Life is an example of negative entropy, i.e. a process that absorbs free energy from its environment and uses it to work against entropy by making a small section of that environment more ordered. That the absorbtion of energy creates more entropy than the localised reduction is given, but it doesn't detract from the usefulness of this observation. I imagine any realistic self-replicating machinery will have the same attributes. Fire and falling dominoes, however, don't.
It was also interesting to me that the Wikipedia article on rat poison appears to recommend the most widely used *ineffective* rat poison, which also made by a large company..., and lists some stupid problems with the competition.
As I read it, the article in question doesn't appear to recommend anything. It just lists available products along with details of the operation of each.
The most effective, if you are wondering, is based on Vitamin D
The most effective rat poisons contain at least three different types of poison to ensure that they always work. Vitamin D3 is usually among them, yes.
and has the advantages that (1) the rats eat a fatal dose on the first feeding, and hence do not get a chance to learn to avoid it
This isn't as much of an advantage as you might think. Rats are known to watch other rats eat, and then avoid the food they have eaten if they later die. Poisons that require multiple doses avoid this problem.
(3) since vitamin D isn't really a poison as such, if another animal eats the rat, there's very little risk of secondary poisoning.
This is often quoted by manufacturers as an advantage of these poisons, but it turns out not to be true. The level of vitamin D contained in a typical application of these poisons is more than enough to be fatal to small mammals, e.g. cats and dogs, or even unpleasant for humans.
Sorry, what gives you the right to decide who can do what with pictures of your face?
If I have a picture of you, and I want to perform some processing of it, and doing so does not adversely effect you, why should I not perform that processing?
I'm pretty certain the zombie apocalypse was started by Amazon a few years back. It's just taking its time to catch up with us. You see, every now and then, I see a Kindle hanging around with a picture of some famous dead writer or other, and the words "slide and release the power switch to wake". I can't believe that in all this time, *nobody* has woken Emily Dickinson yet.
Sorry, you'd rather have the umpire rule incorrectly against your team sometimes, because it pisses you off when it happens, and you want sport to piss you off sometimes. Is that really what you're saying?
Frankly, as far as I see it, the point of a spectator sport is to allow you to get behind a group of people who are really good at what they do, and hope that they do really well against other similar groups. I don't think incorrect enforcement of rules is a necessary part of this experience.
Yes, we've had touch-sensitive screens for years, but they've never used complex symbols (like circles, polygons, or letters) as commands. It's always been touching single points to select buttons, up until Palm created Graffiti. What does this patent cover? That's another rhetorical question. The patent appears to cover later implementations of Graffiti, which isn't surprising since it was filed by PalmSource, Inc.
You do realise that when Palm released Graffiti, they were sued by the owners of the patents on Unistrokes, a similar system that dates back to the 80s, and is now expired, right?
Graffiti was not new and innovative. It was at best a minor improvement on what came before. Actually, I'm not so sure it improved anything -- the original unistroke system worked pretty well, IMO.
This would be fine if the courts didn't take the attitude of presuming that patents issued by the patent office are valid, thus leaving the expense of demonstrating their invalidity to the poor suckers that get sued on the back of a document that should never have been issued in the first place.
Who needs a conversion chart? At ~ -40, it's the same for both scales. Anything colder than that is "too cold to contemplate", and the actual numbers are irrelevant.
Agreed. EVE's price is quite reasonable, especially when you consider they're still charging the same non-inflation-adjusted price they were at launch, and there's now something like 10x as much content that you get for your money as you did then. Inflation adjusted, it's as if the subscription had been reduced to about $12.50.
So, let me get this straight: you believe it is wrong for a company to offer two different levels of service for two different prices? That because somebody's paying the basic level price, they should automatically have a right to anything that can be provided at the higher level of service?
That is just crazy, if you ask me. CCP designed the stuff, they have the right to choose what to charge for it. No amount of money you've spent on their *other* products gives you the right to demand access to the rest for free.
Or do you believe that because you've been paying for EVE for so long, you should automatically have right to receive a copy of Dust when they release it?
I have not read the conditions of entry, but they may have included an agreement to surrender all "... equipment; film; and other media to Capital Shopping Centres Group PLC or its authorised agents" on breaching said condition.
The precedent here in England is that such terms are unenforceable unless specific attention is drawn to them. See for instance the rather famous comment from Denning LJ in J Spurling Ltd v Bradshaw. A term granting a right to confiscate personal property merely because it has been used in a particular place seems to me to be very much the kind of term Denning was talking about in that judgment.
AIUI, Scottish law has a tendency to follow English in such matters, so I would presume the case is similar there.
"Causing a public disturbance" isn't actually a criminal offence, at least not in Scotland. The closest I'm aware of is "behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress", but I suspect it would be quite hard to prove in this case. Particularly as the police have recently received guidance that people being offensive to them isn't in actual fact likely to cause them distress, because accepting offense is part of their job...
A common-law "breach of the peace" may also qualify, but in order for that to be proved, the offender must be shown to have threatened damage to person or property (or behaved such that a reasonable person believed they were under threat) whereas it was actually the centre owner who was threatening damage to property by trying to delete the pictures.
Like England and Wales, trespass (by itself) is not a criminal offence in Scotland, so you cannot be arrested for trespass. You can be required to leave, and you can be required to rectify any damage caused by your trespassing, but you cannot be arrested for it. There are exceptions: trespass on crown land, "encamping", and so on, but none would apply here.
Causing a public disturbance *is* grounds to issue an ASBO, so the photographer needs to watch out he doesn't get one of those. If he does, repeating the behaviour *would* be a criminal offence. But without actually issuing the order before the behaviour occurs, this is irrelevant from the point of view of arresting/prosecuting him.
So, no, I don't think they had a legal leg to stand on.
Above is not legal advice. I'm not a lawyer, nor Scottish, but do take an interest in these things.
So, if there was not Steve Jobs, do you really think we had now afordable music for download?
Yes. There were already plenty of people lining up to be in the business before iTMS became so dominant. And as the record companies have basically dictated pricing, it would be pretty much the same as it is now.
Multi touch gestures?
Yes. There were already plenty of people working on multitouch gesture UIs before Apple came along. Including Fingerworks, the company that Apple bought the technology from. Both Microsoft and Mitsubishi had devices in the works, too. Chances are, we'd have pretty much the same exposure to multitouch by now as we would have had anyway; the initial releases may have been delayed by 6 months to a year, however, had Apple not been on the scene.
Do you really think Android would exist if there was no iOS?
Probably, yes. It might not be quite the same as it is now, because it would have been built primarily as a competitor to Windows Mobile, which was of course the OS that was on most smartphones prior to the release of the iPhone.
Do you have reference to any actual, real-world exploits that rely on such a flaw?
As I understand it, the JVM's security protections against treating arbitrary data as bytecode are at least as good as most operating system level protections against treating data as code, but I'd be willing to see counterevidence if it's available.
That's fine in theory. The problem isn't the theory though. The problem is the implementation of Sun / Oracle JAVA is full of security bugs.
And as long as you don't set up your browser to run untrusted java code by default, *it doesn't matter how many such bugs there are*. I don't say this because I'm a Java fanboy, or an Oracle shill. I say this because I'm fed up of people blaming entire systems for insecurity when it's actually the way they are trying to use them that's insecure. Java is a huge system. Applets are a very small part of it, and are the only part that can really be considered insecure. Disable links between your browser and your JVM, and you're (1) perfectly safe and (2) will probably never notice the difference.
Outsourcing isn't always about cheapness. There are plenty of other reasons to prefer outsourcing to hiring an internal staff member.
- Temporary requirement. If you only have a short term project, then it often isn't worth going to the effort & expense of hiring someone. - Speed. You can get an outsourcing provider working on your project next day, if you want. Hiring new developers to do the same work internally is going to take weeks at a minimum, probably at least a month. - Resources. If hiring a new employee means relocating to a larger office, you'll need a damned good reason to do so rather than outsourcing. - Convenience. True story: a few years back I did some consulting at a place that had outsourced their QA to India. This was more convenient than working with local QA, because when they shut up shop for the evening, they'd just upload the latest version of the software and documentation to the QA team, who'd pick it up a few hours later, and would have the testing report sent back and bugs filed by 9am London time the next morning.
The problem is that both Windows and Linux is badly prepared for this since both of them uses executable program structures that require modification upon loading.
Yes and no. Both use executable formats that are designed to cope with the possibility that modifications may be required upon loading, but in both cases, no modifications are required if all modules can be loaded at their preferred location. This should happen for most Windows software that uses only MS-provided DLLs, and can be made to happen for Linux software using the 'prelink' tool. Also, both formats package up points that are likely to need changing and pack them all together into a minimal number of pages (using jump tables, thunks, and similar techniques), which should minimize the disruption even when changes are required.
Linux only really needs rebooting when either the kernel or libc is updated. All other updates can be applied by simply stopping and restarting the relevant services, which is a much faster, less aggressive option. In the last year, this has happened only 4 times for my current distribution. I have also shut the same system down once to replace a faulty hard disk.
My Windows systems have required restarting on average about 30 times over the same period. This has been for several reasons:
- To install non-kernel updates that still require a reboot for no good reason - To clear up a recurring bug in the power management system that stops hibernation from working periodically - To clear up a bug in the screen saver / lock system that prevents the screen saver from applying, and stops the welcome screen showing after display power saving cancels (resulting in the screen effectively never locking) - As part of the installation processes for several applications (e.g. Visual Studio 2010, which requires 2 reboots during installation). - To fix a buggy scanner driver that fails every time the user cancels a scan operation and cannot be fixed without rebooting (under Linux, even this could be fixed with rmmod/insmod, but no equivalent exists for Windows drivers).
And what's with putting [sic] after "He"? Twitter updates are required to be grammatically correct now, including spaces where grammatically necessary?
No, but Slashdot stories are, which is why the [sic] had to be added.
About to...? You do know that Anonymous organizes against them, right?
(True fact: I was watching BBC coverage of one of their "protests" at a military funeral, and in the background is a counter-protester waving a placard that reads "Tits or GTFO".)
The facts were, to all appearances, copied out of a book and inserted into a database by the defendant. No selection was applied at any point; the time zones for every recognized country is included in both sources, so I don't think there's any argument that creativity is involved. I don't think database right applies here.
Slashdot Mirror
Life is an example of negative entropy, i.e. a process that absorbs free energy from its environment and uses it to work against entropy by making a small section of that environment more ordered. That the absorbtion of energy creates more entropy than the localised reduction is given, but it doesn't detract from the usefulness of this observation. I imagine any realistic self-replicating machinery will have the same attributes. Fire and falling dominoes, however, don't.
It was also interesting to me that the Wikipedia article on rat poison appears to recommend the most widely used *ineffective* rat poison, which also made by a large company..., and lists some stupid problems with the competition.
As I read it, the article in question doesn't appear to recommend anything. It just lists available products along with details of the operation of each.
The most effective, if you are wondering, is based on Vitamin D
The most effective rat poisons contain at least three different types of poison to ensure that they always work. Vitamin D3 is usually among them, yes.
and has the advantages that (1) the rats eat a fatal dose on the first feeding, and hence do not get a chance to learn to avoid it
This isn't as much of an advantage as you might think. Rats are known to watch other rats eat, and then avoid the food they have eaten if they later die. Poisons that require multiple doses avoid this problem.
(3) since vitamin D isn't really a poison as such, if another animal eats the rat, there's very little risk of secondary poisoning.
This is often quoted by manufacturers as an advantage of these poisons, but it turns out not to be true. The level of vitamin D contained in a typical application of these poisons is more than enough to be fatal to small mammals, e.g. cats and dogs, or even unpleasant for humans.
Sorry, what gives you the right to decide who can do what with pictures of your face?
If I have a picture of you, and I want to perform some processing of it, and doing so does not adversely effect you, why should I not perform that processing?
I'm pretty certain the zombie apocalypse was started by Amazon a few years back. It's just taking its time to catch up with us. You see, every now and then, I see a Kindle hanging around with a picture of some famous dead writer or other, and the words "slide and release the power switch to wake". I can't believe that in all this time, *nobody* has woken Emily Dickinson yet.
Sorry, you'd rather have the umpire rule incorrectly against your team sometimes, because it pisses you off when it happens, and you want sport to piss you off sometimes. Is that really what you're saying?
Frankly, as far as I see it, the point of a spectator sport is to allow you to get behind a group of people who are really good at what they do, and hope that they do really well against other similar groups. I don't think incorrect enforcement of rules is a necessary part of this experience.
Yes, we've had touch-sensitive screens for years, but they've never used complex symbols (like circles, polygons, or letters) as commands. It's always been touching single points to select buttons, up until Palm created Graffiti. What does this patent cover? That's another rhetorical question. The patent appears to cover later implementations of Graffiti, which isn't surprising since it was filed by PalmSource, Inc.
You do realise that when Palm released Graffiti, they were sued by the owners of the patents on Unistrokes, a similar system that dates back to the 80s, and is now expired, right?
Graffiti was not new and innovative. It was at best a minor improvement on what came before. Actually, I'm not so sure it improved anything -- the original unistroke system worked pretty well, IMO.
This would be fine if the courts didn't take the attitude of presuming that patents issued by the patent office are valid, thus leaving the expense of demonstrating their invalidity to the poor suckers that get sued on the back of a document that should never have been issued in the first place.
Who needs a conversion chart? At ~ -40, it's the same for both scales. Anything colder than that is "too cold to contemplate", and the actual numbers are irrelevant.
Agreed. EVE's price is quite reasonable, especially when you consider they're still charging the same non-inflation-adjusted price they were at launch, and there's now something like 10x as much content that you get for your money as you did then. Inflation adjusted, it's as if the subscription had been reduced to about $12.50.
So, let me get this straight: you believe it is wrong for a company to offer two different levels of service for two different prices? That because somebody's paying the basic level price, they should automatically have a right to anything that can be provided at the higher level of service?
That is just crazy, if you ask me. CCP designed the stuff, they have the right to choose what to charge for it. No amount of money you've spent on their *other* products gives you the right to demand access to the rest for free.
Or do you believe that because you've been paying for EVE for so long, you should automatically have right to receive a copy of Dust when they release it?
I have not read the conditions of entry, but they may have included an agreement to surrender all " ... equipment; film; and other media to Capital Shopping Centres Group PLC or its authorised agents" on breaching said condition.
The precedent here in England is that such terms are unenforceable unless specific attention is drawn to them. See for instance the rather famous comment from Denning LJ in J Spurling Ltd v Bradshaw. A term granting a right to confiscate personal property merely because it has been used in a particular place seems to me to be very much the kind of term Denning was talking about in that judgment.
AIUI, Scottish law has a tendency to follow English in such matters, so I would presume the case is similar there.
"Causing a public disturbance" isn't actually a criminal offence, at least not in Scotland. The closest I'm aware of is "behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress", but I suspect it would be quite hard to prove in this case. Particularly as the police have recently received guidance that people being offensive to them isn't in actual fact likely to cause them distress, because accepting offense is part of their job...
A common-law "breach of the peace" may also qualify, but in order for that to be proved, the offender must be shown to have threatened damage to person or property (or behaved such that a reasonable person believed they were under threat) whereas it was actually the centre owner who was threatening damage to property by trying to delete the pictures.
Like England and Wales, trespass (by itself) is not a criminal offence in Scotland, so you cannot be arrested for trespass. You can be required to leave, and you can be required to rectify any damage caused by your trespassing, but you cannot be arrested for it. There are exceptions: trespass on crown land, "encamping", and so on, but none would apply here.
Causing a public disturbance *is* grounds to issue an ASBO, so the photographer needs to watch out he doesn't get one of those. If he does, repeating the behaviour *would* be a criminal offence. But without actually issuing the order before the behaviour occurs, this is irrelevant from the point of view of arresting/prosecuting him.
So, no, I don't think they had a legal leg to stand on.
Above is not legal advice. I'm not a lawyer, nor Scottish, but do take an interest in these things.
You wouldn't happen to know where I can find a concrete mixer, would you?
I happen to have one right here, right now. You don't happen to know where Justin Bieber is, do you?
So, if there was not Steve Jobs, do you really think we had now afordable music for download?
Yes. There were already plenty of people lining up to be in the business before iTMS became so dominant. And as the record companies have basically dictated pricing, it would be pretty much the same as it is now.
Multi touch gestures?
Yes. There were already plenty of people working on multitouch gesture UIs before Apple came along. Including Fingerworks, the company that Apple bought the technology from. Both Microsoft and Mitsubishi had devices in the works, too. Chances are, we'd have pretty much the same exposure to multitouch by now as we would have had anyway; the initial releases may have been delayed by 6 months to a year, however, had Apple not been on the scene.
Do you really think Android would exist if there was no iOS?
Probably, yes. It might not be quite the same as it is now, because it would have been built primarily as a competitor to Windows Mobile, which was of course the OS that was on most smartphones prior to the release of the iPhone.
Do you have reference to any actual, real-world exploits that rely on such a flaw?
As I understand it, the JVM's security protections against treating arbitrary data as bytecode are at least as good as most operating system level protections against treating data as code, but I'd be willing to see counterevidence if it's available.
That's fine in theory. The problem isn't the theory though. The problem is the implementation of Sun / Oracle JAVA is full of security bugs.
And as long as you don't set up your browser to run untrusted java code by default, *it doesn't matter how many such bugs there are*. I don't say this because I'm a Java fanboy, or an Oracle shill. I say this because I'm fed up of people blaming entire systems for insecurity when it's actually the way they are trying to use them that's insecure. Java is a huge system. Applets are a very small part of it, and are the only part that can really be considered insecure. Disable links between your browser and your JVM, and you're (1) perfectly safe and (2) will probably never notice the difference.
You misunderstand. What's "negligent" is the fact that www.thepiratebay.org serves up a blank page, rather than a redirect or a copy of the content.
Outsourcing isn't always about cheapness. There are plenty of other reasons to prefer outsourcing to hiring an internal staff member.
- Temporary requirement. If you only have a short term project, then it often isn't worth going to the effort & expense of hiring someone.
- Speed. You can get an outsourcing provider working on your project next day, if you want. Hiring new developers to do the same work internally is going to take weeks at a minimum, probably at least a month.
- Resources. If hiring a new employee means relocating to a larger office, you'll need a damned good reason to do so rather than outsourcing.
- Convenience. True story: a few years back I did some consulting at a place that had outsourced their QA to India. This was more convenient than working with local QA, because when they shut up shop for the evening, they'd just upload the latest version of the software and documentation to the QA team, who'd pick it up a few hours later, and would have the testing report sent back and bugs filed by 9am London time the next morning.
NO CARRIER
That's what happens when you use dialup for subversive stuff.
You have to use dialup for subversive stuff. Broadband can penetrate the tinfoil hat and let the government read your mind.
The problem is that both Windows and Linux is badly prepared for this since both of them uses executable program structures that require modification upon loading.
Yes and no. Both use executable formats that are designed to cope with the possibility that modifications may be required upon loading, but in both cases, no modifications are required if all modules can be loaded at their preferred location. This should happen for most Windows software that uses only MS-provided DLLs, and can be made to happen for Linux software using the 'prelink' tool. Also, both formats package up points that are likely to need changing and pack them all together into a minimal number of pages (using jump tables, thunks, and similar techniques), which should minimize the disruption even when changes are required.
Then there are critical security updates you haven't applied. (e.g. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms11-057 )
Linux only really needs rebooting when either the kernel or libc is updated. All other updates can be applied by simply stopping and restarting the relevant services, which is a much faster, less aggressive option. In the last year, this has happened only 4 times for my current distribution. I have also shut the same system down once to replace a faulty hard disk.
My Windows systems have required restarting on average about 30 times over the same period. This has been for several reasons:
- To install non-kernel updates that still require a reboot for no good reason
- To clear up a recurring bug in the power management system that stops hibernation from working periodically
- To clear up a bug in the screen saver / lock system that prevents the screen saver from applying, and stops the welcome screen showing after display power saving cancels (resulting in the screen effectively never locking)
- As part of the installation processes for several applications (e.g. Visual Studio 2010, which requires 2 reboots during installation).
- To fix a buggy scanner driver that fails every time the user cancels a scan operation and cannot be fixed without rebooting (under Linux, even this could be fixed with rmmod/insmod, but no equivalent exists for Windows drivers).
And what's with putting [sic] after "He"? Twitter updates are required to be grammatically correct now, including spaces where grammatically necessary?
No, but Slashdot stories are, which is why the [sic] had to be added.
Really. ... ... ...
I'm serious.
Honestly.
*ROFLMAO*
About to...? You do know that Anonymous organizes against them, right?
(True fact: I was watching BBC coverage of one of their "protests" at a military funeral, and in the background is a counter-protester waving a placard that reads "Tits or GTFO".)
The facts were, to all appearances, copied out of a book and inserted into a database by the defendant. No selection was applied at any point; the time zones for every recognized country is included in both sources, so I don't think there's any argument that creativity is involved. I don't think database right applies here.