You can have 4 processors in a tetrahedron configuration and
still have any processor one hop away
Ignoring the physical trace-routing issues, you can have N fully
connected nodes as long as every one has a N-1 connections
(ie, a dedicated link to every other node), plus you need at
least one bus-drop somewhere.
In practice, all those connections need to physically connect
somewhere, making more than a handful of fully-connected processors
all but impossible.
Problem 1)
Draw four circles on a piece of paper.
Now draw a line from every circle to every other circle without
crossing any lines.
Problem 2)
Draw four circles on a piece of paper. Draw two "pins" on each.
Now draw a minimal path between any two circles such that you can only
start and stop at a pin, and only one connection can go to a single
pin.
You have the right idea for problem 1, that for low-N, you
can just route connections through different layers of the
board. But that only works for low-N and doesn't generalize
(though in fairness, neither does to the "3-CPU" solution).
For problem #2, no real solution exists other than limiting the
degree of connectedness to some low number of pins (2 gives the
simplest case above single-CPU, a daisy-chain or ring topology),
or having centralized signal switching (star topology).
But those are emergencies only. I guess you should
include to say emergency days as well.
I did not say one should only prostrate oneself to Ballmer
on Tuesdays.
Verily, do not the sacred scrolls read, "Ask, and it shall be given unto you;
Knock, and the Windows shall be opened upon a glorious Vista; Search, and
Clippy shall offer to assist you"?
You mean every second Tuesday of each month? Fourth Tuesdays
are OK too, but they're not critical updates.
Know ye not any better than to question which
Tuesdays work and which don't? Ballmer works in mysterious
ways, after all. Why, on several occasions, updates have even
appeared on non-Tuesdays! Surely He has blessed us only
to reward our dilligence in praying to Redmond 4.25 times each
month?
In any case, you come very near blasphemy, Brother, in asking too
many questions about Tuesdays - That sort of thinking can lead the mind
in dangerous directions. Why, next you might start to question whether
The G*tes (Blessed be his name, which we may not write upon anything
impermanent) meant to pass the mantle of his fold on to his
nephew or his brother-in-law. Such things only lead to tears and
Danish mockery, my friend, so stray not onto that path!
Bush's low popularity numbers reflect on how much conviction he has.
...Whereas most of us just want one conviction.
He operates under beliefs, not by raising his finger in the
air and seeing which way the wind is blowing
The direction of the wind at least has some basis in fact, in that
it means doing what the populace wants them to do. Granted, most people
couldn't find their way out of a paper sack with a map and a flashlight,
but I'll take playing to the polls over playing god any day.
What's going to happen when we beat the terrorists in Iraq?
I dunno... We'll all have to duck the flying pigs? Bush can look
forward to building snowmen in the afterlife? Goatse-man will
experience the least pain of all of us when monkeys start flying out?
Or, if we actually can claim such a victory, we can polish the
crater and use the newly-vitreous ex-middle-east as the largest objective
lens on the planet for a new telescope? Hrmph, and to think some
people have the audacity to claim Bush doesn't support science!
I think I would try Gumstix for non-speed critical apps.
Except, this board doesn't just target the non-speed-critical market.
The Via C7 certainly doesn't compete with the latest offerings from Intel
or AMD, but it does perform quite well for anything short of modern FPS
games or hard-core number crunching.
I have personally used it (the CPU, not that exact MB) as both a Linux
fileserver and as an XP machine. For Linux, it works like a dream... Low
heat, low power requirements, more than enough horsepower. For XP, it
feels a little sluggish if you bog it down with a large number of
tasks, but for web-surfing while listening to music, or even watching a
DVD (almost almost all of VIA's MBs have hardware MPEG2 decoding, the
newer ones support harware MPEG4 as well), it just does its thing without
a problem.
Also, don't overlook the benefit of using an x86-based CPU in a more-or-less
PC-oriented form... We may all make fun of Intel's historical choice of
that particular architecture, but everything supports it. As
cool as we may consider a Gumstix, it pretty much locks you into using
their expansion boards and their software (or their build tools).
It's not every day that a new form factor comes out, especially not one that is 10cm x 7.2cm.
Just as a basis of comparison, a typical full-height PCI card measures 15.5cm[*] x 9.5cm (not counting the
external dangly bits or the actual PCI connector), making this entire motherboard half the area of
most graphics cards.
Or to put it another way, a laptop HDD measures 10cm x 7cm, making this MB just a hair bigger (Too close
to call coincidence, I suspect Via chose the size based on that exact match).
Not bad, as long as you need no expansion capability.
*) They can actually get longer than that, I have an ancient one measuring 19cm long, but a quick
glance at my box-o-obsolete-PC-parts shows 15.5 as the most common size for full-height cards).
I told you if you would just be patient, I had confidence in the system's ability to sort this out in the end.
How many BILLIONS of dollars in lawyers fees, thousands of hours of (taxpayer-funded) court costs, and millions of manpower
hours has this farce wasted all to come up with the "right" outcome, that SCO has absolutely no basis for this fiaSCO?
Sorry, I can't call this "sort[ed] out in the end" unless Glen gets to personally pull the trigger with Darl standing
against the wall. And every stockholder in SCO, IBM, Novell, Redhat, and every open source developer, and several others,
get to piss on the corpse.
You don't use it as a primary form of storage. You would use it as a mirror of data you need kept in
sync on several physically separate systems. Keep in mind, "you" may not refer to a single person...
But, think about the time it takes you to upload, download, etc.
Again, you wouldn't use this as a first-line data store. You'd only need to
tranfer changes, from a "source" or "mirror" POV. From a "nonmirrored destination" perspective,
modern broadband connections can keep up with realtime DVD playback.
Although online storage is great for protecting against a physical disaster,
it's simply too clumsy right now to be used effectively.
Unless they promise zero lost data (with a sizeable financial compensation to
give it some balls), I wouldn't use this as a backup. As a shared 6GB drive between
any machine you touch, though? I'd pay $20/year for that convenience, if
I didn't have the ability to do so already.
I think Google has a good idea here. Don't think of this as a geek-targetted replacement
to portable HDDs, or a backup solution, or even huge web-accessible file store. Think in
terms of social networks... Think in terms of your P2P share folder, except instead of
needing to hit your machine (or suffer through hitting some poor bastard on dialup), you
have all the bandwidth of Google for every transfer. Think in terms of Grandma (who has no
grasp whatsoever of cropping, resizing, or JPEG quality) trying to email you a whole 100+
picture album of family photos.
Think "Rapidshare that you own", and you'll get closer to the target market here.
Goods in China are marginally cheaper, but it's at the
expense of shoddy products that are often of a lower quality
Have you bought a blender recently? A plain, ordinary blender, not
any sort of specialty food-processing setup.
I have. Repeatedly. Let me describe my experiences...
You can get three classes of (home-use) blender... The uber-cheap $29.95
WallyWorld special by the likes of Hamilton Beach or Proctor Silex;
the $60-$120 range blenders, typified Waring and KitchenAid (though
they certainly make their share of low-end crap as well);
and the elite makes such as the $400-$600 BlendTec Total Blender
(as seen in "Will It Blend" - Short answer, "yes, it will", and
no, I have no connection to them).
The $29.99 blenders will usually work once. Sometimes they work a
second time. I had one last a full three months, once.
The $400 blender I can't say much about. I would expect them to
work, and many of them have a lifetime warranty, but I won't
pay $400 for a stupid ice-chopper. I'll do it manually with
a bag and a hammer before I pay that much.
Now, the $60-$120 blenders... Therein lies the sweet-spot. They
may not blend marbles and broomsticks and ipods as with the BlendTec,
but They turn ice into mudslides juuuuuust fine. And my current
blender has lived for over two years. It does seem to start a bit more
sluggishly these days, so I suspect it will eventually die from the
lubricant dissipating or breaking down. But I'd say it has another
year or two left in it.
So, my point?
You can get American-made ripoff pieces of complete shit as well.
Although paying more doesn't always guarantee higher quality, paying
less does almost always mean lower quality.
First use of Red Cross symbol on a battlefield, Battle of Dybbol, 1864.
...At least as of 1989, anyway.
Some silly heretical non-revisionist sources might place the first
use of a red cross in the 12th century (and by non-Americans at
that - Europeans killing Muslims, no less, guess we stole that
from you as well!), but don't let that interfere with your
anti-American bias.
Sometime after all the civilised nations adopted it,
J+J saw it and stole it.
You refer, I presume, to the same "civilized" nations that provided
such a "colorful" history over petty land squabble that they
needed an organization to make sure they played fair while
butchering one another over which bastard brother owned the land
between River-X and Forest-Y this week?
The Americans seem to think the American Red Cross is some kind
of independent body, while the rest of the world thinks of it
correctly as a subsidiary of the IRC.
It has its own independent charter, separate from both the ICRC and
the IFRC.
Strange, that you would prefer to blur the distinction that the
American Red Cross "stole" the IRC's symbols, yet would damn
an international (though originally American) company for
beating them to the punch.
Well, the US are famous for outright theft, imperialism and genocide
throughout the world.
If you say so. Kinda like the way we annexed an obliterated Europe
after saving it in not one, but two world wars?
They are currently practicing in Iraq.
Guilty as charged on that count, and by all means feel free to
send your local constabulary around to drag our treasonous president
off to rot in a Turkish prison.
It looks to me as if the Americans did their usual
theft of IP when they needed it, and now have been caught
Glad to know we can have a totally non-biased discussion of this
issue.
Incidentally, did you read even the summary, nevermind TFO?
You might want to double-check which party initiated the suit here...
This became the symbol for aid throughout the western world,
and so Johnson+Johnson stole it.
One flaw with that idea - The Red Cross basically existed only
on paper until the first world war. It didn't "become the symbol
for aid throughout the western world" until at least 1914,
almost thirty years after J&J started using it.
Additionally, you might want to re-read the summary yet again, to
identify the other party in the suit. Not the IRC,
the ARC. Although the IRC may have first dibs, the ARC
has no such claim.
More seriously, I can see this applied to "fixing" pictures of
just about anyone you want to see naked.
Fake celeb slips will of course come first, but why stop
there? That cute girl at the coffee shop? Snap her with the
camera phone, erase all those pesky clothes, and let this
algorithm do its thing.
Of course, I could also see this used for more nefarious
(even "sick") purposes... Ex-GF cheated and you don't have any
nude pics to release to the web? You do now. And if you
"repaired" a fully-clothed original of someone underage, would
it still count as child porn?
And I don't even want to think about how the furries
would use this... Ugh.
I think if they really go to court over it, J+J might
stand a chance of losing that trademark, IMHO.
I honestly don't think such a ruling would bother J&J nearly
as much as it would bother ARC.
The former may have the rights to it, but never really enforced it.
The later has, for most of its modern history, acted more like SCO
than a "charitable" organization dedicated to relieving human
suffering - Ask a Korean or Vietnam vet their opinion of the Red
Cross; prepare to catch an earful, though, because you won't hear
much good about them.
Declaring genericide on this particular trademark would make almost
everyone happy except the ARC, who doesn't actually have the
rights to it in the first place.
Problem off course is that the avrage websurfer is unlikely to
Fortunately, I don't give two shakes of a rat's derriere about the average
websurfer. In fact, I prefer that they see a deluge of ads,
because:
1) It makes ads easier to block (advertisers only use blocker-circumvention
methods when forced to);
2) As people complain, ads will evolve into less obnoxious forms
(such as the entirely palateable Google text-ads);
3) Although I in no way feel guilty about "consuming" content
voluntarily placed online for free, I won't claim ignorance that
the "average websurfer" seeing all those ads helps fund many
sites.
a) know how to do it
NoScript or QuickJava work just fine. With (as you suggest) the default
as "off", of course. If people can't figure out how to click the
"J" in a crossed-out circle, I have little sympathy.
b) know what sites to trust.
Oh, that one comes easy - "None of them". Unless I go to a page
specifically for the purpose of running a java app hosted
there, I simply don't turn it on. Ever. If a random page comes up
with an unexpected complaint about my having Java disabled, I simply
move on from that page, never giving it another thought.
Why do you consider God and Science as mutually exclusive?
"God" does not exist in isolation. It comes in prepackaged forms, complete
with associated dogma. Some adherents to each of those prepackaged forms
inevitable mistake the writings of a (sometimes only temporarily, via drugs
or fasting) psychotic "founder" as literal unquestionable "truth". Such "truth"s
will of course, as time passes, come to conflict with actual facts.
Thus we have an incompatibility. Science will sooner or later disprove or find
a perfectly rational natural explanation for all matters of religious doctrine,
which zealots cannot ever tolerate.
Then they strap bombs to themselves (or in more civilized nations, merely pick a
scapegoat group to harass).
Except for the fact that the BMI is an outdated and inaccurate POS.
...One having a near-perfect correlation with risk of type-II diabetes
and coronary artery disease.
But yeah, we can all go around pointing to various statistical anomalies
and pretend EATING TOO MANY GODDAMNED BIG-MACS won't kill us.
I expect this may count as an unpopular opinion given the stereotypical (though
often quite incorrect) physical condition of the average Slashdotter, but I for
one applaud criteria-based insurance premiums. I keep myself in shape
(though by no means count as a "health nut"), and although I do it for my own
good, as someone who has only ever visited the doctor for (rare) purely-traumatic
injuries, I'd most definitely like to stop subsidizing the stents and bypasses
and glucophage and statins and the rest for those of you who can't bother cutting
back a bit on the Marlboros and fried chicken.
voting is supposed to be a matter of conscience in one's own locality
With one major problem - 3rd party candidates can't get elected mostly
because everyone knows that 3rd party candidates can't get elected.
I sincerely believe that most people would vote for just about anyone
other than Tweedledee(D) and Tweedledum(R), given a serious option. But
we all know that doing so effectively throws away our vote, so we settle
for the lesser of the two evils.
The question is, what SHOULD the law or at least constitutionality
of something like this be given the 'Net?
We shouldn't need to resort to a system such as vote-swapping,
which arises only as a symptom of a frustrated populace trying
to balance an issue more a matter of perception than actual tallies.
If we actually had some form of fair election system like IRV (not
saying that IRV doesn't have its flaws, but it does a hell of a lot
better than what we have in the US now), we wouldn't need these games,
because everyone would vote for who they really wanted, while
still getting to pick a "safety" from the big-two.
Come on, this is Slashdot. Half of the people here live off food that was flavor-engineered
in a lab and vacu-formed into some sort of food-like eXtreme cheese thing.
I highly recommend the book "Twinky, Deconstructed" to elaborate on your point. Informative,
and despite the subject matter, makes for a light, enjoyable read.
I've always cared about what I eat and could identify at least the basic purpose of most
items on an ingredient label ("Sugar, sugar, an emollient, another sugar, preservative,
etc"), but this book really taught me quite a lot. I can't say it did much to improve
my apetite for mass-produced snack foods, but most of it blew me away as to why, for
example, they use so many different sugars (short reason for a lot of the less
obvious ingredients - the less water they use, the longer food stays fresh).
It also surprised me how much of our food production qualifies as a matter of national
security. Or how much of it comes from a mine rather than a farm (really!).
(I have no connection to the author or publisher).
After a brief explanation of why this is a problem, they're referred to whichever
legal download site suits their fancy.
How noble... As if!
Don't bother lying on Slashdot... You leech their music and porn collection, and
teach them not to share out their download folder. "Whichever legal download site suits
their fancy"? Gimme a break! Their "fancy" means "all the free music/movies/porn I can
download at my current bandwidth cap". If you know of a legal source for that, by all
means feel free to correct me.;-)
They do? Oh shit, what happens if you don't get it? 'cause I haven't bought gasoline in...let's see...ever.
Congrats on living in either a city with good (non-internal-combustion-based) public transportation...
Or a third-world hellhole. Or having a large enough fortune to never need to leave the house.
Some of us don't have that option. A three-hour (each way) bicycle trip to and from work every day would
technically work most of the year, but I live somewhere that we actually get this white fluffy shit called
"snow" for three to five months out of the year, on which bicycles work about as well as pissing in the
wind - You don't get far, but you do get wet.
So yes, I "need" gasoline. I 100% support the development of feasible all-electric cars, powered
by quadrupling the current number of nuclear power plants (breeder reactors with the fuel recycled,
of course, none of the wasteful pansy-assed "ooh, spooky plutonium" BS we have in the US today). Or
better yet, solar/microwave satellites. But don't insult us all by pretending that 90% of us
(in the civilized world) can get by without gasoline.
It almost certainly took them more effort to disable the
feature than it would have to fix the broken code.
Additionally, regardless of the ease of fixing vs disabling, they
should have given users the choice of disabling it or not.
If I actually used uPNP (which I don't), I'd feel pretty pissed
off that Apple had taken it upon themselves to break a perfectly
functional feature on a machine on my nice safe LAN (Not that I
keep my LAN-side machines defenseless, but I don't worry about
peeling wallpaper when the barberians have already breached the
outer walls).
And worse still, Mac users for the most part prefer to remain
willfully ignorant of even the most basic of details on how their
machines work (and don't call that a troll, ASK one! They
brag about how little they know compared to what it
takes to keep a Windows machine happy). So they won't have the
first idea of what to do when iChat suddenly breaks for no
apparent reason.
You must work with the Bush administration, thinking
that Africa only has one government.
And you must work for the UN, thinking that Africa
has any government.
With a few notable exceptions, the organizations that pass for
"governments" in most of Africa make the Afghan warlords look
like enlightened bastions of modern representational democracy.
Savages still engaging in tribal warfare and genocide, regularly burning/stoning
people for "witchcraft", rape as the standard form of reproduction,
roaming packs of kids-with-guns... These people only qualify as
"human" in the genetic sense, nevermind attributing anything so
organized as a "government" to them.
Slashdot Mirror
You can have 4 processors in a tetrahedron configuration and still have any processor one hop away
Ignoring the physical trace-routing issues, you can have N fully connected nodes as long as every one has a N-1 connections (ie, a dedicated link to every other node), plus you need at least one bus-drop somewhere.
In practice, all those connections need to physically connect somewhere, making more than a handful of fully-connected processors all but impossible.
If it is impossible, please explain why.
Problem 1)
Draw four circles on a piece of paper.
Now draw a line from every circle to every other circle without crossing any lines.
Problem 2)
Draw four circles on a piece of paper. Draw two "pins" on each.
Now draw a minimal path between any two circles such that you can only start and stop at a pin, and only one connection can go to a single pin.
You have the right idea for problem 1, that for low-N, you can just route connections through different layers of the board. But that only works for low-N and doesn't generalize (though in fairness, neither does to the "3-CPU" solution).
For problem #2, no real solution exists other than limiting the degree of connectedness to some low number of pins (2 gives the simplest case above single-CPU, a daisy-chain or ring topology), or having centralized signal switching (star topology).
But those are emergencies only. I guess you should include to say emergency days as well.
I did not say one should only prostrate oneself to Ballmer on Tuesdays.
Verily, do not the sacred scrolls read, "Ask, and it shall be given unto you; Knock, and the Windows shall be opened upon a glorious Vista; Search, and Clippy shall offer to assist you"?
A little prayer goes a long way, Friend.
You mean every second Tuesday of each month? Fourth Tuesdays are OK too, but they're not critical updates.
Know ye not any better than to question which Tuesdays work and which don't? Ballmer works in mysterious ways, after all. Why, on several occasions, updates have even appeared on non-Tuesdays! Surely He has blessed us only to reward our dilligence in praying to Redmond 4.25 times each month?
In any case, you come very near blasphemy, Brother, in asking too many questions about Tuesdays - That sort of thinking can lead the mind in dangerous directions. Why, next you might start to question whether The G*tes (Blessed be his name, which we may not write upon anything impermanent) meant to pass the mantle of his fold on to his nephew or his brother-in-law. Such things only lead to tears and Danish mockery, my friend, so stray not onto that path!
Bush's low popularity numbers reflect on how much conviction he has.
...Whereas most of us just want one conviction.
He operates under beliefs, not by raising his finger in the air and seeing which way the wind is blowing
The direction of the wind at least has some basis in fact, in that it means doing what the populace wants them to do. Granted, most people couldn't find their way out of a paper sack with a map and a flashlight, but I'll take playing to the polls over playing god any day.
What's going to happen when we beat the terrorists in Iraq?
I dunno... We'll all have to duck the flying pigs? Bush can look forward to building snowmen in the afterlife? Goatse-man will experience the least pain of all of us when monkeys start flying out?
Or, if we actually can claim such a victory, we can polish the crater and use the newly-vitreous ex-middle-east as the largest objective lens on the planet for a new telescope? Hrmph, and to think some people have the audacity to claim Bush doesn't support science!
I think I would try Gumstix for non-speed critical apps.
Except, this board doesn't just target the non-speed-critical market.
The Via C7 certainly doesn't compete with the latest offerings from Intel or AMD, but it does perform quite well for anything short of modern FPS games or hard-core number crunching.
I have personally used it (the CPU, not that exact MB) as both a Linux fileserver and as an XP machine. For Linux, it works like a dream... Low heat, low power requirements, more than enough horsepower. For XP, it feels a little sluggish if you bog it down with a large number of tasks, but for web-surfing while listening to music, or even watching a DVD (almost almost all of VIA's MBs have hardware MPEG2 decoding, the newer ones support harware MPEG4 as well), it just does its thing without a problem.
Also, don't overlook the benefit of using an x86-based CPU in a more-or-less PC-oriented form... We may all make fun of Intel's historical choice of that particular architecture, but everything supports it. As cool as we may consider a Gumstix, it pretty much locks you into using their expansion boards and their software (or their build tools).
It's not every day that a new form factor comes out, especially not one that is 10cm x 7.2cm.
Just as a basis of comparison, a typical full-height PCI card measures 15.5cm[*] x 9.5cm (not counting the external dangly bits or the actual PCI connector), making this entire motherboard half the area of most graphics cards.
Or to put it another way, a laptop HDD measures 10cm x 7cm, making this MB just a hair bigger (Too close to call coincidence, I suspect Via chose the size based on that exact match).
Not bad, as long as you need no expansion capability.
*) They can actually get longer than that, I have an ancient one measuring 19cm long, but a quick glance at my box-o-obsolete-PC-parts shows 15.5 as the most common size for full-height cards).
I told you if you would just be patient, I had confidence in the system's ability to sort this out in the end.
How many BILLIONS of dollars in lawyers fees, thousands of hours of (taxpayer-funded) court costs, and millions of manpower hours has this farce wasted all to come up with the "right" outcome, that SCO has absolutely no basis for this fiaSCO?
Sorry, I can't call this "sort[ed] out in the end" unless Glen gets to personally pull the trigger with Darl standing against the wall. And every stockholder in SCO, IBM, Novell, Redhat, and every open source developer, and several others, get to piss on the corpse.
I've always had an issue with online storage.
You don't use it as a primary form of storage. You would use it as a mirror of data you need kept in sync on several physically separate systems. Keep in mind, "you" may not refer to a single person...
But, think about the time it takes you to upload, download, etc.
Again, you wouldn't use this as a first-line data store. You'd only need to tranfer changes, from a "source" or "mirror" POV. From a "nonmirrored destination" perspective, modern broadband connections can keep up with realtime DVD playback.
Although online storage is great for protecting against a physical disaster, it's simply too clumsy right now to be used effectively.
Unless they promise zero lost data (with a sizeable financial compensation to give it some balls), I wouldn't use this as a backup. As a shared 6GB drive between any machine you touch, though? I'd pay $20/year for that convenience, if I didn't have the ability to do so already.
I think Google has a good idea here. Don't think of this as a geek-targetted replacement to portable HDDs, or a backup solution, or even huge web-accessible file store. Think in terms of social networks... Think in terms of your P2P share folder, except instead of needing to hit your machine (or suffer through hitting some poor bastard on dialup), you have all the bandwidth of Google for every transfer. Think in terms of Grandma (who has no grasp whatsoever of cropping, resizing, or JPEG quality) trying to email you a whole 100+ picture album of family photos.
Think "Rapidshare that you own", and you'll get closer to the target market here.
Goods in China are marginally cheaper, but it's at the expense of shoddy products that are often of a lower quality
Have you bought a blender recently? A plain, ordinary blender, not any sort of specialty food-processing setup.
I have. Repeatedly. Let me describe my experiences...
You can get three classes of (home-use) blender... The uber-cheap $29.95 WallyWorld special by the likes of Hamilton Beach or Proctor Silex; the $60-$120 range blenders, typified Waring and KitchenAid (though they certainly make their share of low-end crap as well); and the elite makes such as the $400-$600 BlendTec Total Blender (as seen in "Will It Blend" - Short answer, "yes, it will", and no, I have no connection to them).
The $29.99 blenders will usually work once. Sometimes they work a second time. I had one last a full three months, once.
The $400 blender I can't say much about. I would expect them to work, and many of them have a lifetime warranty, but I won't pay $400 for a stupid ice-chopper. I'll do it manually with a bag and a hammer before I pay that much.
Now, the $60-$120 blenders... Therein lies the sweet-spot. They may not blend marbles and broomsticks and ipods as with the BlendTec, but They turn ice into mudslides juuuuuust fine. And my current blender has lived for over two years. It does seem to start a bit more sluggishly these days, so I suspect it will eventually die from the lubricant dissipating or breaking down. But I'd say it has another year or two left in it.
So, my point?
You can get American-made ripoff pieces of complete shit as well. Although paying more doesn't always guarantee higher quality, paying less does almost always mean lower quality.
First use of Red Cross symbol on a battlefield, Battle of Dybbol, 1864.
...At least as of 1989, anyway.
Some silly heretical non-revisionist sources might place the first use of a red cross in the 12th century (and by non-Americans at that - Europeans killing Muslims, no less, guess we stole that from you as well!), but don't let that interfere with your anti-American bias.
Sometime after all the civilised nations adopted it, J+J saw it and stole it.
You refer, I presume, to the same "civilized" nations that provided such a "colorful" history over petty land squabble that they needed an organization to make sure they played fair while butchering one another over which bastard brother owned the land between River-X and Forest-Y this week?
The Americans seem to think the American Red Cross is some kind of independent body, while the rest of the world thinks of it correctly as a subsidiary of the IRC.
It has its own independent charter, separate from both the ICRC and the IFRC.
Strange, that you would prefer to blur the distinction that the American Red Cross "stole" the IRC's symbols, yet would damn an international (though originally American) company for beating them to the punch.
Well, the US are famous for outright theft, imperialism and genocide throughout the world.
If you say so. Kinda like the way we annexed an obliterated Europe after saving it in not one, but two world wars?
They are currently practicing in Iraq.
Guilty as charged on that count, and by all means feel free to send your local constabulary around to drag our treasonous president off to rot in a Turkish prison.
If you don't have a huge, huge catalog of images, it won't really work for any given image as well as their samples.
;)
So basically, most of us could only fix images missing pink/beige* areas.
I'll still take it.
* - Nothing racist intended; most online porn quite simply features caucasian or light-skinned asian models, like it or not.
It looks to me as if the Americans did their usual theft of IP when they needed it, and now have been caught
Glad to know we can have a totally non-biased discussion of this issue.
Incidentally, did you read even the summary, nevermind TFO? You might want to double-check which party initiated the suit here...
This became the symbol for aid throughout the western world, and so Johnson+Johnson stole it.
One flaw with that idea - The Red Cross basically existed only on paper until the first world war. It didn't "become the symbol for aid throughout the western world" until at least 1914, almost thirty years after J&J started using it.
Additionally, you might want to re-read the summary yet again, to identify the other party in the suit. Not the IRC, the ARC. Although the IRC may have first dibs, the ARC has no such claim.
Finally... Uncensored Japanese pornography!
More seriously, I can see this applied to "fixing" pictures of just about anyone you want to see naked.
Fake celeb slips will of course come first, but why stop there? That cute girl at the coffee shop? Snap her with the camera phone, erase all those pesky clothes, and let this algorithm do its thing.
Of course, I could also see this used for more nefarious (even "sick") purposes... Ex-GF cheated and you don't have any nude pics to release to the web? You do now. And if you "repaired" a fully-clothed original of someone underage, would it still count as child porn?
And I don't even want to think about how the furries would use this... Ugh.
I think if they really go to court over it, J+J might stand a chance of losing that trademark, IMHO.
I honestly don't think such a ruling would bother J&J nearly as much as it would bother ARC.
The former may have the rights to it, but never really enforced it. The later has, for most of its modern history, acted more like SCO than a "charitable" organization dedicated to relieving human suffering - Ask a Korean or Vietnam vet their opinion of the Red Cross; prepare to catch an earful, though, because you won't hear much good about them.
Declaring genericide on this particular trademark would make almost everyone happy except the ARC, who doesn't actually have the rights to it in the first place.
Problem off course is that the avrage websurfer is unlikely to
Fortunately, I don't give two shakes of a rat's derriere about the average websurfer. In fact, I prefer that they see a deluge of ads, because:
1) It makes ads easier to block (advertisers only use blocker-circumvention methods when forced to);
2) As people complain, ads will evolve into less obnoxious forms (such as the entirely palateable Google text-ads);
3) Although I in no way feel guilty about "consuming" content voluntarily placed online for free, I won't claim ignorance that the "average websurfer" seeing all those ads helps fund many sites.
a) know how to do it
NoScript or QuickJava work just fine. With (as you suggest) the default as "off", of course. If people can't figure out how to click the "J" in a crossed-out circle, I have little sympathy.
b) know what sites to trust.
Oh, that one comes easy - "None of them". Unless I go to a page specifically for the purpose of running a java app hosted there, I simply don't turn it on. Ever. If a random page comes up with an unexpected complaint about my having Java disabled, I simply move on from that page, never giving it another thought.
Why do you consider God and Science as mutually exclusive?
"God" does not exist in isolation. It comes in prepackaged forms, complete with associated dogma. Some adherents to each of those prepackaged forms inevitable mistake the writings of a (sometimes only temporarily, via drugs or fasting) psychotic "founder" as literal unquestionable "truth". Such "truth"s will of course, as time passes, come to conflict with actual facts.
Thus we have an incompatibility. Science will sooner or later disprove or find a perfectly rational natural explanation for all matters of religious doctrine, which zealots cannot ever tolerate.
Then they strap bombs to themselves (or in more civilized nations, merely pick a scapegoat group to harass).
Except for the fact that the BMI is an outdated and inaccurate POS.
...One having a near-perfect correlation with risk of type-II diabetes
and coronary artery disease.
.
But yeah, we can all go around pointing to various statistical anomalies and pretend EATING TOO MANY GODDAMNED BIG-MACS won't kill us.
I expect this may count as an unpopular opinion given the stereotypical (though often quite incorrect) physical condition of the average Slashdotter, but I for one applaud criteria-based insurance premiums. I keep myself in shape (though by no means count as a "health nut"), and although I do it for my own good, as someone who has only ever visited the doctor for (rare) purely-traumatic injuries, I'd most definitely like to stop subsidizing the stents and bypasses and glucophage and statins and the rest for those of you who can't bother cutting back a bit on the Marlboros and fried chicken
voting is supposed to be a matter of conscience in one's own locality
With one major problem - 3rd party candidates can't get elected mostly because everyone knows that 3rd party candidates can't get elected.
I sincerely believe that most people would vote for just about anyone other than Tweedledee(D) and Tweedledum(R), given a serious option. But we all know that doing so effectively throws away our vote, so we settle for the lesser of the two evils.
The question is, what SHOULD the law or at least constitutionality of something like this be given the 'Net?
We shouldn't need to resort to a system such as vote-swapping, which arises only as a symptom of a frustrated populace trying to balance an issue more a matter of perception than actual tallies. If we actually had some form of fair election system like IRV (not saying that IRV doesn't have its flaws, but it does a hell of a lot better than what we have in the US now), we wouldn't need these games, because everyone would vote for who they really wanted, while still getting to pick a "safety" from the big-two.
Come on, this is Slashdot. Half of the people here live off food that was flavor-engineered in a lab and vacu-formed into some sort of food-like eXtreme cheese thing.
I highly recommend the book "Twinky, Deconstructed" to elaborate on your point. Informative, and despite the subject matter, makes for a light, enjoyable read.
I've always cared about what I eat and could identify at least the basic purpose of most items on an ingredient label ("Sugar, sugar, an emollient, another sugar, preservative, etc"), but this book really taught me quite a lot. I can't say it did much to improve my apetite for mass-produced snack foods, but most of it blew me away as to why, for example, they use so many different sugars (short reason for a lot of the less obvious ingredients - the less water they use, the longer food stays fresh).
It also surprised me how much of our food production qualifies as a matter of national security. Or how much of it comes from a mine rather than a farm (really!).
(I have no connection to the author or publisher).
After a brief explanation of why this is a problem, they're referred to whichever legal download site suits their fancy.
;-)
How noble... As if!
Don't bother lying on Slashdot... You leech their music and porn collection, and teach them not to share out their download folder. "Whichever legal download site suits their fancy"? Gimme a break! Their "fancy" means "all the free music/movies/porn I can download at my current bandwidth cap". If you know of a legal source for that, by all means feel free to correct me.
They do? Oh shit, what happens if you don't get it? 'cause I haven't bought gasoline in...let's see...ever.
Congrats on living in either a city with good (non-internal-combustion-based) public transportation... Or a third-world hellhole. Or having a large enough fortune to never need to leave the house.
Some of us don't have that option. A three-hour (each way) bicycle trip to and from work every day would technically work most of the year, but I live somewhere that we actually get this white fluffy shit called "snow" for three to five months out of the year, on which bicycles work about as well as pissing in the wind - You don't get far, but you do get wet.
So yes, I "need" gasoline. I 100% support the development of feasible all-electric cars, powered by quadrupling the current number of nuclear power plants (breeder reactors with the fuel recycled, of course, none of the wasteful pansy-assed "ooh, spooky plutonium" BS we have in the US today). Or better yet, solar/microwave satellites. But don't insult us all by pretending that 90% of us (in the civilized world) can get by without gasoline.
And what happened to the "-1, no boobies" mod?
Apple is doing the right thing, here, folks!
The worm in question exploits a buffer overflow.
It almost certainly took them more effort to disable the feature than it would have to fix the broken code.
Additionally, regardless of the ease of fixing vs disabling, they should have given users the choice of disabling it or not. If I actually used uPNP (which I don't), I'd feel pretty pissed off that Apple had taken it upon themselves to break a perfectly functional feature on a machine on my nice safe LAN (Not that I keep my LAN-side machines defenseless, but I don't worry about peeling wallpaper when the barberians have already breached the outer walls).
And worse still, Mac users for the most part prefer to remain willfully ignorant of even the most basic of details on how their machines work (and don't call that a troll, ASK one! They brag about how little they know compared to what it takes to keep a Windows machine happy). So they won't have the first idea of what to do when iChat suddenly breaks for no apparent reason.
You must work with the Bush administration, thinking that Africa only has one government.
And you must work for the UN, thinking that Africa has any government.
With a few notable exceptions, the organizations that pass for "governments" in most of Africa make the Afghan warlords look like enlightened bastions of modern representational democracy.
Savages still engaging in tribal warfare and genocide, regularly burning/stoning people for "witchcraft", rape as the standard form of reproduction, roaming packs of kids-with-guns... These people only qualify as "human" in the genetic sense, nevermind attributing anything so organized as a "government" to them.