Depends on the type of cancer. I've heard fifth or sixth-hand about some rather interesting test treatments for certain cancers that are sugar-sensitive that involve flooding the body with vitamin C (which the cells treat similarly to sugar) until all the normal cells are saturated and won't absorb any more, then they add a radioactive tag to it and release it so that it almost exclusively targets the cancer cells.
Similarly, there is work being done on retroviral therapy for certain types of cancer in which the virus attaches to the cancer cells, presumably based on some characteristic of the cell's receptors, thus allowing the virus to attack just the cancer cells.
And then there's seed radiation therapy, which is almost completely targetting just the cancer, though I don't know how useful it is outside the realm of prostate cancer. For prostate cancer, it's fairly effective.
But with traditional chemotherapy (and to a lesser degree, beam radiation therapy), yeah, it's very definitely a battle of strength.... Hopefully it won't be too many years before more effective treatments are available....
Re #2: Ehm... a corporation doesn't die? Life + 25 years for something biological, just 75 years for something non-biological. Seems straightforward to me.
Of course, that's too long to be equal to Life + 25. If you assume average life expectancy of 80 years, and that creations are done over the last 60 of those years, then that means that the composer will statistically live an average of 30 years (60/2) after composing a piece. Thus, it should be more like 50 or 55 years for a corporate author to be equivalent.
To be pedantic, most of the options that are interesting can be changed with simple shell-like syntax. You only need to know forth if you want to rewrite parts of the "BIOS", for example if you find a bug in the ATA driver in the firmware and want to change it to "think differently".
Most of the settings that can be changed in a PC BIOS do not need to be changed on a Mac, due to fundamental differences in the interrupt and memory architectures (e.g. there's no such thing as I/O space, and there are enough interrupt lines that IRQ sharring is a non-issue (as in minimum 64, often more).
The only thing I'm aware of that you can set in BIOS that you might want to change on OF but can't is the clock. Oh well.
And that you CAN copy the bootROM off of any MacOSX install.
s/MacOSX/Mac OS 9
Mac OS X doesn't come with the ROM file. That's installed as part of installing Mac OS 9 (which was on a separate CD for older Mac OS X boxed sets, and isn't even included in current ones).
But you're right, you don't need the ROM to boot Mac OS X. Just to boot Mac OS 9/Classic, and even then, it's in a file.
I hate to feed the troll, but.... Apple keeps a few bits of hardware detail secret because of contractual obligations with the companies that make them (e.g. the USB modems in newer machines). Most of the hardware in Macs, however, is not only documented, but comes with SOURCE CODE.
1. Transmitter in a separate shack. 2. Always keep equipment truck outside building. 3. Make sure you have cameras in the truck. 4. Make-goods for all your advertisers, since you won't have the automation racks, and won't be able to air as many spots by hand.
If you do this, then 24 hours and a rented double-wide later, you can be back on the air if your studio burns. I'm not saying it'll be up to your usual standards, but there are always ways.
I'm going to say "not". The text of laws are in the public domain. Period. There are no exceptions. You -can-, however, get busted for putting laws on the net, just not because the text of the law is copyrighted.
The presentation of the law in legal books can be, and often is, copyrighted. This includes various annotations like paragraph numbers, etc. that most of us take for granted. Unless the annotations were in the bill that went through the legislature, it is a copyright violation to publish them.
Of course, you can always come up with your own numbering system, but then nobody will be able to reference parts of the bill in your online copy, and it will thus be of only marginal utility. Catch-22.
Read a crypto text before you go shouting "provably secure". It is impossible to secure the endpoint of communications. You can only secure the transmission medium. Further, the only way to "provably secure" the transmission medium is to use a one-time pad. DRM solutions do not use one-time pads, and it is hopelessly impractical for them to do so. Therefore they are provably insecure, regardless of what algorithm is chosen, the key length, or any other factor.
Now you can argue that the encryption that they might use would be sufficiently hard to crack that a brute-force attack would take eons, but that makes it no less possible to do a brute-force attack, just less practical.
Recall that DES was considered relatively secure just a few years ago. DES would be safe for decades. Now anyone can crack a single DES stream with modest hardware.
Using hardware for encryption makes it harder to break the scheme. It does not make it impossible by any means. It might make it impossible without hardware modification, but once a single person figures out how to make that modification, the integrity of the entire system collapses. Sorry, thank you for playing.
Because making a backup copy of anything you own is protected under U.S. Copyright law. Nobody is getting shafted. There's a difference between breaking a lock on somebody else's house and breaking the lock on your own. Making a backup copy is more like the latter.
Let me counter that by saying that I do a weekly comic strip, Tech Magazine (on a pseudo-vacation this week). With the exception of the occasional super-simple strip (like this week's), they normally range from 80-120k. It seems to make little difference whether they're black and white or color. Even on a 56k modem, that's only about 15-20 seconds or so.
The reason I don't do color most weeks is that it's a pain in the backside. For every area that you can quickly whitewash in a black-and-white strip, you have to go through, figure out what exact color you used on that character's clothing the previous week, repeating for every article of clothing in the entire strip, repeating again to get the flesh tones right, make sure you didn't put too much blush on the women or too many freckles on Tami. Not to mention how many more hours it takes to draw a -bookshelf- in color. Oh, my....
Close, but backwards. The person making the claim can be a public figure or a private individual -- the law is the same regardless. The person or company who the claim is about, however, has less rights if that person or company is in the public eye.
Libel also does not require proof of damages, at least in the U.S. You're probably thinking of slander.
If I'm remembering my communications law class, for libel, you must show that:
1. The statement is false.
2. The person/company suing must show that the person making the claim was negligent, i.e. that a reasonable person taking reasonable care should have been able to determine that the statement was false, and that the person failed to take reasonable precautions to avoid making a false statement.
3. If the person/company maligned was a public figure, a person running for office, or any company or group in the public eye, they must further show that the person making the claim knew the statement was false at the time the statement was made.
4. The statement must be a statement of fact, not an opinion.
You will note that #2 makes it very difficult for a company to win a libel suit against an individual unless that person works or worked for the company. Since most companies answer "no comment" to any inquiries about touchy subjects, no amount of external research could uncover that most statements about them are false.
You're way off. Mac OS X uses a descendant of OSFMK Mach 3. NeXT used a descendant of CMU Mach 2.5. The two bear little resemblance to each other. NeXT used DriverKit, which was written in Objective C if memory serves. Mac OS X uses the I/O Kit, a ground-up driver environment written in a limited subset of C++. In short, they completely gutted the kernel way back in the early DP releases....
As for why Mach 3 instead of L4... well, here's my guess...
1. They had experience with a mass-deployed OS based on Mach 3 on Macs already (MkLinux).
2. To my knowledge, L4 has never been broadly deployed. Few things scare business more than betting the farm on an untested research OS....
3. Last I checked, L4 was GPLed. The stigma of the GPL would scare hardware developers. Not a good position to be in.
As always, this is my opinion only, and may not represent the views of my employer.:-)
Sounds like the writers didn't do their research. Most bullets contain an oxidizer. They have to, as the firing caps are basically airtight packages, IIRC. Granted there probably isn't enough oxidizer (if any) mixed with the powder that's packed into the rest of the shell casing to effectively fire a bullet, but that is an economic, not technical issue.
Sure it will. In fact, the shuttle launches with a pair of solid fuel rockets that illustrate the basic principle nicely. You use a solid propellant mixed with an oxidizer.
When it comes to bullets in space, the issue of whether that propellant is black powder or some other similarly explosive substance really doesn't matter much in the end, as long as it goes boom.:-)
The most expedient manner is proabbly a SLAPP-back. But in order to do that, you first have to appear in court and file a motion with the judge requesting summary judgement on grounts that the suit is without merit. If you can convince a judge to do so, -then- you counter-sue and odds are you get your expenses back. The problem is that you have to first fight the initial case in court, which is painful for a small business. That's why these things are usually settled out-of-court.
What's that you say? The movie industry is enjoying record profits? How is this possible, when in addition to Taiwan's criminal 50-year copyright protection, Jack Valenti assures me that 50 TB of pirated movies in DivX flows through the Internet each day
The first ammendment and freedom of the press. I don't think the RIAA is stupid enough to sue over this, as they would be laughed out of court, as would the DMCA. If they want the DMCA to continue to exist, it is not in their best interest to pursue this.
Why? The DMCA, in attempting to make certain speech illegal, fails all of the tests necessary for prior restraint, making that aspect of the DMCA unconstitutional when applied to the press. Whether online speech is classified as "press" in general is another issue, but since cnet has other media presence, it is very unlikely that the DMCA provisions would stick against them.
Law or not, a suit over this would end badly for the RIAA.
Two million dollars for a major spammer isn't disproportionate. First, assume that it costs the average person twenty seconds of time to decide if something is spam, 30 seconds to download a large html file with lots of pictures, etc. over a 56k modem, and you're at nearly a minute of lost work per message. At an engineer's salary, that's fifty cents of wasted time _PER MESSAGE_. Assume the spammer sent out ten million messages (not unreasonable). That's five million dollars worth of damage. If you ask me, they're getting off easy. Really easy.
Worth dying over, no. Worth fighting over, yes, whether in the court system, through "protests", whatever. As for me, I'll fight with my vote. We each have our own ways of fighting bad laws. The important thing is not how we choose to fight them, but that we do choose to fight them.
Or to quote Fahrenheit 451, Faber says to Montag, "I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself."
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the type of cancer. I've heard fifth or sixth-hand about some rather interesting test treatments for certain cancers that are sugar-sensitive that involve flooding the body with vitamin C (which the cells treat similarly to sugar) until all the normal cells are saturated and won't absorb any more, then they add a radioactive tag to it and release it so that it almost exclusively targets the cancer cells.
Similarly, there is work being done on retroviral therapy for certain types of cancer in which the virus attaches to the cancer cells, presumably based on some characteristic of the cell's receptors, thus allowing the virus to attack just the cancer cells.
And then there's seed radiation therapy, which is almost completely targetting just the cancer, though I don't know how useful it is outside the realm of prostate cancer. For prostate cancer, it's fairly effective.
But with traditional chemotherapy (and to a lesser degree, beam radiation therapy), yeah, it's very definitely a battle of strength.... Hopefully it won't be too many years before more effective treatments are available....
Of course, that's too long to be equal to Life + 25. If you assume average life expectancy of 80 years, and that creations are done over the last 60 of those years, then that means that the composer will statistically live an average of 30 years (60/2) after composing a piece. Thus, it should be more like 50 or 55 years for a corporate author to be equivalent.
To be pedantic, most of the options that are interesting can be changed with simple shell-like syntax. You only need to know forth if you want to rewrite parts of the "BIOS", for example if you find a bug in the ATA driver in the firmware and want to change it to "think differently".
Most of the settings that can be changed in a PC BIOS do not need to be changed on a Mac, due to fundamental differences in the interrupt and memory architectures (e.g. there's no such thing as I/O space, and there are enough interrupt lines that IRQ sharring is a non-issue (as in minimum 64, often more).
The only thing I'm aware of that you can set in BIOS that you might want to change on OF but can't is the clock. Oh well.
Last I recall, the Atari machines (at least the ST series) used ACSI....
Mac OS X doesn't come with the ROM file. That's installed as part of installing Mac OS 9 (which was on a separate CD for older Mac OS X boxed sets, and isn't even included in current ones).
But you're right, you don't need the ROM to boot Mac OS X. Just to boot Mac OS 9/Classic, and even then, it's in a file.
I hate to feed the troll, but.... Apple keeps a few bits of hardware detail secret because of contractual obligations with the companies that make them (e.g. the USB modems in newer machines). Most of the hardware in Macs, however, is not only documented, but comes with SOURCE CODE.
See also:
http://www.apple.com/opensource
Can I move my residence to a mailbox in Bermuda and avoid taxes legally?
No, but you can change your citizenship, which is roughly equivalent to a corporation moving its headquarters....
1. Transmitter in a separate shack.
2. Always keep equipment truck outside building.
3. Make sure you have cameras in the truck.
4. Make-goods for all your advertisers, since you won't have the automation racks, and won't be able to air as many spots by hand.
If you do this, then 24 hours and a rented double-wide later, you can be back on the air if your studio burns. I'm not saying it'll be up to your usual standards, but there are always ways.
The presentation of the law in legal books can be, and often is, copyrighted. This includes various annotations like paragraph numbers, etc. that most of us take for granted. Unless the annotations were in the bill that went through the legislature, it is a copyright violation to publish them.
Of course, you can always come up with your own numbering system, but then nobody will be able to reference parts of the bill in your online copy, and it will thus be of only marginal utility. Catch-22.
Now you can argue that the encryption that they might use would be sufficiently hard to crack that a brute-force attack would take eons, but that makes it no less possible to do a brute-force attack, just less practical.
Recall that DES was considered relatively secure just a few years ago. DES would be safe for decades. Now anyone can crack a single DES stream with modest hardware.
Using hardware for encryption makes it harder to break the scheme. It does not make it impossible by any means. It might make it impossible without hardware modification, but once a single person figures out how to make that modification, the integrity of the entire system collapses. Sorry, thank you for playing.
Because making a backup copy of anything you own is protected under U.S. Copyright law. Nobody is getting shafted. There's a difference between breaking a lock on somebody else's house and breaking the lock on your own. Making a backup copy is more like the latter.
The reason I don't do color most weeks is that it's a pain in the backside. For every area that you can quickly whitewash in a black-and-white strip, you have to go through, figure out what exact color you used on that character's clothing the previous week, repeating for every article of clothing in the entire strip, repeating again to get the flesh tones right, make sure you didn't put too much blush on the women or too many freckles on Tami. Not to mention how many more hours it takes to draw a -bookshelf- in color. Oh, my....
Libel also does not require proof of damages, at least in the U.S. You're probably thinking of slander.
If I'm remembering my communications law class, for libel, you must show that:
1. The statement is false.
2. The person/company suing must show that the person making the claim was negligent, i.e. that a reasonable person taking reasonable care should have been able to determine that the statement was false, and that the person failed to take reasonable precautions to avoid making a false statement.
3. If the person/company maligned was a public figure, a person running for office, or any company or group in the public eye, they must further show that the person making the claim knew the statement was false at the time the statement was made.
4. The statement must be a statement of fact, not an opinion.
You will note that #2 makes it very difficult for a company to win a libel suit against an individual unless that person works or worked for the company. Since most companies answer "no comment" to any inquiries about touchy subjects, no amount of external research could uncover that most statements about them are false.
As for why Mach 3 instead of L4... well, here's my guess...
1. They had experience with a mass-deployed OS based on Mach 3 on Macs already (MkLinux).
2. To my knowledge, L4 has never been broadly deployed. Few things scare business more than betting the farm on an untested research OS....
3. Last I checked, L4 was GPLed. The stigma of the GPL would scare hardware developers. Not a good position to be in.
As always, this is my opinion only, and may not represent the views of my employer. :-)
The processr itself was plenty fast.... It's the lack of DMA that probably killed you, IMO....
if SG1 got canned. I mean, with Roswell gone, it's almost the last refugre for non-trek Sci-fi.
Sounds like the writers didn't do their research. Most bullets contain an oxidizer. They have to, as the firing caps are basically airtight packages, IIRC. Granted there probably isn't enough oxidizer (if any) mixed with the powder that's packed into the rest of the shell casing to effectively fire a bullet, but that is an economic, not technical issue.
Sure it will. In fact, the shuttle launches with a pair of solid fuel rockets that illustrate the basic principle nicely. You use a solid propellant mixed with an oxidizer.
:-)
When it comes to bullets in space, the issue of whether that propellant is black powder or some other similarly explosive substance really doesn't matter much in the end, as long as it goes boom.
Caveat emptor, IANAL.
Easy. They keep raising the price of tickets....
Why? The DMCA, in attempting to make certain speech illegal, fails all of the tests necessary for prior restraint, making that aspect of the DMCA unconstitutional when applied to the press. Whether online speech is classified as "press" in general is another issue, but since cnet has other media presence, it is very unlikely that the DMCA provisions would stick against them.
Law or not, a suit over this would end badly for the RIAA.
How about the back of your watch? Metal object, in constant contact with your skin. Much less painful, and maybe even practical, too.
Two million dollars for a major spammer isn't disproportionate. First, assume that it costs the average person twenty seconds of time to decide if something is spam, 30 seconds to download a large html file with lots of pictures, etc. over a 56k modem, and you're at nearly a minute of lost work per message. At an engineer's salary, that's fifty cents of wasted time _PER MESSAGE_. Assume the spammer sent out ten million messages (not unreasonable). That's five million dollars worth of damage. If you ask me, they're getting off easy. Really easy.
Worth dying over, no. Worth fighting over, yes, whether in the court system, through "protests", whatever. As for me, I'll fight with my vote. We each have our own ways of fighting bad laws. The important thing is not how we choose to fight them, but that we do choose to fight them.
Or to quote Fahrenheit 451, Faber says to Montag, "I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself."
Erik is probably rolling over in his grave right now.