It looked to me like many of the tests Wine didn't finish required Windows Media Player, so it's reasonable not to expect Wine to complete those. Wine doesn't include a Windows Media Player replacement.
How is Next-Generation Secure Computing base (NGSCB, aka Palladium) going to improve security for actual users?
It seems like most security threats would either already be covered by the current windows security model (if applications used it correctly) or are not helped by this new technology. Three major security issues right now are Trojan viruses as e-mail attachments (bad user practices), buffer overflows (simple bugs, often due to insecure programming languages), and insecure scripting languages as part of many applications, that turn any document into the equivalent of an executable (insecure applications by design.)
What does NGSCB do to remove or at least mitigate the effects of the above types of security issues, beyond what is already possible with existing security technologies?
What is Microsoft doing to ensure that application developers will make use of the existing security mechanisms (such as being able to run in User accounts) and will take advantage of the new security options provided in the upcoming version of Windows, such as NGSCB?
1.) Disable swap. Swap on a Flash drive is BAD. 2.) Set automatic sync time to once per day (or hour, something "very long,") not the 30 seconds that it is in most machines. 3.) Tune the filesystem victim selection to *strongly* favor pages that do not need to be written to disk. 4.) Journaling BAD, Soft Updates GOOD. 5.) In some environments, it may make sense to tune the filesystem such that, if one dirty block needs to be written to disk, write all dirty blocks to disk.
The result of the above is a system that is more likely to lose data in a crash, but that does not totally break things, and which should at least preserve filesystem consistency. However, in return it minimizes flash writes.
You can also play with making sync a no-op, but this usually isn't a good idea.
I agree. The correct thing to do is not have slashdot used to increase pagerank, only to increase exposure. Tag those user site links as nofollow. If the target site is good, people will learn about it and link to it as a result of it being on slashdot. If the site is link farming, being on slashdot will not improve the pagerank. This makes story submission legitimate advertising for legitimate sites, but not for link farms.
Then again, there's something to be said for pagerank as a form of payment, but I'm not sure how I feel about that one.
Incidentally, I would suggest even your test won't prove it, unless the two sites got the same click-throughs at different rates, because we know (well, we think) that google puts well-clicked-on sites higher, and there will be a feedback between high price and high click rate that creates higher apparent relevance. This will then skew the results when the prices are equalised.
Actually, this will be a good way to test if price change is one of their criteria. If price change is NOT a criteria, then the site that was originally advertised for $1.00 should continue to get more clicks at $.50 than the site that was originally advertised for $.10, due to the higher initial click-thru rate.
If price change IS a significant criteria, then the site that was originally $.10 should get significantly more clicks at $.50 than the site originally advertised for $1.00, since the initially cheaper site will see a price increase, whereas the initially more expensive site will see a price decrease.
Interesting test, and well worth performing, if I were an adwords user.
The idea here is that these aliens are significantly more technologically advanced than we are. In that case, they can have whatever sophisticated weapons we can dream up. While subliminal messages may not be possible with our current technology, one can't totally discount the idea that a sufficiently advanced civilization would have means to plant a self-destructive suggestion into the minds of at least a large subset of the people on Earth. Subliminal messages seemed a convenient way of describing this, although no doubt the actual mechanism of placing the suggestion would be quite different.
BTW, the internet (snopes) agrees with you that subliminal messages do not exist. It's popular culture that says they do.
What makes you think any signal capable of that kind of breakage won't simply attack all of the OTHER radio receivers on the planet and blow up the power grid? Better yet send a subliminal message that says: please proceed to the nearest body of water and drown yourself. That way the aliens get to take advantage of the existing infrastructure, if desired.
The problem with trying to protect the SETI computers from some kind of extraterrestrial signal is that either
1.) The attack will be one similar to those we've already seen, in which case attacks from terrestrial sources are much more likely, and pose a much greater risk
OR
2.) The attack will be something we can't even conceive of, in which case there's no reason to believe it will specifically target the SETI computers, or that whatever security precautions we take to defend against such an attack will be effective.
At 24 fps, the camera shutter will be open for (don't know the exact number) 1/30 of a second each frame, and any motion that occurs during the time the shutter is open will appear on the film as a blur. It's the same blur effect as when you use a slow shutter speed to take a picture of fast action. When viewed as part of a sequence of moving pictures, your mind interprets the blur as a moving object.
Games try to emulate this effect with motion blur, since the alternative of using instantaneous pictures can be visually jarring. I suspect (don't know) that motion blur does take more processing power than just throwing out more frames, but the end result looks much better to a human observer.
I agree, countries can't agree on things. However, you miss two things:
The whole reason we're doing this is that governments want control over the internet AS SEEN IN THEIR COUNTRY. They want to make sure the the US can't turn off the internet for them.
The grandparent implied that there was a technical issue with having multiple root servers. I was saying that there is not.
The point of my scheme was to respond to the grandparent in saying that there IS a way for every country to run their own independent set of DNS root servers, thus gaining complete control over the internet within their borders. The whole CC1:CC2:00:01 scheme was a way to automate the administrative procedures of doling out IP address space and the complexities of having a distributed root (since each country would know the root of every other country.) Keeping administrative procedures out of the hands of politicians is a good thing.
It's also a FEATURE of this design that China can easily "knock the US off the internet" as far as its citizens are concerned, without having any effect on what any other country sees. If the US primarily wants control of the internet as a defensive issue, then a solution like the above one would not be a problem, since the US would continue to have complete control over the internet within their borders, including IP space, which is just as important as DNS control.
The only really fundamental international agreement I added was the one about not adding any more global TLDs other than CCs. While this may not be a popular idea, it's not so contentious that politicians couldn't agree on it, and the right time to make these kinds of big changes is during the transition to IPv6. Getting a new CC would also be more involved, but that's not totally unreasonable, as a new CC would be part of forming a new nation, and nation-building is nasty business no matter how you look at it.
Each country gets their own.cc domain. Allocation of.cc domains is done by the UN. This is a real international political issue, so it goes there.
All existing non-cc domains go to the US.
MOVE TO IPv6.
ICANN keeps control of ipv4, if for no other reason than habit.
Give each country receiving a.cc domain control of the IPv6 space that begins with the 2-byte ASCII encoding of their.cc domain. This immediately takes care of all number assignment responsibilities of ICANN.
(Here's where the magic happens) DEFINE the root server for each.cc as: CC1:CC2:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:01
There, all of the policy problems are taken care of. Only the technical issues of determining new protocols remain. ICANN has done an acceptable job at this, and it isn't clear to me how to replace that particular responsibility.
Are there ICANN responsibilities that I have missed? Is there something wrong with the above solution? This solution may be unworkable, but I'm not clear as to why not.
4. Artists who continue to participate in the corrupt entertainment industry
Agreed to a point. Unfortunately, the only way to make a living as a musician is to participate in the corrupt entertainment industry. Since popular musicians provide real value to society, it's hard to fault this group. They could work in another profession as a day job, but then they could not concentrate on their chosen profession, and the public would not benefit from their musical talent.
3. The MPAA for ruthlessly trying to protect its own profits and interests
This one is obvious. As with any megacorp, the MPAA members are responsible for doing everything in their power to maximize their profits. This includes exploiting artists wanting to make a living, exploiting the public domain by extending copyrights, and exploiting a weak government by bullying in the courts and buying laws protecting their profits.
2. Politicians for being so pathetically weak that they can be bought and sold like prostitutes
Unfortunately, this is primarily the result of living in a republic with lax campaign finance rules. Since with our "fat and happy" populace and two-party system, votes can essentially be bought and sold with media exposure, political money is what is required to be reelected. Those politicians who stand up to the big corporate interests will fail to receive campaign funding and will not be reelected. Those who are left are the "weak" or corrupt ones who do whatever the corporations ask of them.
1. Yourself and everyone else who does not fall into 4, 3 or 2 but who (a) funds the MPAA and the artists by buying their crap, (b) funds the politicians with their taxes, and (c) allows the politicians to get away with it by being politically disengaged and reelecting them all the time.
This is really three groups.
a.) true, the best way to remove power from a corporation is to quit buying their products. Unfortunately, American society has become so complacent, that staging a meaningful boycott is basically impossible. However, buying from independent artists is a good start here, and is the only way to allow musicians to get out of their trap.
b.) This is TOTALLY OUT OF LINE. The governent has all the guns, and even if you think they're completely corrupt, you don't steal the big kid's lunch money. There is no way to stop paying taxes to a corrupt government short of 1.) moving away from your home and out of the country, 2.) going to jail, or 3.) violent revolution.
c.) Unfortunately, this is one of the biggest roots of bad government in our country. People are pretty well off, so they just don't care. When you add in the two-party system, people care even less, since there really isn't any difference between the two parties.
When it comes down to it, we have a self-sustaining system where corporations pay to elect politicians, politicians establish and protect the corporations, and politicians further protect the right of corporations to do so by not enacting real campaign finance reform. To sustain the system they must keep the populace happy and well-fed (give them their soma, as it were) thus preventing violent revolution and maintaining the ability to buy votes with media attention. For the people to effect any real change in such a system is difficult, since it is virtually impossible to get a sufficiently large group to care, especially since the two-party system ensures that everything but the largest or most well-funded group gets zero voice in government.
As for your overall point, I agree, lawyers in general are not the problem. However, the profession has become a poster child for a profession full of corrupt individuals, and with good reason. Like politicians, there is more work available for the lawyer who is willing to produce frivolous lawsuits for a client, and our court system makes such lawsuits prof
Even when you take into account transmission and storage losses when transferring it from the plant, into the vehicle batteries, and then out onto the road? There's a lot of energy loss there, and I don't know if it would make up for the loss incurred by using a small gasoline engine instead of a large turbine.
Admittadely, flexibility may be an issue; if something needs rushed to completion, or you genuinely need to be away from work to look after a sick kid, I don't mind throwing in some extra time, but I expect for you to put in extra hours later to make up for it, and let me take it easy for a bit.
If I have to miss work to look after a sick kid, rest assured, I HAVE TO MISS WORK TO LOOK AFTER A SICK KID. The ONLY reasonable alternative is taking that sick kid to work with me, thus decreasing everyone else's productivity, not only my own. I will do my best to work longer hours at other times, but I do that anyways. I average over 40 hours a week, and I usually get more than my share of the work done.
Single people often seem to have it out for people with kids because they feel like they're being taken advantage of. Yes, I need health insurance for my family. Guess what, not having it and thus having a sick kid decreases my productivity significantly more than any other factor. I also need to take time off occaisionally to take care of my kid. This happens. I will keep it under 2 hours (normal doctor's appt. time) or I will take vacation, and I won't do it unless necessary. I extend the same courtesy to my single coworkers. It's none of my business if they need to miss work for a few hours. I don't ask questions unless they are doing it an unreasonable amount, and so long as they are getting their work done.
My grandmother, who has 6 children, had the same gripes about people taking too much time off as people here do. She could tell which parents were wasting their time off, and it made her upset. These were often the same parents who asked for sick day donations at the end of the year because they had used all of theirs. This isn't to say that she never had to take time off to care for her kids, but she understood that there are limits. I suspect the same is true for most of your married coworkers, and there really are only a few that are the troublemakers.
You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute.
As I read it, the word you makes other sources irrelevant to the question. It's the copies that you make which must be readable.
You may be right about needing litigation to settle it, but my point is that an interpretation that broad is not really reasonable, because virtually no person (user, judge, jury) would interpret that to mean that you can't lock up your own copy.
It's sort of analogous to modifying GPLed code. You can make whatever modifications you like for your personal use and keep them secret, as long as you don't try to distribute that version to others without the source to the changes. That's how I read this FDL clause - I'm perfectly free to keep my copy under lock and key and let whomever I like in to see it, but I'm not free to give a copy to somebody with a password on it. Otherwise it would be like requiring me to make my copy available 24/7 to anyone who asks, e.g. store it on a web server, which is not reasonable.
The problem is that if the intention was for you to be allowed to lock up copies that you make, but don't distribute, then the clause would be:
You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you distribute.
This makes it sound a lot more like what you were thinking, tying the restriction to distribution. Adding the words intentionally or wilfully might also be helpful.
There is a further problem in the form of sending your friend an encrypted copy of the document. Your friend will be able to copy it and redistribute it to whoever he wants, but the derived work you distributed has a control on the reading. It could be argued that distribution doesn't actually happen until the encrypted version is opened, but that would be a pretty hard line to take, especially when considering the similarity to what this clause is trying to restrict.
In this area hides the hidden beauty of the GPL. You're free to distribute GPL data in whatever encrypted or DRM-encumbered fashion you desire, so long as an offer accompanies it to send a version with no DRM. (Of course, I'm not sure RMS would see it this way.)
Ahhh, but we have changed the English language since Shakespeare's time. We have completely removed the farmiliar second person verb form.
The reason you don't see "thou hast" anymore is that this verb form is now archaic. The only reason you recognize and understand this verb form is from reading Shakespeare or other literature from that time period. Modern students are no longer trained in this verb form, and there is a good chance that if you tried you would use it incorrectly (not to mention that more modern verbs would not have a correct conjugation.)
<insert on-topic part of post> This is similar to why having a computer require correct grammar is a problem. It would probably flag more modern forms of lanugage (not to mention technical jargon) incorrectly. What would be good is to run a spell and grammar check on the IM client after they have been sent. That way people's grammar will be checked and they can learn from the interaction with the checker, but still use incorrect grammar when appropriate. </on-topic>
The automatic transmission shifter sequence is Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, Low, [Lower, [Lowest]]
This was a stupid decision. I don't know how many times I've gotten in an automatic and thought: DRIVE SHOULD BE LAST!!!! That way there would be no more futzing around trying to find it every time I want the vehicle to go forward. Drive and Park are the two that get used the most, and as such should be on the ends. Reverse is the next most used, and it goes best next to Park, where it is as far away from Drive as possible, but is still relatively easy to find.
Putting Low on the end was a stupid user interface decision that went so far as to be codified as law. This is actually one of the few truly bad user interfaces found in cars, which are usually the model of usability.
NOTE: I am NOT a gun activist, but I am generally for a restrictive(to the government) constitutional interpretation.
I agree, one of the implied reasons for the 2nd amendment is to protect the right of revolution. "Security of a free state" was probably chosen over "defense of a free state" because they also wanted to protect the free state from the government that might rule over it.
The problem is, the US government has already basically prevented revolution. It would require private citizens to own major military aircraft and probably also nuclear weapons for the US government to be under any credible threat from the citizenry. Is this really something you're advocating? (I'm ignoring the chance of a military coup, which is still a fight between the powerful, and not a revolution by the people.)
Now, if we assume that they only meant security in the traditional sense, there are still good reasons to allow citizens to carry guns. Domestic police are private citizens, and are a good example. Another good example is self-defense (which is a good enough reason to qualify for a right important enough to be codified in a constitutional amendment.)
The computer records the vote and prints out a paper receipt with the votes for the voter to verify. If it is incorrect, the receipt is destroyed, the computer vote removed, and the voter is allowed to start over. After that the voter puts the paper in another machine preferrably manufactured by another company that records the paper vote. This second machine would also be able to read the vote to the voter, to allow blind voters or those who can't read to verify the paper vote.
At the end of the day, the tallies for both machines are compared, and any discrepancy (apart from perhaps a limited number of votes not making it to the second machine) immediately makes the counts suspect. In cases where the counts are suspect, or in recounts, the paper vote is official.
Each of the changes is important. Maintaining multiple counts means that no single machine can greatly mess up the vote, and that even unchallenged elections have a check on the machines. Having the two machines from different companies helps to prevent shared code (either intentionally or unintentionally) causing both machines to be wrong in the same way. Letting the second machine read votes helps to alleviate some of the disabled access problems with paper receipts.
Certain programs belong in the core OS. Others don't. Microsoft seems to have the concept backwards, and that is why people get upset.
Firewall software is fundamentally part of the security model of the OS. It SHOULD be bundled with the OS. CD-burning is just disk writing, it's also an OS-level feature.
Anti-virus is a tougher call, but some anti-virus functionality should be in the core OS (like No-execute support) and other anti-virus functionality should be third-party, with the OS providing safe, established hooks.
Media player has NOTHING to do with the OS, it's an app, and should be packaged as such. Similarly, IE is an app, and should be at a minimum removable. Having some kind of web browser in the default install provides an important service (the ability to download other web browsers) but beyond that is not an OS component.
This isn't such a bad example, it's just that the poster failed to give the prerequisite example to show why people would want to falsify their preferences in the first place. Without that this example makes no sense.
That's a big part of the problem with people who MIGHT be quota people. The differences do get exaggerated, mainly because coworkers are looking for them. In a work environment that sends the message "white males aren't wanted," is it any wonder that people of other races/gender are feared and put down? The white male workers fear that they will be replaced by a less qualified (or at best equally qualified) applicant of a minority because of their race. The reaction to such an environment is to portray your minority coworkers as SUBSTANTIALLY less qualified, not just slightly so, since unless they minority employees are SUBSTANTIALLY less qualified, they will get picked over you for promotion, raises, etc.
The problem here is that the minorities have the same fears about white males. To the minorities, they get passed up for promotion by less qualified white males, because minorities are still descriminated against. However in these cases, the comparisons are often equally not fair.
If a minority gets promoted over a white male, the white male will consider it because of a "quota." If a white male gets promoted over a minority, it's because of the "good-ole-boy" network. As long as people expect to be discriminated against, these kinds of unfair comparisons won't be hard to find.
IBM's System/390 is still very much around, so x86 isn't the only CISC holdout. I had a professor in college who firmly believed that in 20 years, two instruction set architectures would rule the world, modern variants of x86 and System/360. Still doesn't seem too far fetched.
His conclusion was based on a single principle: backwards compatibility is INCREDIBLY important, and those are the two architectures with the least movable installed base.
ARM and POWER seem to be the two RISC instruction set architectures settling in for the long term, so I'd probably call the RISC/CISC battle a draw.
As for internal design, the RISC processors came up with good microarchitectures that CISC processors then copied. This didn't make them have non-CISC instruction sets, it was just a different implementation underneath.
It IS like sailing. With sailing, there are two (important) forces, that provided by the wind on the sails, and the normal force of the centerboard against the water. The sum of these two forces can be in any direction besides directly into the wind. Control of how these two forces sum is provided by muscle power that controls the rudder and sail position.
For Solar sailing, you are propelled in the direction that is the sum of the gravitational force from the sun and the force from the sails. Rockets, bending the sails, or some other secondary propulsion method are used to position the sails relative to the star. If the sails are at an angle relative to the star, then the sail will apply a sideways force, and thus sideways motion is possible.
NOTE: To get sideways force I believe a reflective sail surface is required, as it is the direction of the photons leaving the sail that provides the sideways propulsion.
Here's a simple diagram:
. O sails closed, fall into the sun
| O sails open, push away from the sun
\ O sails open, move sideways relative to sun
And the path of the photons and resulting force on the sail.
\..^ .\.| ..\| ../\----Photons |/..\ --...\ Sail Force
Slashdot Mirror
It looked to me like many of the tests Wine didn't finish required Windows Media Player, so it's reasonable not to expect Wine to complete those. Wine doesn't include a Windows Media Player replacement.
How is Next-Generation Secure Computing base (NGSCB, aka Palladium) going to improve security for actual users?
It seems like most security threats would either already be covered by the current windows security model (if applications used it correctly) or are not helped by this new technology. Three major security issues right now are Trojan viruses as e-mail attachments (bad user practices), buffer overflows (simple bugs, often due to insecure programming languages), and insecure scripting languages as part of many applications, that turn any document into the equivalent of an executable (insecure applications by design.)
What does NGSCB do to remove or at least mitigate the effects of the above types of security issues, beyond what is already possible with existing security technologies?
What is Microsoft doing to ensure that application developers will make use of the existing security mechanisms (such as being able to run in User accounts) and will take advantage of the new security options provided in the upcoming version of Windows, such as NGSCB?
Agreed. The correct way to handle this is:
1.) Disable swap. Swap on a Flash drive is BAD.
2.) Set automatic sync time to once per day (or hour, something "very long,") not the 30 seconds that it is in most machines.
3.) Tune the filesystem victim selection to *strongly* favor pages that do not need to be written to disk.
4.) Journaling BAD, Soft Updates GOOD.
5.) In some environments, it may make sense to tune the filesystem such that, if one dirty block needs to be written to disk, write all dirty blocks to disk.
The result of the above is a system that is more likely to lose data in a crash, but that does not totally break things, and which should at least preserve filesystem consistency. However, in return it minimizes flash writes.
You can also play with making sync a no-op, but this usually isn't a good idea.
I agree. The correct thing to do is not have slashdot used to increase pagerank, only to increase exposure. Tag those user site links as nofollow. If the target site is good, people will learn about it and link to it as a result of it being on slashdot. If the site is link farming, being on slashdot will not improve the pagerank. This makes story submission legitimate advertising for legitimate sites, but not for link farms.
Then again, there's something to be said for pagerank as a form of payment, but I'm not sure how I feel about that one.
If price change IS a significant criteria, then the site that was originally $.10 should get significantly more clicks at $.50 than the site originally advertised for $1.00, since the initially cheaper site will see a price increase, whereas the initially more expensive site will see a price decrease.
Interesting test, and well worth performing, if I were an adwords user.
The idea here is that these aliens are significantly more technologically advanced than we are. In that case, they can have whatever sophisticated weapons we can dream up. While subliminal messages may not be possible with our current technology, one can't totally discount the idea that a sufficiently advanced civilization would have means to plant a self-destructive suggestion into the minds of at least a large subset of the people on Earth. Subliminal messages seemed a convenient way of describing this, although no doubt the actual mechanism of placing the suggestion would be quite different.
BTW, the internet (snopes) agrees with you that subliminal messages do not exist. It's popular culture that says they do.
What makes you think any signal capable of that kind of breakage won't simply attack all of the OTHER radio receivers on the planet and blow up the power grid? Better yet send a subliminal message that says: please proceed to the nearest body of water and drown yourself. That way the aliens get to take advantage of the existing infrastructure, if desired.
The problem with trying to protect the SETI computers from some kind of extraterrestrial signal is that either
1.) The attack will be one similar to those we've already seen, in which case attacks from terrestrial sources are much more likely, and pose a much greater risk
OR
2.) The attack will be something we can't even conceive of, in which case there's no reason to believe it will specifically target the SETI computers, or that whatever security precautions we take to defend against such an attack will be effective.
It's inherent to the film and camera itself.
At 24 fps, the camera shutter will be open for (don't know the exact number) 1/30 of a second each frame, and any motion that occurs during the time the shutter is open will appear on the film as a blur. It's the same blur effect as when you use a slow shutter speed to take a picture of fast action. When viewed as part of a sequence of moving pictures, your mind interprets the blur as a moving object.
Games try to emulate this effect with motion blur, since the alternative of using instantaneous pictures can be visually jarring. I suspect (don't know) that motion blur does take more processing power than just throwing out more frames, but the end result looks much better to a human observer.
The point of my scheme was to respond to the grandparent in saying that there IS a way for every country to run their own independent set of DNS root servers, thus gaining complete control over the internet within their borders. The whole CC1:CC2:00:01 scheme was a way to automate the administrative procedures of doling out IP address space and the complexities of having a distributed root (since each country would know the root of every other country.) Keeping administrative procedures out of the hands of politicians is a good thing.
It's also a FEATURE of this design that China can easily "knock the US off the internet" as far as its citizens are concerned, without having any effect on what any other country sees. If the US primarily wants control of the internet as a defensive issue, then a solution like the above one would not be a problem, since the US would continue to have complete control over the internet within their borders, including IP space, which is just as important as DNS control.
The only really fundamental international agreement I added was the one about not adding any more global TLDs other than CCs. While this may not be a popular idea, it's not so contentious that politicians couldn't agree on it, and the right time to make these kinds of big changes is during the transition to IPv6. Getting a new CC would also be more involved, but that's not totally unreasonable, as a new CC would be part of forming a new nation, and nation-building is nasty business no matter how you look at it.
There, all of the policy problems are taken care of. Only the technical issues of determining new protocols remain. ICANN has done an acceptable job at this, and it isn't clear to me how to replace that particular responsibility.
Are there ICANN responsibilities that I have missed? Is there something wrong with the above solution? This solution may be unworkable, but I'm not clear as to why not.
Agreed to a point. Unfortunately, the only way to make a living as a musician is to participate in the corrupt entertainment industry. Since popular musicians provide real value to society, it's hard to fault this group. They could work in another profession as a day job, but then they could not concentrate on their chosen profession, and the public would not benefit from their musical talent.
This one is obvious. As with any megacorp, the MPAA members are responsible for doing everything in their power to maximize their profits. This includes exploiting artists wanting to make a living, exploiting the public domain by extending copyrights, and exploiting a weak government by bullying in the courts and buying laws protecting their profits.
Unfortunately, this is primarily the result of living in a republic with lax campaign finance rules. Since with our "fat and happy" populace and two-party system, votes can essentially be bought and sold with media exposure, political money is what is required to be reelected. Those politicians who stand up to the big corporate interests will fail to receive campaign funding and will not be reelected. Those who are left are the "weak" or corrupt ones who do whatever the corporations ask of them.
This is really three groups.
When it comes down to it, we have a self-sustaining system where corporations pay to elect politicians, politicians establish and protect the corporations, and politicians further protect the right of corporations to do so by not enacting real campaign finance reform. To sustain the system they must keep the populace happy and well-fed (give them their soma, as it were) thus preventing violent revolution and maintaining the ability to buy votes with media attention. For the people to effect any real change in such a system is difficult, since it is virtually impossible to get a sufficiently large group to care, especially since the two-party system ensures that everything but the largest or most well-funded group gets zero voice in government.
As for your overall point, I agree, lawyers in general are not the problem. However, the profession has become a poster child for a profession full of corrupt individuals, and with good reason. Like politicians, there is more work available for the lawyer who is willing to produce frivolous lawsuits for a client, and our court system makes such lawsuits prof
Even when you take into account transmission and storage losses when transferring it from the plant, into the vehicle batteries, and then out onto the road? There's a lot of energy loss there, and I don't know if it would make up for the loss incurred by using a small gasoline engine instead of a large turbine.
If I have to miss work to look after a sick kid, rest assured, I HAVE TO MISS WORK TO LOOK AFTER A SICK KID. The ONLY reasonable alternative is taking that sick kid to work with me, thus decreasing everyone else's productivity, not only my own. I will do my best to work longer hours at other times, but I do that anyways. I average over 40 hours a week, and I usually get more than my share of the work done.
Single people often seem to have it out for people with kids because they feel like they're being taken advantage of. Yes, I need health insurance for my family. Guess what, not having it and thus having a sick kid decreases my productivity significantly more than any other factor. I also need to take time off occaisionally to take care of my kid. This happens. I will keep it under 2 hours (normal doctor's appt. time) or I will take vacation, and I won't do it unless necessary. I extend the same courtesy to my single coworkers. It's none of my business if they need to miss work for a few hours. I don't ask questions unless they are doing it an unreasonable amount, and so long as they are getting their work done.
My grandmother, who has 6 children, had the same gripes about people taking too much time off as people here do. She could tell which parents were wasting their time off, and it made her upset. These were often the same parents who asked for sick day donations at the end of the year because they had used all of theirs. This isn't to say that she never had to take time off to care for her kids, but she understood that there are limits. I suspect the same is true for most of your married coworkers, and there really are only a few that are the troublemakers.
You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you distribute.
This makes it sound a lot more like what you were thinking, tying the restriction to distribution. Adding the words intentionally or wilfully might also be helpful.
There is a further problem in the form of sending your friend an encrypted copy of the document. Your friend will be able to copy it and redistribute it to whoever he wants, but the derived work you distributed has a control on the reading. It could be argued that distribution doesn't actually happen until the encrypted version is opened, but that would be a pretty hard line to take, especially when considering the similarity to what this clause is trying to restrict.
In this area hides the hidden beauty of the GPL. You're free to distribute GPL data in whatever encrypted or DRM-encumbered fashion you desire, so long as an offer accompanies it to send a version with no DRM. (Of course, I'm not sure RMS would see it this way.)
Ahhh, but we have changed the English language since Shakespeare's time. We have completely removed the farmiliar second person verb form.
The reason you don't see "thou hast" anymore is that this verb form is now archaic. The only reason you recognize and understand this verb form is from reading Shakespeare or other literature from that time period. Modern students are no longer trained in this verb form, and there is a good chance that if you tried you would use it incorrectly (not to mention that more modern verbs would not have a correct conjugation.)
<insert on-topic part of post>
This is similar to why having a computer require correct grammar is a problem. It would probably flag more modern forms of lanugage (not to mention technical jargon) incorrectly. What would be good is to run a spell and grammar check on the IM client after they have been sent. That way people's grammar will be checked and they can learn from the interaction with the checker, but still use incorrect grammar when appropriate.
</on-topic>
This was a stupid decision. I don't know how many times I've gotten in an automatic and thought: DRIVE SHOULD BE LAST!!!! That way there would be no more futzing around trying to find it every time I want the vehicle to go forward. Drive and Park are the two that get used the most, and as such should be on the ends. Reverse is the next most used, and it goes best next to Park, where it is as far away from Drive as possible, but is still relatively easy to find.
Putting Low on the end was a stupid user interface decision that went so far as to be codified as law. This is actually one of the few truly bad user interfaces found in cars, which are usually the model of usability.
NOTE: I am NOT a gun activist, but I am generally for a restrictive(to the government) constitutional interpretation.
I agree, one of the implied reasons for the 2nd amendment is to protect the right of revolution. "Security of a free state" was probably chosen over "defense of a free state" because they also wanted to protect the free state from the government that might rule over it.
The problem is, the US government has already basically prevented revolution. It would require private citizens to own major military aircraft and probably also nuclear weapons for the US government to be under any credible threat from the citizenry. Is this really something you're advocating? (I'm ignoring the chance of a military coup, which is still a fight between the powerful, and not a revolution by the people.)
Now, if we assume that they only meant security in the traditional sense, there are still good reasons to allow citizens to carry guns. Domestic police are private citizens, and are a good example. Another good example is self-defense (which is a good enough reason to qualify for a right important enough to be codified in a constitutional amendment.)
The computer records the vote and prints out a paper receipt with the votes for the voter to verify. If it is incorrect, the receipt is destroyed, the computer vote removed, and the voter is allowed to start over. After that the voter puts the paper in another machine preferrably manufactured by another company that records the paper vote. This second machine would also be able to read the vote to the voter, to allow blind voters or those who can't read to verify the paper vote.
At the end of the day, the tallies for both machines are compared, and any discrepancy (apart from perhaps a limited number of votes not making it to the second machine) immediately makes the counts suspect. In cases where the counts are suspect, or in recounts, the paper vote is official.
Each of the changes is important. Maintaining multiple counts means that no single machine can greatly mess up the vote, and that even unchallenged elections have a check on the machines. Having the two machines from different companies helps to prevent shared code (either intentionally or unintentionally) causing both machines to be wrong in the same way. Letting the second machine read votes helps to alleviate some of the disabled access problems with paper receipts.
Certain programs belong in the core OS. Others don't. Microsoft seems to have the concept backwards, and that is why people get upset.
Firewall software is fundamentally part of the security model of the OS. It SHOULD be bundled with the OS. CD-burning is just disk writing, it's also an OS-level feature.
Anti-virus is a tougher call, but some anti-virus functionality should be in the core OS (like No-execute support) and other anti-virus functionality should be third-party, with the OS providing safe, established hooks.
Media player has NOTHING to do with the OS, it's an app, and should be packaged as such. Similarly, IE is an app, and should be at a minimum removable. Having some kind of web browser in the default install provides an important service (the ability to download other web browsers) but beyond that is not an OS component.
This isn't such a bad example, it's just that the poster failed to give the prerequisite example to show why people would want to falsify their preferences in the first place. Without that this example makes no sense.
The vault at the Baghdad Museum comes to mind.
compression algorithms. It wasn't expected in this context, which is why it was hard to read.
That's a big part of the problem with people who MIGHT be quota people. The differences do get exaggerated, mainly because coworkers are looking for them. In a work environment that sends the message "white males aren't wanted," is it any wonder that people of other races/gender are feared and put down? The white male workers fear that they will be replaced by a less qualified (or at best equally qualified) applicant of a minority because of their race. The reaction to such an environment is to portray your minority coworkers as SUBSTANTIALLY less qualified, not just slightly so, since unless they minority employees are SUBSTANTIALLY less qualified, they will get picked over you for promotion, raises, etc.
The problem here is that the minorities have the same fears about white males. To the minorities, they get passed up for promotion by less qualified white males, because minorities are still descriminated against. However in these cases, the comparisons are often equally not fair.
If a minority gets promoted over a white male, the white male will consider it because of a "quota." If a white male gets promoted over a minority, it's because of the "good-ole-boy" network. As long as people expect to be discriminated against, these kinds of unfair comparisons won't be hard to find.
IBM's System/390 is still very much around, so x86 isn't the only CISC holdout. I had a professor in college who firmly believed that in 20 years, two instruction set architectures would rule the world, modern variants of x86 and System/360. Still doesn't seem too far fetched.
His conclusion was based on a single principle: backwards compatibility is INCREDIBLY important, and those are the two architectures with the least movable installed base.
ARM and POWER seem to be the two RISC instruction set architectures settling in for the long term, so I'd probably call the RISC/CISC battle a draw.
As for internal design, the RISC processors came up with good microarchitectures that CISC processors then copied. This didn't make them have non-CISC instruction sets, it was just a different implementation underneath.
For Solar sailing, you are propelled in the direction that is the sum of the gravitational force from the sun and the force from the sails. Rockets, bending the sails, or some other secondary propulsion method are used to position the sails relative to the star. If the sails are at an angle relative to the star, then the sail will apply a sideways force, and thus sideways motion is possible.
NOTE: To get sideways force I believe a reflective sail surface is required, as it is the direction of the photons leaving the sail that provides the sideways propulsion.
Here's a simple diagram:
And the path of the photons and resulting force on the sail.