The entire Office UI team, that's who. Ever seen that Customer Experience Improvement Program that you probably disable? Well, they collected and analysed data, and found that people simply weren't discovering Office features.
Maybe they weren't finding them, because menu items started to auto-hide? Maybe they weren't finding them because the online help was a little too online (taking a precious half minute to collect search results from a website, in stead of just using a properly indexed helpfile, and then returning a dozen irrelevant hits that look more like blog items than reference content).
The ribbon is all nice and that, but it's only seeking to fix the interface they broke.
People not finding features is also due to the fact people don't expect some features, and some features are just shoddily made. People tend to be amazed the first time they're shown how easy it is to make Word comparisons with change-balloons. And then turned off when it turns out excel doesn't have that feature (only a clumsy cooperative mode that uses exchange). In fact, comparing excel sheets (and circumventing 'protection') is the reason I've installed OpenOffice at work, alongside the sanctioned office 2003.
In the end, people tend to use as much as office as they need to do their job.
I'm sorry but this is a stupid argument that's been pulled out over and over by people who don't want to take responsabilities. You have lung cancer? Damn those tobacco lobbyists. You have obesity? Damn the junk food lobbyists...
You're trying to have your cake and eat it. If consumers' intake of sugar versus high fructose corn syrup is their own damn responsibility, and therefore not a matter for public policy, then surely congress should have stayed out of the whole business of regulating sugar in the first place - which is what GP is complaining about. You can't have it both ways; when it comes to health, consumers should control themselves, but when it comes to buying 'the right product' for 'the economy' consumers cannot be trusted and the government must sway their choices via subsidies and tariffs?
Postgres SQL syntax is much like using Modula-2: unecessarily anal and restrictive.
Uhhhm what syntax? ANSI SQL? Can you actually provide any examples, cause what you're saying doesn't make any sense.
I think grandparent poster is referring to precisely that. You can do some pretty neat (but weird) stuff in MySQL. It'll allow you to use functions just about anywhere, and alias stuff. IIRC, from back in the day when I made a LAMP website, a query like thus would work on MySQL (contrived example):
SELECT SOUNDEX(a.name) AS s, b.zipcode FROM names AS a, adress AS b WHERE SOUNDEX(b.name) = s;
Also, IIRC MySQL doesn't bother too much with type conversions, you can concatenate and compare numbers and strings, etc.
I don't know about psql, but oracle or even MSSQL won't stand for that sort of thing! The only other "database" I've found so far that will allow you to pull such stunts is Access (using the Jet engine, not the MSSQL interface).
A lesson here for anyone starting a company is to hire some top management people who are well-connected. If your Director of Engineering or CTO or Chief Scientist or whatever, in a situation like this, can say, "Hey...B's CTO went to my school and we were in the same fraternity...I can get his number, call, give the secret Alpha Delta Smegma pass phrase, and I'm sure he'll get the problem taken care of", that's great. The tech industry, just like the other industry groups, has its old boy's network, and you want to have someone who is connected to that.
In ye olden days, all the AV people hung out on virus-L/comp.virus. I guess now they hang out together in not-so-public places, but you can still find places like virus bulletin which posts virus analyses etc. I find it hard to believe vendor Foo's developers have any problem at all reaching vendor Bar's developers.
Well, disclaimer here, I don't need a portable music player, and I'm from Europe; handsets are cheap and interchangeable, and you can get plans that don't include a handset and cost only a few euros a month with a few hours of talktime included, so that's not really much of an issue. Also, check out the price on something like a glofiish or other HTC handset. Or even a blackberry. Much lower than the iPhone, just slightly less chique. And I've not been able to hold an iPhone in my hand yet, whereas I have had occasion to play with HTCs and blackberries and talk to their owners.. Seeing as you could also buy 2 glofiish'es (or ASUS, or whatever) for the cost of an iPhone.. Well..
The AT&T 8525 is also known as the HTC TyTN (which has been available for some time, which is a good thing, more reviews to go on!). The glofiish M700 has twice the RAM and built-in GPS (killer app and all that), and is about 90 cheaper, though the TyTN has UMTS/HSDPA (both have wifi though). I'm not really bothered with UMTS, but I do like GPS, so it's probably not the handset for me.
Is there anything to suggest that the iPhone is or will be a success? Perhaps it won't fail as spectacularly as their earlier try at a phone.. But it's facing hefty competition from dozens of windows mobile devices, blackberries, and even just plain old devices that only have one function, but do it extremely well. Hey, some of the windows mobile devices even look pretty stylish! Not to forget, you can buy 2 laptops for the price of the iPhone AND the 2-year contract that comes with it..
As for me personally, the iPhone is off my shortlist because I'm looking either for a nice phone that only does voice, or (ideally) for an all-in-one; and 'all' very much includes GPS in my mind. It's kind of a killer app for PDAs.
If fellow slashdotters have any suggestions.. the ipaq 6515w is a bit too wide for my taste, and it has a small square screen.. The E-ten M700 looks very good, but I'm not sure about the robustness of the handset and keyboard, the call quality(!), and the software support - I hated dicking about with 'unofficial' windows mobile upgrades on my Qtek 2020 (which incidentally had crappy voice quality).
Finally, EULAs are sometimes just as important to you and "throwing them all out" would be idiotic. They often set out things like your warranty coverage and your rights to use software (your "license") that you otherwise wouldn't have the right. Most importantly, it keeps things CHEAPER for you. If every computer/software company had unlimited liability, you would probably be spending considerably more for your purchases.
Shennanigans. Commerce has operated without EULAs just fine for centuries. I never sign a contract when I buy something from a supermarket, or even a big ticket item like a fridge, and somehow those companies don't suffer "unlimited liability" claims. Plenty of businesses have general terms and conditions that aren't disguised as contracts, and they're just as valid -- in fact, probably moreso, as they don't pretend to be something they're not.
Also, tricking people into agreeing to waive their rights is pretty stupid. Even if it were found that a contract was entered into, that sort of term is often thrown out as unreasonable.
A better approach would be a technological one; let machinery decide whether the toilet seat should be lowered or not.
One might imagine some sort of sensor that detects the prospective toilet user's gender. However, this is not satisfactory, seeing as how males do sometimes require the seat to be down as well.
I propose a system whereby the toiletseat is lowered when the door leading to the toilet is closed, and opened when the door is closed.
After all, many men leave the toilet door open, though women are vastly more likely to close it. Also, men are more likely to close the door for fear of exposing themselves (or malodorous fumes) when they would be facing the door when using the toilet, rather than standing with their back to the door - which is the most likely orientation when urinating. Closing the door for toiletseat-down operation can be reinforced in males by only providing access to printed matter (such as a newspaper) with the door closed (and hence, the toiletseat down).
The toilet seat might be operated electronically, or even mechanically, so this system could even be used during power outages or in developing nations. It would require only the bare minimum of training for all participants.
I've always found captures of camcordered movies to be of crap quality. It has never stopped me from later buying the DVD, or from even going to the theater. From me, they've never lost a dime because of this.
This move is analogous to some singer taking out a multi-million dollar insurance on her ass.
It's to make the asset appear more valuable than it is.
Going to a movie theater and sitting there in person, the sound and video quality is already far inferior to a DVD. A camcorder video of that experience is worthless. The experience itself..
Businesses should not be run on shared hosting accounts. Every time there's a hardware problem on a Dreamhost shared box/cluster, for example, there's a whole pile of morons complaining that their business is losing money, etc etc.
Dedicated hosting or colocation, people. Pay for an SLA!
I've seen this bandied about on dreamhost's forums before. But face it, $7/month for hosting isn't cheap. I could run my puny little website off my home PC and ADSL line with no problem, so any money at all that's spent on hosting outside the door is spent there for a reason: economies of scale. That $7 times thousands of customers should be able to buy some redundant power supplies, for example. Dreamhost's particular problem is that while they do a whole lot of things right, the building they're located in does not have a dependable or redundant powersupply. It's not the $7/month pricing that's making their sites unreliable, it's their own past decisions.
If anything, shared hosting should be more reliable than a dedicated server. You're not fucking up things yourself as root. There'll be measures in place to prevent sites from using up all the bandwidth. Some one's keeping an eye out on the server 24h, or at least 38 pimply teenagers will complain about their forum being down the second anything happens to it..
Let's put it this way; buying dedicated hosting at the likes of dreamhost won't help you the next time the power for their entire facility goes down. Or when the (single, non-redundant) connection to their secondary datacenter, which actually happens to host dedicated servers, goes down.
Re:Why Does Encryption Need to "Scramble" Informat
on
A Mighty Number Falls
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· Score: 1
Check out the wikipedia page on navajo code talkers. It even has the memo recommending navajo, as the navajo speaking tribes hadn't been visited by German anthropologist, unlike every other native american tribe.
Re:Why Does Encryption Need to "Scramble" Informat
on
A Mighty Number Falls
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The Navajo language basically served as a one time pad in WWII
No, they served as code-talkers. A one-time pad is a system whereby every bit of the encryption key is independent of the others (never reused, unlike codewords) and entropy is maximal. Simply translating stuff from one word to another is simple substitution, a simple code.
The reason Navajo Code Talkers were succesful wasn't because the scheme was particularly advanced. In fact, it would have been computationally trivial to break. However the messages relayed were only ever "tactical" in nature; i.e. communications in the field, of use during a fight, but old news in about 10 minutes. Had Navajo code talking been used to relay top-secret messages, it would have been broken fairly quickly. The reason for its success was that is was extremely cheap to implement for the US, and the secrets protected weren't valuable enough to spend huge effort on breaking. Economics, rather than mathematics.
Navajo wasn't used in Europe, because Germany had sent anthropologists to the US to learn native languages, anticipating precisely this scheme.
And of course, since they say that's why they did it, that must be why they did it. Yeah, right
I look forward to your sources. Maybe, I dunno, some people who were there at the time? (Don't bother with quoting Churchill or Robert Schuman, they're obvious patsies for the "peace as a prime purpose" position) Glossing over the the Treaty that established the ECSC when discussing the origins of the EU might give some people the impression you're just making stuff up as you go along.
CONSIDERING that world peace may be safeguarded only by creative efforts equal to the dangers which menace it;
CONVINCED that the contribution which an organized and vital Europe can bring to civilization is indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations;
CONSCIOUS of the fact that Europe can be built only by concrete actions which create a real solidarity and by the establishment of common bases for economic development;
DESIROUS of assisting through the expansion of their basic production in raising the standard of living and in furthering the works of peace;
RESOLVED to substitute for historic rivalries a fusion of their essential interests; to establish, by creating an economic community, the foundation of a broad and independent community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts; and to lay the bases of institutions capable of giving direction to their future common destiny;
HAVE DECIDED to create a European Coal and Steel Community[..]
"they are responsible for keeping peace (within EU members states) for over 50 years"
Huh? The EU started out as, and effectively remains, an economic organization. How did they "keep the peace".
The EU started out as the European Coal and Steel Community, steel being the stuff you use to make bombs, trucks, tanks and other weaponry. One of the express purposes of regulation the steel and coal industries was to be able to prevent any country from suddenly starting a mass buildup of weaponry, like Germany's effort immediately preceding WWII.
I predict we'll see open warfare between (soon-to-be) former EU nations within 20 years.
Like you said - Europe's been at peace for "a fucking long time", but 50 years isn't enouigh to change huma nature, and the nature of humans is to make war.
I'm sure that like US states for the past 142 years, we'll see fit to take it out on nations outside the federation.
I must be missing something obvious. How do cable companies benefit from this? They aren't content providers. They display the feed from the broadcaster (ie NBC, Discovery, etc). I have never heard the cable companies ever getting a cut of the ad revenue. What am I missing?
Back up to the part where you say I have never heard the cable companies ever getting a cut of the ad revenue.
Now you have.
Some channels pay the cable networks to be carried, and some channels the cable networks have to pay for in order to carry them (ad-free premium channels being the most obvious). In the first case it's obvious that the cable networks are getting money from the content companies, in the second case they can get discounts. Some channels allow local cable operators to insert localized ads during the breaks. It's all very, how you say, payola.
Of course, the major content corporations are only a handful of companies, and they have huge brand recognition - coupled with tight copyright restrictions (a cable company can't start it's own 'desperate housewives' channel and just pay some mandatory licensing fees, quite different from radio) this is an environment that is conducive to forming an oligopoly. To put it lightly. And then there's cable networks owned by content companies (like Time-Warner Cable).
Cable and content companies are in an eternal love-hate relationship. The one has eyeballs, the other stuff to gaze at. They pay each other, give and take.
Perhaps a better term would be the Content-Distribution Complex.
people complaining that 60-watt-equivalent CFLs are too dim are taking slightly the wrong approach
On the contrary - producers of CFLs are engaging in false labelling. An 11W CFL I picked up puts out (according to its specifications) 550 Lumen of light, whereas a 60W incandescent I had lying about puts out 690 Lumen according to the box; that's 25% more! No wonder people feel cheated. Yes, you could switch to higher wattage CFL bulbs, but that doesn't change the fact you were lied to.
I'm also sceptical about the energy savings. Yes, you'll pay less in electricity bills, but the energy that isn't being converted into light is converted into heat. So getting rid of incandescents could increase your heating bill. Of course not all of the heat incandescents put out will be useful (close to the ceiling, heating up the lamp itself, or outdoors) but you cant simply substract 11 from 60 and take that number as the Watts-per-hour saved.
In my savings account, thirteen and quarter million dollars aren't exactly loose change. If they drop that much, they'll be bought up by some hedge fund who will split up the litigious part of the company (some LLC that can take the fall for the IBM counterclaims) from assets that they can sell on, like real estate.
At a market cap of 19.53M at 92ct/share, there are 21M shares in SCOX. 14.25M are "float" according to finance.yahoo.com, so they can do reverse stock-splits quite a bit, and still have more than 500,000 shares listed.
I wonder how many of those 30 million HDTV owners are in a similar situation, just biding their time.
Well, they probably all have 720 sets, which means they'll be miffed in a few years when 1080 is mainstream, anyway. I wouldn't touch a HD TV unless it's 2160 (twice 1080 and three times 720, so upscaling will work neatly for both). Most sets I see on the market now are 768, and since no-one is looking at those through letterboxes, it means they're upscaling from 720 to 768, which is pitiful. You're better off upscaling divx movies from bittorrent on your computer screen.
If any journalist can be forced to provide any information (including raw footage of demonstrations and providing sourced) to the police, they will be treated like the police, and we, the public, will get little or no information any more about these events, about these people and their motivations. This is obviously a bad thing.
If just anybody can claim to be a journalist and clam up, police and prosecution will have a lot less evidence to work with and have great problems prosecuting anyone. This is obviously a bad thing too.
The trick is to strike a balance between these public interests. That's a nuanced discussed not ideally suited to slashdot.
One thing you can say is: if this guy withstood 226 days of imprisonment and still didn't turn over the tapes, it seems pretty obvious that the court is taking extreme liberties with this guys personal freedoms, without producing results. All the more irksome is that the guy went to jail without a real trial. For all we know the tapes, not having been physically entered into evidence, never actually existed, and the whole thing is based on hearsay and a confession.
Of course, the prevailing public mood in any case seems to be "something bad happened, so someone should go to jail". We live in interesting times.
Slashdot Mirror
That translates to annual electricity savings between $20.29 per server and $36.04 per server
:)
Over what time period? Or are they using the prime interest rate to figure out what the one-time savings are?
They're talking about those very special monthly annual savings..
The entire Office UI team, that's who. Ever seen that Customer Experience Improvement Program that you probably disable? Well, they collected and analysed data, and found that people simply weren't discovering Office features.
Maybe they weren't finding them, because menu items started to auto-hide? Maybe they weren't finding them because the online help was a little too online (taking a precious half minute to collect search results from a website, in stead of just using a properly indexed helpfile, and then returning a dozen irrelevant hits that look more like blog items than reference content).
The ribbon is all nice and that, but it's only seeking to fix the interface they broke.
People not finding features is also due to the fact people don't expect some features, and some features are just shoddily made. People tend to be amazed the first time they're shown how easy it is to make Word comparisons with change-balloons. And then turned off when it turns out excel doesn't have that feature (only a clumsy cooperative mode that uses exchange). In fact, comparing excel sheets (and circumventing 'protection') is the reason I've installed OpenOffice at work, alongside the sanctioned office 2003.
In the end, people tend to use as much as office as they need to do their job.
I'm sorry but this is a stupid argument that's been pulled out over and over by people who don't want to take responsabilities. You have lung cancer? Damn those tobacco lobbyists. You have obesity? Damn the junk food lobbyists...
You're trying to have your cake and eat it. If consumers' intake of sugar versus high fructose corn syrup is their own damn responsibility, and therefore not a matter for public policy, then surely congress should have stayed out of the whole business of regulating sugar in the first place - which is what GP is complaining about. You can't have it both ways; when it comes to health, consumers should control themselves, but when it comes to buying 'the right product' for 'the economy' consumers cannot be trusted and the government must sway their choices via subsidies and tariffs?
Postgres SQL syntax is much like using Modula-2: unecessarily anal and restrictive.
Uhhhm what syntax? ANSI SQL? Can you actually provide any examples, cause what you're saying doesn't make any sense.
I think grandparent poster is referring to precisely that. You can do some pretty neat (but weird) stuff in MySQL. It'll allow you to use functions just about anywhere, and alias stuff. IIRC, from back in the day when I made a LAMP website, a query like thus would work on MySQL (contrived example):
SELECT SOUNDEX(a.name) AS s, b.zipcode FROM names AS a, adress AS b WHERE SOUNDEX(b.name) = s;
Also, IIRC MySQL doesn't bother too much with type conversions, you can concatenate and compare numbers and strings, etc.
I don't know about psql, but oracle or even MSSQL won't stand for that sort of thing! The only other "database" I've found so far that will allow you to pull such stunts is Access (using the Jet engine, not the MSSQL interface).
A lesson here for anyone starting a company is to hire some top management people who are well-connected. If your Director of Engineering or CTO or Chief Scientist or whatever, in a situation like this, can say, "Hey...B's CTO went to my school and we were in the same fraternity...I can get his number, call, give the secret Alpha Delta Smegma pass phrase, and I'm sure he'll get the problem taken care of", that's great. The tech industry, just like the other industry groups, has its old boy's network, and you want to have someone who is connected to that.
In ye olden days, all the AV people hung out on virus-L/comp.virus. I guess now they hang out together in not-so-public places, but you can still find places like virus bulletin which posts virus analyses etc. I find it hard to believe vendor Foo's developers have any problem at all reaching vendor Bar's developers.
Glad they weren't dicks and didn't honor the warantee because I didn't register it when I bought.
That's what "doesn't affect your statutory rights" means.
All the letters worked but special keys like Shift, Ctrl, Alt, Etc didn't.
Where's the Etc key?
My uncle has a keyboard (sorry, no pic) that has a keycap that says "unused".
If you press it, it turns out to function as a back-slash.
They should've just captioned it "any".
Well, disclaimer here, I don't need a portable music player, and I'm from Europe; handsets are cheap and interchangeable, and you can get plans that don't include a handset and cost only a few euros a month with a few hours of talktime included, so that's not really much of an issue.
Also, check out the price on something like a glofiish or other HTC handset. Or even a blackberry. Much lower than the iPhone, just slightly less chique. And I've not been able to hold an iPhone in my hand yet, whereas I have had occasion to play with HTCs and blackberries and talk to their owners.. Seeing as you could also buy 2 glofiish'es (or ASUS, or whatever) for the cost of an iPhone.. Well..
The AT&T 8525 is also known as the HTC TyTN (which has been available for some time, which is a good thing, more reviews to go on!).
The glofiish M700 has twice the RAM and built-in GPS (killer app and all that), and is about 90 cheaper, though the TyTN has UMTS/HSDPA (both have wifi though). I'm not really bothered with UMTS, but I do like GPS, so it's probably not the handset for me.
Is there anything to suggest that the iPhone is or will be a success? Perhaps it won't fail as spectacularly as their earlier try at a phone.. But it's facing hefty competition from dozens of windows mobile devices, blackberries, and even just plain old devices that only have one function, but do it extremely well. Hey, some of the windows mobile devices even look pretty stylish! Not to forget, you can buy 2 laptops for the price of the iPhone AND the 2-year contract that comes with it..
As for me personally, the iPhone is off my shortlist because I'm looking either for a nice phone that only does voice, or (ideally) for an all-in-one; and 'all' very much includes GPS in my mind. It's kind of a killer app for PDAs.
If fellow slashdotters have any suggestions.. the ipaq 6515w is a bit too wide for my taste, and it has a small square screen.. The E-ten M700 looks very good, but I'm not sure about the robustness of the handset and keyboard, the call quality(!), and the software support - I hated dicking about with 'unofficial' windows mobile upgrades on my Qtek 2020 (which incidentally had crappy voice quality).
Finally, EULAs are sometimes just as important to you and "throwing them all out" would be idiotic. They often set out things like your warranty coverage and your rights to use software (your "license") that you otherwise wouldn't have the right. Most importantly, it keeps things CHEAPER for you. If every computer/software company had unlimited liability, you would probably be spending considerably more for your purchases.
Shennanigans. Commerce has operated without EULAs just fine for centuries. I never sign a contract when I buy something from a supermarket, or even a big ticket item like a fridge, and somehow those companies don't suffer "unlimited liability" claims. Plenty of businesses have general terms and conditions that aren't disguised as contracts, and they're just as valid -- in fact, probably moreso, as they don't pretend to be something they're not.
Also, tricking people into agreeing to waive their rights is pretty stupid. Even if it were found that a contract was entered into, that sort of term is often thrown out as unreasonable.
A better approach would be a technological one; let machinery decide whether the toilet seat should be lowered or not.
One might imagine some sort of sensor that detects the prospective toilet user's gender. However, this is not satisfactory, seeing as how males do sometimes require the seat to be down as well.
I propose a system whereby the toiletseat is lowered when the door leading to the toilet is closed, and opened when the door is closed.
After all, many men leave the toilet door open, though women are vastly more likely to close it. Also, men are more likely to close the door for fear of exposing themselves (or malodorous fumes) when they would be facing the door when using the toilet, rather than standing with their back to the door - which is the most likely orientation when urinating. Closing the door for toiletseat-down operation can be reinforced in males by only providing access to printed matter (such as a newspaper) with the door closed (and hence, the toiletseat down).
The toilet seat might be operated electronically, or even mechanically, so this system could even be used during power outages or in developing nations. It would require only the bare minimum of training for all participants.
I've always found captures of camcordered movies to be of crap quality. It has never stopped me from later buying the DVD, or from even going to the theater. From me, they've never lost a dime because of this.
This move is analogous to some singer taking out a multi-million dollar insurance on her ass.
It's to make the asset appear more valuable than it is.
Going to a movie theater and sitting there in person, the sound and video quality is already far inferior to a DVD. A camcorder video of that experience is worthless. The experience itself..
Businesses should not be run on shared hosting accounts. Every time there's a hardware problem on a Dreamhost shared box/cluster, for example, there's a whole pile of morons complaining that their business is losing money, etc etc.
Dedicated hosting or colocation, people. Pay for an SLA!
I've seen this bandied about on dreamhost's forums before. But face it, $7/month for hosting isn't cheap. I could run my puny little website off my home PC and ADSL line with no problem, so any money at all that's spent on hosting outside the door is spent there for a reason: economies of scale. That $7 times thousands of customers should be able to buy some redundant power supplies, for example. Dreamhost's particular problem is that while they do a whole lot of things right, the building they're located in does not have a dependable or redundant powersupply. It's not the $7/month pricing that's making their sites unreliable, it's their own past decisions.
If anything, shared hosting should be more reliable than a dedicated server. You're not fucking up things yourself as root. There'll be measures in place to prevent sites from using up all the bandwidth. Some one's keeping an eye out on the server 24h, or at least 38 pimply teenagers will complain about their forum being down the second anything happens to it..
Let's put it this way; buying dedicated hosting at the likes of dreamhost won't help you the next time the power for their entire facility goes down. Or when the (single, non-redundant) connection to their secondary datacenter, which actually happens to host dedicated servers, goes down.
Check out the wikipedia page on navajo code talkers. It even has the memo recommending navajo, as the navajo speaking tribes hadn't been visited by German anthropologist, unlike every other native american tribe.
The Navajo language basically served as a one time pad in WWII
No, they served as code-talkers. A one-time pad is a system whereby every bit of the encryption key is independent of the others (never reused, unlike codewords) and entropy is maximal. Simply translating stuff from one word to another is simple substitution, a simple code.
The reason Navajo Code Talkers were succesful wasn't because the scheme was particularly advanced. In fact, it would have been computationally trivial to break. However the messages relayed were only ever "tactical" in nature; i.e. communications in the field, of use during a fight, but old news in about 10 minutes. Had Navajo code talking been used to relay top-secret messages, it would have been broken fairly quickly. The reason for its success was that is was extremely cheap to implement for the US, and the secrets protected weren't valuable enough to spend huge effort on breaking. Economics, rather than mathematics.
Navajo wasn't used in Europe, because Germany had sent anthropologists to the US to learn native languages, anticipating precisely this scheme.
And of course, since they say that's why they did it, that must be why they did it. Yeah, right
I look forward to your sources. Maybe, I dunno, some people who were there at the time? (Don't bother with quoting Churchill or Robert Schuman, they're obvious patsies for the "peace as a prime purpose" position)
Glossing over the the Treaty that established the ECSC when discussing the origins of the EU might give some people the impression you're just making stuff up as you go along.
Probably not a prime purpose, though.
The preambles of the Treaty of Paris:
CONSIDERING that world peace may be safeguarded only by creative efforts equal to the dangers which menace it;
CONVINCED that the contribution which an organized and vital Europe can bring to civilization is indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations;
CONSCIOUS of the fact that Europe can be built only by concrete actions which create a real solidarity and by the establishment of common bases for economic development;
DESIROUS of assisting through the expansion of their basic production in raising the standard of living and in furthering the works of peace;
RESOLVED to substitute for historic rivalries a fusion of their essential interests; to establish, by creating an economic community, the foundation of a broad and independent community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts; and to lay the bases of institutions capable of giving direction to their future common destiny;
HAVE DECIDED to create a European Coal and Steel Community[..]
Yeah, probably just a footnote in history.
"they are responsible for keeping peace (within EU members states) for over 50 years"
Huh? The EU started out as, and effectively remains, an economic organization. How did they "keep the peace".
The EU started out as the European Coal and Steel Community, steel being the stuff you use to make bombs, trucks, tanks and other weaponry. One of the express purposes of regulation the steel and coal industries was to be able to prevent any country from suddenly starting a mass buildup of weaponry, like Germany's effort immediately preceding WWII.
I predict we'll see open warfare between (soon-to-be) former EU nations within 20 years.
Like you said - Europe's been at peace for "a fucking long time", but 50 years isn't enouigh to change huma nature, and the nature of humans is to make war.
I'm sure that like US states for the past 142 years, we'll see fit to take it out on nations outside the federation.
I must be missing something obvious. How do cable companies benefit from this? They aren't content providers. They display the feed from the broadcaster (ie NBC, Discovery, etc). I have never heard the cable companies ever getting a cut of the ad revenue. What am I missing?
Back up to the part where you say I have never heard the cable companies ever getting a cut of the ad revenue.
Now you have.
Some channels pay the cable networks to be carried, and some channels the cable networks have to pay for in order to carry them (ad-free premium channels being the most obvious). In the first case it's obvious that the cable networks are getting money from the content companies, in the second case they can get discounts. Some channels allow local cable operators to insert localized ads during the breaks. It's all very, how you say, payola.
Of course, the major content corporations are only a handful of companies, and they have huge brand recognition - coupled with tight copyright restrictions (a cable company can't start it's own 'desperate housewives' channel and just pay some mandatory licensing fees, quite different from radio) this is an environment that is conducive to forming an oligopoly. To put it lightly. And then there's cable networks owned by content companies (like Time-Warner Cable).
Cable and content companies are in an eternal love-hate relationship. The one has eyeballs, the other stuff to gaze at. They pay each other, give and take.
Perhaps a better term would be the Content-Distribution Complex.
people complaining that 60-watt-equivalent CFLs are too dim are taking slightly the wrong approach
On the contrary - producers of CFLs are engaging in false labelling. An 11W CFL I picked up puts out (according to its specifications) 550 Lumen of light, whereas a 60W incandescent I had lying about puts out 690 Lumen according to the box; that's 25% more! No wonder people feel cheated. Yes, you could switch to higher wattage CFL bulbs, but that doesn't change the fact you were lied to.
I'm also sceptical about the energy savings. Yes, you'll pay less in electricity bills, but the energy that isn't being converted into light is converted into heat. So getting rid of incandescents could increase your heating bill. Of course not all of the heat incandescents put out will be useful (close to the ceiling, heating up the lamp itself, or outdoors) but you cant simply substract 11 from 60 and take that number as the Watts-per-hour saved.
In my savings account, thirteen and quarter million dollars aren't exactly loose change. If they drop that much, they'll be bought up by some hedge fund who will split up the litigious part of the company (some LLC that can take the fall for the IBM counterclaims) from assets that they can sell on, like real estate.
At a market cap of 19.53M at 92ct/share, there are 21M shares in SCOX. 14.25M are "float" according to finance.yahoo.com, so they can do reverse stock-splits quite a bit, and still have more than 500,000 shares listed.
I wonder how many of those 30 million HDTV owners are in a similar situation, just biding their time.
Well, they probably all have 720 sets, which means they'll be miffed in a few years when 1080 is mainstream, anyway.
I wouldn't touch a HD TV unless it's 2160 (twice 1080 and three times 720, so upscaling will work neatly for both). Most sets I see on the market now are 768, and since no-one is looking at those through letterboxes, it means they're upscaling from 720 to 768, which is pitiful. You're better off upscaling divx movies from bittorrent on your computer screen.
If any journalist can be forced to provide any information (including raw footage of demonstrations and providing sourced) to the police, they will be treated like the police, and we, the public, will get little or no information any more about these events, about these people and their motivations. This is obviously a bad thing.
If just anybody can claim to be a journalist and clam up, police and prosecution will have a lot less evidence to work with and have great problems prosecuting anyone. This is obviously a bad thing too.
The trick is to strike a balance between these public interests. That's a nuanced discussed not ideally suited to slashdot.
One thing you can say is: if this guy withstood 226 days of imprisonment and still didn't turn over the tapes, it seems pretty obvious that the court is taking extreme liberties with this guys personal freedoms, without producing results.
All the more irksome is that the guy went to jail without a real trial. For all we know the tapes, not having been physically entered into evidence, never actually existed, and the whole thing is based on hearsay and a confession.
Of course, the prevailing public mood in any case seems to be "something bad happened, so someone should go to jail". We live in interesting times.