading this to be very diligent in your boycott of buying new music or going to see movies.
Bah. If I care about how the law is going, I'll write a letter./. Boycotts are simply too small to have ANY effect at all.
Why not? They are 2 seperate cases. IIRC, there was a case recently where 2 sons were each tried for murder of their father (parents?) and both found guilty, even though only one could have committed the murder.
Conspiracy. If it can be proven that two people worked together (even informally) towards a criminal act, both can be tried for said act.
I'm not advocating shorter copyright limits. I'm advocating a change in the right that copyright limits/protects.
Instead of the right to make copies--that is, the right to fire up your printing presses and print 10,000 copies that authors sell to publishers for a royalty contract--I think that copyright should limit/protect the right of an author to decide who can have a copy of their work.
Think of it this way: you buy my book. In the old model, each time you wanted to get a new version, you have to pay me again, and you can pass your book around to as many people as you want. In my "new model", you can make as many copies of the book as you want, inclduing paying a print shop to make you a replacement, and I don't get another dime from you--but if you let your friends borrow a copy, they owe me the $1 royalty payment (and therein gain the right to have a copy.)
Copyright law is already written in a way that would allow that. Please read up some more on copyright law before posting questions like this.
Not quite.
I mean, sure, we COULD go around and make millions of signed licenses, but most copywritten works are protected by the law and not a lot more.
Changing copyright law is like changing probate law--yes, those who just want something different can spell it out that way, but the majority of folk would still wind up being forced to use the old method because they don't want to hire the legions of lawyers necessary to do it some other way.
The concept of copyright was concieved of way back in "ye olden days" to restrict who could and could not print books; it also conveniently allowed an author to control who profits from their works. We adapted the second cause here in the USA, and have since extended copyright to just about any form of creative expression.
But, copyright is still a control of making a copy, which is getting to be almost farcical in a world where most creative output can be easily and near-freely copied.
Do you think that it would be a good idea to alter copyright so that, instead of selling pubslihers a right to copy works, artists sell consumers the right to have a copy of a work, however that they want to get it and however many redundant copies they want?
(Let's just ignore the privacy and feasability problems for the moment; statistics and security can probably fix them to be "good enough.")
The jet engine itself cannot be covered by the GPL, as you cannot copyright an actual jet engine.
Sure you can; you can copyright a sculpture, after all.
But the copyright will be next to useless--it protects the specific expression of ideas, rather than the ideas themselves, and a lot of physical ideas don't leave a lot of room for variation--and are, ergo, uncopyrightable.
IANAL either, but I can tell you that you are in error. According to U.S. law, all works are copyrighted at the moment of creation. The notion that you can choose to put something into the public domain has no force of law behind it.
Wrong. I mean, really wrong.
Public Domain is a great concept, and release into Public Domain by the author has long been upheld as legally binding.
If I write a novel, host it on my website, and clearly state that it's in the public domain (a nice "this whole novel is in public domain" should work), I won't be able to sue someone for taking my PD novel and selling it for thousands of dollars.
(well, I could, but I'd have to convince a Jury that I didn't mean to put that statement there--something like "that was never there" or "hey, a hacker did it!" would be plausible.)
But Galileo didn't malign the church, even if it thought he did. A common misconception of "believers", thinking that an attack against their stupidity or brutality is an attack against their faith.
The church, especially when talking about Catholics, is the people and things dedicated to spreading and maintaining the religion.
Galileo didn't malign Christianity. He maligned the Catholic Church, and like any medieval institution of power, the church silenced him for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone know of a whole-house solution for providing clean, voltage-regulated power to an entire house?
Assuming that you've got enough cash, just get a very-big UPS and run your circuit breaker from that. Couple it with an automatic fallover generator, and you can even ignore blackouts. (Your house-UPS could, theoretically, even turn the generator on and off, and monitor the gasoline level...)
Hyrdrogen "clean" fuel is a misnomer...
No, it's relative.
Theoretically, energy produced at a central plant and then shipped elsewhere via hydrogen results in more effecieint use of power than millions of seperate, individual power plants.
Last I heard, this is espeically true for gasoline vs. "big oil fired hydrogen plant." Plus, you can clean and maintain the "big oil fired hydrogen plant" a lot easier than the engines of a million cars.
As for the other power sources you listed: solar eventually pays for itself, and bugger on the wildlife. Nuclear waste can be re-used, used in weapons, used in an Orion Drive, etc. Microwave from stellites, while a rather silly idea to begin with, is "dangerous", not "unclean" in your point.
(And what about wind, hydroelectric, thermal disparity, or 'running office worker' power?)
Hmm...
It's not OSS, but if you're looking to switch to a non-MS groupware system, why not try Novell? As of next version the server is going to be kernal-swappable, so it can run on Linux (which is an infinite boon, speaking from experience) and they've got a Groupwise client for Linux & Mac out now, too.
Sure, GW is a PITA--but it does what it does, and no one seems to taget it for viri attacks.
With all the problems SCO has been causing, the news about Corel going private makes me sort of uncomfortable.
You misunderstand the stock market.
A publicly-traded company, like SCO or Microsoft, has to issue quarterly earnings reports, and is simply unable to focus on anything but profit. OSS is very, VERY hard to sell to publicly-traded software shops because OSS means that they're spending capital and getting no resources in return. (Publicly-traded hardware shops, like IBM and Apple, or service-shops, like AOL, are much easier sells--they simply write off the OSS programming as "support and maintenance")
Privately-held companies, like Corel will be, are a LOT easier to convince to use OSS. They can issue earnings reports at about any interval they want, they can market themselves in odd ways, and, being free of the whims of the stock market, they can pursue their business plan without worrying too much about hostile takeovers or the tides of politics.
A good release of Wordperfect office and a very stable Linux desktop would make an almost perfect MS replacement. Even though Word is the market-leader in word-processing (which, I wager, is what most users-hours are), Wordperfect still has sufficient mindshare to challenge MS--espeically in the legal field.
(Hey, join /. and get a UID!)
Your Tungsten W, and most other consumer-grade electronics, are limited on airplanes because of their EM interference, not their (im)possibility of causing things to explode. The inside of an airliner never gets as many fuel fumes as a gas station does--and even at the gas station, you have to be pretty stupid and unlucky to spark an ignition with your cell phone.
As for being Palestinian--no, you're not automatically a threat to national security. You might automatically be looked at to see if you are, but I was automatically looked at to see if I was a threat to national security when my government-employed father flew me down to buy a van from him. (One way ticket, purchased by someone else, flight had a fair ammount of fuel onboard--damn, I probably set off more red flags that you do.)
At what point do I have recourse in this?
What if I followed you around asking you to join my in-game guild?
Tell the "jerk" that you're not interested, and if you were interested, you'd seek out Chrisitians in real life, not at an MMORPG. They should leave you alone after that.
He just made it up because he's being paid by the hour to say anything that sounds good.
/. lawers have had a bad track record predicting the courts recently.
No. He made it up because his job is to argue for an interpretation of laws, contracts, and events that is most favorable to his client. He might even be correct. He's a lawyer, I'm not, you're not. And the
This will go to court, because neither IBM nor SCO are going to back down--and it's not in court yet because they're both taking their time.
How the hell does posting a sign saying "We reserve the right to check bags" make it OK for them to rifle through your belongings?
They're a private place of business. You can always (a) not shop there or (b) not carry any bags in.
And if you're just WALKING through a store--yeah, they probaby should check that shoulder bag you're carrying. Or, just have RFID tags on all of their packaging, and scan you as you walk out.
I love fancy new stuff like this, but as with all tools which render law enforcement work easier, there is an inherit danger that these tools are abused.
WHAT?
This is a skull-identification technolgoy. If you've done something where identifying a skull will hurt you, you should be caught.
Sheesh. Next thing you'll be arguing that giving police first aid kits is a unviable conflict of interest.
Er, the "pop" in "pop culture" is "popular." You're thinking of "geek culture."
Your prob. is just that video games became "pop culture."
Guns are specifically enumerated as a right in the Constitution. P2P file-sharing apps are not. Just as with the VCR, unless a P2P app can be found to have "substantial legal uses", it's probably not good.
It saddens me as a developer that you can't even deign to write a P2P add without the assumption that it will be used for sharing copyrighted materials and thus shut down by the RIAA/MPAA.
/. Boycotts are simply too small to have ANY effect at all.
Newsflash: most P2P file-transfer apps are used for copyright infringement. Blame the users and Napster--but you still have to live with it.
(Oh, and if you are just working on P2P, take anonymnity out of the picture and RIAA will probably leave you alone. P2P isn't bad, but anonymous P2P is almost certinaly so.)
I urge everyone reading this to be very diligent in your boycott of buying new music or going to see movies.
Bah. If I care about how the law is going, I'll write a letter.
You can do this already
A simple Google Search finds a bunch of them. Some for-pay, some for-free.
I don't use them because WinXP's taskbar acutally does everything I want it to do, and when I use Win2k at work, I can't customize it that much.
If I could run a native (not cygwin) KDE, GNOME or Xfce under Windows, I would do it in a heartbeat.
So would I, probably. But they're simply not ported.
Question: Were there other witnesses collaborating the placement of either brother?
Because if it's just the brothers saying "my brother was at X, he didn't do it", then I'd suspect that they are both guilty of the murder.
Why not? They are 2 seperate cases. IIRC, there was a case recently where 2 sons were each tried for murder of their father (parents?) and both found guilty, even though only one could have committed the murder.
Conspiracy. If it can be proven that two people worked together (even informally) towards a criminal act, both can be tried for said act.
If McDonald's food is so bad (compared to, let's say, an expensive steak house), why do so many people eat it?
Because it isn't?
Oh, or were you judging purely on taste, and not familiarily/cost/variety/speed?
What [annoyed] me was the "It's there but we don't want you to use it" mentality.
That's MS's take on the command line, in a nutshell.
I'm interested in "4dos"--got a link?
You misunderstand, Erasmus.
I'm not advocating shorter copyright limits. I'm advocating a change in the right that copyright limits/protects.
Instead of the right to make copies--that is, the right to fire up your printing presses and print 10,000 copies that authors sell to publishers for a royalty contract--I think that copyright should limit/protect the right of an author to decide who can have a copy of their work.
Think of it this way: you buy my book. In the old model, each time you wanted to get a new version, you have to pay me again, and you can pass your book around to as many people as you want. In my "new model", you can make as many copies of the book as you want, inclduing paying a print shop to make you a replacement, and I don't get another dime from you--but if you let your friends borrow a copy, they owe me the $1 royalty payment (and therein gain the right to have a copy.)
Copyright law is already written in a way that would allow that. Please read up some more on copyright law before posting questions like this.
Not quite.
I mean, sure, we COULD go around and make millions of signed licenses, but most copywritten works are protected by the law and not a lot more.
Changing copyright law is like changing probate law--yes, those who just want something different can spell it out that way, but the majority of folk would still wind up being forced to use the old method because they don't want to hire the legions of lawyers necessary to do it some other way.
The concept of copyright was concieved of way back in "ye olden days" to restrict who could and could not print books; it also conveniently allowed an author to control who profits from their works. We adapted the second cause here in the USA, and have since extended copyright to just about any form of creative expression.
But, copyright is still a control of making a copy, which is getting to be almost farcical in a world where most creative output can be easily and near-freely copied.
Do you think that it would be a good idea to alter copyright so that, instead of selling pubslihers a right to copy works, artists sell consumers the right to have a copy of a work, however that they want to get it and however many redundant copies they want?
(Let's just ignore the privacy and feasability problems for the moment; statistics and security can probably fix them to be "good enough.")
?
Odd.
(/me hits "win+R", types "command", types "start winword"... and MS Word opens up just fine.)
Strikes me as working pretty much as well as DOS ever did. But it's still a crippled command line (no auto-complete, no grep...)
The jet engine itself cannot be covered by the GPL, as you cannot copyright an actual jet engine.
Sure you can; you can copyright a sculpture, after all.
But the copyright will be next to useless--it protects the specific expression of ideas, rather than the ideas themselves, and a lot of physical ideas don't leave a lot of room for variation--and are, ergo, uncopyrightable.
No, the GPL is not being formally challenged. It is being farcically challenged by a bunch of loons.
Not loons. Corporate shrills. Loons would get tossed out by a simple request from IBM to the judge.
IANAL either, but I can tell you that you are in error. According to U.S. law, all works are copyrighted at the moment of creation. The notion that you can choose to put something into the public domain has no force of law behind it.
Wrong. I mean, really wrong.
Public Domain is a great concept, and release into Public Domain by the author has long been upheld as legally binding.
If I write a novel, host it on my website, and clearly state that it's in the public domain (a nice "this whole novel is in public domain" should work), I won't be able to sue someone for taking my PD novel and selling it for thousands of dollars.
(well, I could, but I'd have to convince a Jury that I didn't mean to put that statement there--something like "that was never there" or "hey, a hacker did it!" would be plausible.)
But Galileo didn't malign the church, even if it thought he did. A common misconception of "believers", thinking that an attack against their stupidity or brutality is an attack against their faith.
The church, especially when talking about Catholics, is the people and things dedicated to spreading and maintaining the religion.
Galileo didn't malign Christianity. He maligned the Catholic Church, and like any medieval institution of power, the church silenced him for it.