Seriously... The more companies make the old or cracked versions of their
products more useful than the latest-n'-greatest, the less right they have
to whine about illegal copying and decreased sales.
Whether we talk about DVDs or WGA or software that phones home, people
just want to use what they own (and spare me the BS about licensing-vs-owning).
Making that harder will eventually drive people to the competition,
up to and including piracy.
I don't use any anti-virus products to secure any of my machines. The reason--I just don't
like their approach, which is to block only known malware.
Riiiiiight... So, for fear of future threats, we should totally ignore current
ones? Why do I not feel inclined to take advice from this person?
Overall, she makes a good point about how vulnerable
current systems seem to VM rootkits. I disagree about the recentness
of VM tech (we've had it in the x86 line since the 386, and in Big Iron
for almost half a century), but yes, we do need some way to protect
ourselves from inherently undetectable malware.
I think it's an easy solution to what you're looking for.
At a minimum of 50 cents per (CC) transaction, probably not, since the
FP mentioned wanting 39 cents as an example price.
Obviously that overhead drops as the number of tracks goes up
(for complete album downloads in the $5 range, they might work
as a great option). But that flat fee totally kills the idea
of "visit our site and pick up a track or two for four dimes"
Those are the situations where it doesnt really matter though.
He didn't mean per state, he meant per county (or whatever
type of district boundaries a battleground state uses).
If a strong dem county shows a win for the rep candidate, that might
raise eyebrows. If a strong rep county has a 10% stronger showing
than normal, that still boosts the statewide tally but no one would
think to call foul.
I didn't realise this, I thought if you took an mp3 (any compressed music file), and
converted to uncompressed, then you would not lose quality.
I guess I did learn something today, thank you.
You shouldn't have - VP has it completely wrong.;-)
Decoding an MP3 produces what amounts to a headerless WAV file. In the
case of starting from a CD, you take a 44.1kHz, 16bit, 2 channel input stream;
remove information (mostly higher frequencies, which compress poorly and
start to (statistically) resemble noise above 10-12kHz) for the sake of producing
a much, much smaller file; Then an MP3 decoder follows, to use the GP's choice of
words, an entirely "mechanical" process to convert that MP3 to a a 44.1kHz,
16bit, 2 channel output stream. "Playing" the MP3 sends the exact same data to
the soundcard as playing the WAV file (which contains nothing more than the raw
decoded data wrapped in a header to identify the data format).
Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba. There - no analog
conversion. Was that so hard?
The grandparent post has the right idea, but either misspoke or
misunderstood the real problem...
Even with "perfect" fidelity analog (or in the case you
offer as an alternative, bypassing the analog step completely),
playing and recompressing to MP3 will still cause a loss
of quality, for two reasons.
First, AAC throws away slightly different "unneeded" parts of
the sound than MP3 (or Ogg, or whatever lossy format you want
to use) does. This means you have a serial reduction in
quality with every generation of transcoding. You can avoid
this problem by transcoding to a lossless format ("lossless"
at the same sampling rate and number of bits per sample,
anyway, since no truly lossless encoding exists, not
even in analog)... But doing so gives you a much larger file
with the same (lossily compressed) quality as the AAC you
started with.
Second - and your suggestion may get around this, if the
sound hardware allows it - Resampling an audio stream will
virtually never capture the exact same moments in time, with
the same exact starting point. Thus, even reencoding with the
exact same encoder as the original will still result in the
same sort of quality loss you see from transcoding.
Thus, if you consider the convenience of downloading
compressed audio as worth the loss of quality compared to
buying a CD (for almost the same price new, and actually
less if you buy used) and ripping it yourself to
something like FLAC - At least keep the original and never,
ever transcode it. That means, if you want to really "own"
your collection, you have the sole option of directly
stripping out the DRM. Any other method will sacrifice
quality for the convenience.
The fact that you can complain about it here like the above
says we're not *that* bad yet.
Right - Much better to wait until we can't complain
about it.
Suck it up, libs. Don't like it? Keep your mouth shut, since they
don't even need to "produce the body" anymore to make you legally
vanish forever to endure a (much shortened) lifetime of "interrogation
not likely to lead to organ failure, impairment of bodily function,
or even death".
And to hear people talking about this upcoming election! Well,
thank Jesus for Diebold, folks.
I don't consider your point ridiculous at all! We made it to the top of the
food chain by evolving as the most savage, brutal, but somewhat intelligent
creatures on the planet. If our savagery can still give us an edge in the
modern world, I have no doubt we haven't forgotten it.
However, we look at this slightly differently... While you fear that success
in curing some diseases with stem cells might lead to fetus-farming and thus
research should stop (or greatly slow down with massive hindering oversight),
I consider more research with more public funding the best way to avoid
that gruesome future.
Also, something people often overlook on this issue, stem cells interest the world
of medical science precisely for their ability to divide and remain
undiferentiated. Even if we don't need to use them to establish a "line" that
can remain viable for several decades as we do today due to the scarcity of new
lines, we can certainly carry them on long enough to grow therapeutically-sufficient
quantities from just a few dozen new lines per year (far lower than the tens of
thousands physically, but not legally, available).
Where exactly did they obtain "human fetal midbrain tissues"?
Well now... IANASTR, but I'll go out on a limb and say "from the midbrains
of human fetuses", with a pretty high level of confidence in my answer.
I cringe in disgust at how far this slippery slope is progressing...
What slippery slope? We have a significant portion of the population that
deliberately aborts unwanted pregnancies. If someday we benefit from
the use of their medical waste to cure Parkinson's or Alzheimer's
or even just slow down plain ol' ageing - Good for me, good for you, good for
everyone!
This doesn't require any sort of moral relativism to accept. It can provide
nearly miraculous benefits for no (extra) cost. Sounds like a win/win, even
if you take the FUD spewed by its worst opponents (tempered by a small dose of
reality).
The fact that it causes tumors I consider an exceedingly inconvenient (if
somewhat predictable) complication, but one we can hopefully overcome with
continued research.
As an aside, I also fully encourage continued research into adult
stem cells... Though not for any squeamish "oooh, no dead babies" line of
BS. Nope - Simply for the far more pragmaic reason that tissue rejection
doesn't present a problem after the cure itself takes effect.
You mean like
these, recently discovered in a South African gold mine?
Except for the water part (which Mars may well have underground),
they seem just about perfectly suited to the environment on Mars...
They don't need an atmosphere, they depend on radiation,
and they have a sulfur-based metabolism rather than using oxygen.
Sounds like a good match... We should look for something like those,
rather than trying to find types of organisms that, as you point
out, have a very, very low chance of surviving on Mars.
Vista is designed to be bootable from flash memory.
But as they describe it, this HHD doesn't look like a flash
device, it looks like a normal hard drive.
It just happens to use a huge nonvolatile write cache to maximize
the time it can remain in a spun-down state.
Now... I can see how OS support could increase the efficiency
of this even more (by intelligently forcing some commonly used
files to stay in the cache), but if it totally doesn't work
correctly under Linux or even XP, I would have to STRONGLY
suspect that as a deliberate design constraint to boost sales
of Vista, rather than a mere side-effect of a new technology.
My sincere hope - my challenge - is that those 90 percent will, in
hopes of foiling my prediction, actually/read/ the text of the statement,
and not presume to know what it means by reading headlines.
Okay... Just provide us with (FTA) "The document, much of which is
classified", and I promise that I'll read it before making any
other comments.
As for anti-Bush rhetoric... I can't possibly top the man
himself for presenting him as a megalomaniacal warmongering fool;
so what could I ever write to sway the minds of those who still
seem to love him, regardless of how much damage he does to our
country and our world?
which restrict the web sites that employees can visit [...]
they are suspicious of time wasting on the Internet and need proof.
Before worrying about privacy issues (you can make those go away
with the simple wave of an AUP), you should perhaps wonder if the
people in question work hourly or on salary.
You have a set of sites you allow. If you then scold people
for going there, you need a reason to do so. "Wasting time" simply
doesn't apply to salaried employees - As the flip-side to all that
unpaid overtime, their "time" belongs to them, not the company.
If they can get the job done in five minutes per week and surf the
web for the other 39h55m, your company can't do a hell of a lot
about it (short of making them hourly).
People are presumed innocent until proven guilty, sure, but
that doesn't stop the police from investigating many people who
are suspected of crimes
Fishing for a potential (possibly future) crime does
not equal investigating a known crime.
but are proven innocent over the course of the investigation.
Again - If investigating a specific crime, that makes sense. If not...
Well, "prove" I didn't kill Nicole Simpson. Good luck on that.
You simply can't "prove" innocence from all possible crimes. Think
of this in terms of the SCO case, which gives us a good example of the
problem here... IBM has no way to physically prove its innocence, and
(in theory) doesn't need to; The burden of proof rests on SCO to
specifically name what IBM infringed on, then prove the infringement
actually occurred. Without that limitation to what SCO can claim,
this case would go on forever (and already has for far too long...
You can consider the current length the analogy to the FBI "interviewing"
you downtown - Even if they don't find anything, they've wasted a LOT of
your time and taxpayer money).
Are you one of those people who believes that nobody who photographs
a bridge may be planning to blow it up? Or are you one of those people
who believes that the occasional blown-up bridge is worth it, so long
as your desire to take pictures of bridges is not scrutinized?
You left out "one of those people who believes in the presumption of
innocence"?
In isolation, taking pictures of bridges, dams, national monuments,
even government buildings (which frequently have some of the neatest
architecture) should not arouse enough suspicion to earn a visit
from a TLA(gency). Now, if PREVIOUSLY KNOWN (or apparent at the time)
causes of Reasonable Suspicion exist, I don't have a problem with a
casual chat with the FBI (by which I don't mean spending 16 hours
under a hot light asked the same stupid questions over and over).
But just taking pictures? No. Doesn't cut it.
Does anybody really not think wireless will soon be a mandatory
feature for all portable media players?
Well, yes, but functional wireless - MS screwed the pooch with
the Zune, by not letting it show up directly on your WLAN as a CIFS
share (possibly even with some device-side browsing ability so you can
pull music down rather than needing to push it from your fileserver or
a third machine), instead limiting it to the all-but-useless "share
for three listens" feature.
Now, as for Steverino's comment - The Zune's wireless, useful or
not, exists in addition to a headphone jack. Not "instead
of" (I'd like to see how that would work;-) ). So you can
still share a bud with a bud, if so desired (or somewhat more
hygienic - ick, sharing earbuds, how nasty - use a 2-way headphone
splitter and jack in the second set at the same time).
But for the REALLY interesting question - I slammed both
MS and Apple here... Will the fanboys' heads explode before
they can mod this into obvlivion?
As I mentioned, you have quite a few invalid numbers... The ones I
mentioned alone drop that down by 12,100,001. Also, several other
"valid" ranges have closed, such as the 700-733 range for railroad
workers, despite that range not having come even close to fully
used. Then 800 to 999 also count as invalid (you have 200 million
numbers wasted right there).
SSNs are being added at a rate of 5.5 million a year.... that's
around a hundred years to use up the remaining possibilities. I
call that more than "a few decades"
Don't forget that rate itself grows at roughly 1.3% per year (at least it
did, on average, from the 1990 to the 2000 census). Compounding that,
and taking those excluded ranges into consideration, we'll run out of
numbers at the current rate of population growth in just under 43
years (R=5.5M; G=1.013; X=767M-450M=317M; sum[i=1->43](R*(G^i))=323,775,738;
323M > 317M).
So, if you take "a few" as literally three, then yes, my original
statement underestimates somewhat. But it will happen within
our expected lifetimes.
Are SSNs of dead people later re-assigned? If not now, is there a guarantee that they won't do that later?
Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?
A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder's death. Even though we have
issued over 415 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current
numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes
in the numbering system.
However, an SSN has only nine digits - So the SSA will need to add a digit or three within then next few decades.
Reissuing numbers, thanks to the exponential growth of the population, would only gain them a few years at most,
so they probably won't do it (instead doing something like adding a new number group and moving all existing
users to 000-###-##-####).
Rather than use a dead person's number, though, might I suggest you use one of the classic non-numbers,
such as any group all zeros (000-##-####, ###-00-####, ###-##-0000) (official) or 666-##-#### (unofficial,
but as yet still never issued), or 078-05-1120 (the single most used fake SSN in history, which belongs
to Hilda Whitcher, the secretary of an ad exec who decided to use her number in a promotion - She got a
new one to replace it and the SSA retired it). A friend of mine had his used, just by coincidence, for
something as mundane as a college ID, and you wouldn't believe the hoops he had to jump through
just to register for classes. So don't make someone else's life hell, just carefully pick a totally
invalid number.
You forgot #6 - Pirate a DRM-less, restrictionless, non-phoning-home VLK version, just like we all have
for every version (that didn't come with the machine) since Win 95.
No virtualization? "Home" users don't virtualize, with one exception - To save having to
multiboot into Linux (and those fall into the extreme minority). Thus, this limitation
amounts to "no painlessly trying out Linux allowed".
5 client connections? Not sure about that one... Did they decide the whopping 10 from XP allowed
too much power to the users? At least for the XP line, only an idiot would run a business on Home
(or even Pro) anyway, when SBS 2003 costs relatively little to make a shop legal.
As for license transfers... With OEM versions, you already can't transfer them. So that
means this won't affect 99% of home users right from the start. As for upgrades... Much like XP's
much-protested activation, this will vanish with the first service pack as soon as MS starts getting
dozens, then hundreds, then potentially thousands of calls a day from people who made one upgrade too
many and have a dead system. MS can throw lawyers at any problem, but they can't afford to piss
too many users off.
So, most of these seemingly-offensive policies depend entirely on the
fact that most of their users won't even notice the change. Then again, if
these affect so few people - Why bother?
If you kept reading just another sentence or two, you would've understood.
D'oh! My bad... I must have glazed over for that part, because I seriously
didn't notice it. But yeah, I suppose that pretty much negates the bulk of my
point.
The BrightSide DR37-R EDR display theoretically has an infinite contrast ratio. How? Because it can turn individual
LED backlights off completely (see How It Works), it has a black luminance of zero. When you divide any brightness
value by this zero black value, you get infinity.
It goes from 0 to 4000cd/m^2. Their comparison model, the LVM-37w1, goes from 0.55 to 550cd/m^2.
So this toy gets as close to true black as you can get - "off", thus constrained by the ambient light level.
For white, they manage 4000cd/m^2, or comparable to fairly bright interior lighting.
Consider me impressed, but realistically, this only amounts to roughly an 8x brightness improvement over
the best normal displays, with true-black thrown in as a perk (they suspiciously don't mention the next
lowest intensity, no doubt because it goes back into the realm of a contrast ratio of only a few thousand.
Maybe a better window manager/gui that you could break the screen
in to regions, so that when you maximize a window, it would only fill
the top 40% or something. Or the ability to pin windows to a location,
os you don't have to maximize them.
A number of 3rd-party programs will already do that for you - You set a
program's window(s) up like you want, tell it to remember the size and
position, and from then on it will always force that window to behave
and stay where you want it.
IIRC, even the stock NVidia drivers have an option very much like that,
you just need to turn it on and set it up for each program you want it
to beat into submission.
The biggest problem I have with such programs, very few even try
to handle multiple monitors. And while I certainly wouldn't turn down
a 30" display if offered to me for free, a pair of decent 19" panels
costs about a quarter the price of a single 30" for a similar boost in
screen real-estate.
where authorities suspect deposits of uranium and plutonium may
be located
Plutonium has too short of a half-life to find natural "deposits"... If
our solar system ever had any, it decayed long before the
accretion disk ever coalesced into solid objects such as our planet.
Thus, if these snails show traces of plutonium, you can take it as
100% certain that this has nothing to do with auspicious mineral
fomations, and that they have found the "missing" bombs' fuel.
I consider it more interesting that these snails would survive contact
with plutonium - Not specifically because of its radioactivity, but
because it counts as SOOOOOO toxic - IIRC, inhaling just a few
nanograms of Pu dust guarantees death from cancer within a few years;
a few micrograms just outright kills you directly.
Slashdot Mirror
...To never, ever upgrade from Office 97.
Seriously... The more companies make the old or cracked versions of their products more useful than the latest-n'-greatest, the less right they have to whine about illegal copying and decreased sales.
Whether we talk about DVDs or WGA or software that phones home, people just want to use what they own (and spare me the BS about licensing-vs-owning). Making that harder will eventually drive people to the competition, up to and including piracy.
I don't use any anti-virus products to secure any of my machines. The reason--I just don't like their approach, which is to block only known malware.
Riiiiiight... So, for fear of future threats, we should totally ignore current ones? Why do I not feel inclined to take advice from this person?
Overall, she makes a good point about how vulnerable current systems seem to VM rootkits. I disagree about the recentness of VM tech (we've had it in the x86 line since the 386, and in Big Iron for almost half a century), but yes, we do need some way to protect ourselves from inherently undetectable malware.
I think it's an easy solution to what you're looking for.
At a minimum of 50 cents per (CC) transaction, probably not, since the FP mentioned wanting 39 cents as an example price.
Obviously that overhead drops as the number of tracks goes up (for complete album downloads in the $5 range, they might work as a great option). But that flat fee totally kills the idea of "visit our site and pick up a track or two for four dimes"
Those are the situations where it doesnt really matter though.
He didn't mean per state, he meant per county (or whatever type of district boundaries a battleground state uses).
If a strong dem county shows a win for the rep candidate, that might raise eyebrows. If a strong rep county has a 10% stronger showing than normal, that still boosts the statewide tally but no one would think to call foul.
I didn't realise this, I thought if you took an mp3 (any compressed music file), and converted to uncompressed, then you would not lose quality.
;-)
I guess I did learn something today, thank you.
You shouldn't have - VP has it completely wrong.
Decoding an MP3 produces what amounts to a headerless WAV file. In the case of starting from a CD, you take a 44.1kHz, 16bit, 2 channel input stream; remove information (mostly higher frequencies, which compress poorly and start to (statistically) resemble noise above 10-12kHz) for the sake of producing a much, much smaller file; Then an MP3 decoder follows, to use the GP's choice of words, an entirely "mechanical" process to convert that MP3 to a a 44.1kHz, 16bit, 2 channel output stream. "Playing" the MP3 sends the exact same data to the soundcard as playing the WAV file (which contains nothing more than the raw decoded data wrapped in a header to identify the data format).
Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba. There - no analog conversion. Was that so hard?
The grandparent post has the right idea, but either misspoke or misunderstood the real problem...
Even with "perfect" fidelity analog (or in the case you offer as an alternative, bypassing the analog step completely), playing and recompressing to MP3 will still cause a loss of quality, for two reasons.
First, AAC throws away slightly different "unneeded" parts of the sound than MP3 (or Ogg, or whatever lossy format you want to use) does. This means you have a serial reduction in quality with every generation of transcoding. You can avoid this problem by transcoding to a lossless format ("lossless" at the same sampling rate and number of bits per sample, anyway, since no truly lossless encoding exists, not even in analog)... But doing so gives you a much larger file with the same (lossily compressed) quality as the AAC you started with.
Second - and your suggestion may get around this, if the sound hardware allows it - Resampling an audio stream will virtually never capture the exact same moments in time, with the same exact starting point. Thus, even reencoding with the exact same encoder as the original will still result in the same sort of quality loss you see from transcoding.
Thus, if you consider the convenience of downloading compressed audio as worth the loss of quality compared to buying a CD (for almost the same price new, and actually less if you buy used) and ripping it yourself to something like FLAC - At least keep the original and never, ever transcode it. That means, if you want to really "own" your collection, you have the sole option of directly stripping out the DRM. Any other method will sacrifice quality for the convenience.
The fact that you can complain about it here like the above says we're not *that* bad yet.
Right - Much better to wait until we can't complain about it.
Suck it up, libs. Don't like it? Keep your mouth shut, since they don't even need to "produce the body" anymore to make you legally vanish forever to endure a (much shortened) lifetime of "interrogation not likely to lead to organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death".
And to hear people talking about this upcoming election! Well, thank Jesus for Diebold, folks.
They have to post 38 different executables, and do a very last check to see if they actually work.
Well, sure, but 90% of FF users only really cares about one release, the US english version.
And before anyone mods me a troll, ask yourself if I lie, or just write an un-PC truth.
Before you respond that I'm being ridiculous
I don't consider your point ridiculous at all! We made it to the top of the food chain by evolving as the most savage, brutal, but somewhat intelligent creatures on the planet. If our savagery can still give us an edge in the modern world, I have no doubt we haven't forgotten it.
However, we look at this slightly differently... While you fear that success in curing some diseases with stem cells might lead to fetus-farming and thus research should stop (or greatly slow down with massive hindering oversight), I consider more research with more public funding the best way to avoid that gruesome future.
Also, something people often overlook on this issue, stem cells interest the world of medical science precisely for their ability to divide and remain undiferentiated. Even if we don't need to use them to establish a "line" that can remain viable for several decades as we do today due to the scarcity of new lines, we can certainly carry them on long enough to grow therapeutically-sufficient quantities from just a few dozen new lines per year (far lower than the tens of thousands physically, but not legally, available).
Where exactly did they obtain "human fetal midbrain tissues"?
Well now... IANASTR, but I'll go out on a limb and say "from the midbrains of human fetuses", with a pretty high level of confidence in my answer.
I cringe in disgust at how far this slippery slope is progressing...
What slippery slope? We have a significant portion of the population that deliberately aborts unwanted pregnancies. If someday we benefit from the use of their medical waste to cure Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or even just slow down plain ol' ageing - Good for me, good for you, good for everyone!
This doesn't require any sort of moral relativism to accept. It can provide nearly miraculous benefits for no (extra) cost. Sounds like a win/win, even if you take the FUD spewed by its worst opponents (tempered by a small dose of reality).
The fact that it causes tumors I consider an exceedingly inconvenient (if somewhat predictable) complication, but one we can hopefully overcome with continued research.
As an aside, I also fully encourage continued research into adult stem cells... Though not for any squeamish "oooh, no dead babies" line of BS. Nope - Simply for the far more pragmaic reason that tissue rejection doesn't present a problem after the cure itself takes effect.
barring some bizarre deep-rock extremophiles.
You mean like these, recently discovered in a South African gold mine?
Except for the water part (which Mars may well have underground), they seem just about perfectly suited to the environment on Mars... They don't need an atmosphere, they depend on radiation, and they have a sulfur-based metabolism rather than using oxygen.
Sounds like a good match... We should look for something like those, rather than trying to find types of organisms that, as you point out, have a very, very low chance of surviving on Mars.
Vista is designed to be bootable from flash memory.
But as they describe it, this HHD doesn't look like a flash device, it looks like a normal hard drive.
It just happens to use a huge nonvolatile write cache to maximize the time it can remain in a spun-down state.
Now... I can see how OS support could increase the efficiency of this even more (by intelligently forcing some commonly used files to stay in the cache), but if it totally doesn't work correctly under Linux or even XP, I would have to STRONGLY suspect that as a deliberate design constraint to boost sales of Vista, rather than a mere side-effect of a new technology.
My sincere hope - my challenge - is that those 90 percent will, in hopes of foiling my prediction, actually /read/ the text of the statement,
and not presume to know what it means by reading headlines.
Okay... Just provide us with (FTA) "The document, much of which is classified", and I promise that I'll read it before making any other comments.
As for anti-Bush rhetoric... I can't possibly top the man himself for presenting him as a megalomaniacal warmongering fool; so what could I ever write to sway the minds of those who still seem to love him, regardless of how much damage he does to our country and our world?
which restrict the web sites that employees can visit [...] they are suspicious of time wasting on the Internet and need proof.
Before worrying about privacy issues (you can make those go away with the simple wave of an AUP), you should perhaps wonder if the people in question work hourly or on salary.
You have a set of sites you allow. If you then scold people for going there, you need a reason to do so. "Wasting time" simply doesn't apply to salaried employees - As the flip-side to all that unpaid overtime, their "time" belongs to them, not the company. If they can get the job done in five minutes per week and surf the web for the other 39h55m, your company can't do a hell of a lot about it (short of making them hourly).
People are presumed innocent until proven guilty, sure, but that doesn't stop the police from investigating many people who are suspected of crimes
Fishing for a potential (possibly future) crime does not equal investigating a known crime.
but are proven innocent over the course of the investigation.
Again - If investigating a specific crime, that makes sense. If not... Well, "prove" I didn't kill Nicole Simpson. Good luck on that.
You simply can't "prove" innocence from all possible crimes. Think of this in terms of the SCO case, which gives us a good example of the problem here... IBM has no way to physically prove its innocence, and (in theory) doesn't need to; The burden of proof rests on SCO to specifically name what IBM infringed on, then prove the infringement actually occurred. Without that limitation to what SCO can claim, this case would go on forever (and already has for far too long... You can consider the current length the analogy to the FBI "interviewing" you downtown - Even if they don't find anything, they've wasted a LOT of your time and taxpayer money).
Are you one of those people who believes that nobody who photographs a bridge may be planning to blow it up? Or are you one of those people who believes that the occasional blown-up bridge is worth it, so long as your desire to take pictures of bridges is not scrutinized?
You left out "one of those people who believes in the presumption of innocence"?
In isolation, taking pictures of bridges, dams, national monuments, even government buildings (which frequently have some of the neatest architecture) should not arouse enough suspicion to earn a visit from a TLA(gency). Now, if PREVIOUSLY KNOWN (or apparent at the time) causes of Reasonable Suspicion exist, I don't have a problem with a casual chat with the FBI (by which I don't mean spending 16 hours under a hot light asked the same stupid questions over and over). But just taking pictures? No. Doesn't cut it.
Does anybody really not think wireless will soon be a mandatory feature for all portable media players?
;-) ). So you can
still share a bud with a bud, if so desired (or somewhat more
hygienic - ick, sharing earbuds, how nasty - use a 2-way headphone
splitter and jack in the second set at the same time).
Well, yes, but functional wireless - MS screwed the pooch with the Zune, by not letting it show up directly on your WLAN as a CIFS share (possibly even with some device-side browsing ability so you can pull music down rather than needing to push it from your fileserver or a third machine), instead limiting it to the all-but-useless "share for three listens" feature.
Now, as for Steverino's comment - The Zune's wireless, useful or not, exists in addition to a headphone jack. Not "instead of" (I'd like to see how that would work
But for the REALLY interesting question - I slammed both MS and Apple here... Will the fanboys' heads explode before they can mod this into obvlivion?
10^9 = 1 billion possibilities.
As I mentioned, you have quite a few invalid numbers... The ones I mentioned alone drop that down by 12,100,001. Also, several other "valid" ranges have closed, such as the 700-733 range for railroad workers, despite that range not having come even close to fully used. Then 800 to 999 also count as invalid (you have 200 million numbers wasted right there).
SSNs are being added at a rate of 5.5 million a year.... that's around a hundred years to use up the remaining possibilities. I call that more than "a few decades"
Don't forget that rate itself grows at roughly 1.3% per year (at least it did, on average, from the 1990 to the 2000 census). Compounding that, and taking those excluded ranges into consideration, we'll run out of numbers at the current rate of population growth in just under 43 years (R=5.5M; G=1.013; X=767M-450M=317M; sum[i=1->43](R*(G^i))=323,775,738; 323M > 317M).
So, if you take "a few" as literally three, then yes, my original statement underestimates somewhat. But it will happen within our expected lifetimes.
However, an SSN has only nine digits - So the SSA will need to add a digit or three within then next few decades. Reissuing numbers, thanks to the exponential growth of the population, would only gain them a few years at most, so they probably won't do it (instead doing something like adding a new number group and moving all existing users to 000-###-##-####).
Rather than use a dead person's number, though, might I suggest you use one of the classic non-numbers, such as any group all zeros (000-##-####, ###-00-####, ###-##-0000) (official) or 666-##-#### (unofficial, but as yet still never issued), or 078-05-1120 (the single most used fake SSN in history, which belongs to Hilda Whitcher, the secretary of an ad exec who decided to use her number in a promotion - She got a new one to replace it and the SSA retired it). A friend of mine had his used, just by coincidence, for something as mundane as a college ID, and you wouldn't believe the hoops he had to jump through just to register for classes. So don't make someone else's life hell, just carefully pick a totally invalid number.
My options
You forgot #6 - Pirate a DRM-less, restrictionless, non-phoning-home VLK version, just like we all have for every version (that didn't come with the machine) since Win 95.
No virtualization? "Home" users don't virtualize, with one exception - To save having to multiboot into Linux (and those fall into the extreme minority). Thus, this limitation amounts to "no painlessly trying out Linux allowed".
5 client connections? Not sure about that one... Did they decide the whopping 10 from XP allowed too much power to the users? At least for the XP line, only an idiot would run a business on Home (or even Pro) anyway, when SBS 2003 costs relatively little to make a shop legal.
As for license transfers... With OEM versions, you already can't transfer them. So that means this won't affect 99% of home users right from the start. As for upgrades... Much like XP's much-protested activation, this will vanish with the first service pack as soon as MS starts getting dozens, then hundreds, then potentially thousands of calls a day from people who made one upgrade too many and have a dead system. MS can throw lawyers at any problem, but they can't afford to piss too many users off.
So, most of these seemingly-offensive policies depend entirely on the fact that most of their users won't even notice the change. Then again, if these affect so few people - Why bother?
If you kept reading just another sentence or two, you would've understood.
D'oh! My bad... I must have glazed over for that part, because I seriously didn't notice it. But yeah, I suppose that pretty much negates the bulk of my point.
The BrightSide DR37-R EDR display theoretically has an infinite contrast ratio. How? Because it can turn individual LED backlights off completely (see How It Works), it has a black luminance of zero. When you divide any brightness value by this zero black value, you get infinity.
It goes from 0 to 4000cd/m^2. Their comparison model, the LVM-37w1, goes from 0.55 to 550cd/m^2.
So this toy gets as close to true black as you can get - "off", thus constrained by the ambient light level. For white, they manage 4000cd/m^2, or comparable to fairly bright interior lighting.
Consider me impressed, but realistically, this only amounts to roughly an 8x brightness improvement over the best normal displays, with true-black thrown in as a perk (they suspiciously don't mention the next lowest intensity, no doubt because it goes back into the realm of a contrast ratio of only a few thousand.
What's the lifespan of a snail?
Five to fifteen years (with outliers, of course). So "long enough", if I infer your meaning correctly.
Maybe a better window manager/gui that you could break the screen in to regions, so that when you maximize a window, it would only fill the top 40% or something. Or the ability to pin windows to a location, os you don't have to maximize them.
A number of 3rd-party programs will already do that for you - You set a program's window(s) up like you want, tell it to remember the size and position, and from then on it will always force that window to behave and stay where you want it.
IIRC, even the stock NVidia drivers have an option very much like that, you just need to turn it on and set it up for each program you want it to beat into submission.
The biggest problem I have with such programs, very few even try to handle multiple monitors. And while I certainly wouldn't turn down a 30" display if offered to me for free, a pair of decent 19" panels costs about a quarter the price of a single 30" for a similar boost in screen real-estate.
where authorities suspect deposits of uranium and plutonium may be located
Plutonium has too short of a half-life to find natural "deposits"... If our solar system ever had any, it decayed long before the accretion disk ever coalesced into solid objects such as our planet.
Thus, if these snails show traces of plutonium, you can take it as 100% certain that this has nothing to do with auspicious mineral fomations, and that they have found the "missing" bombs' fuel.
I consider it more interesting that these snails would survive contact with plutonium - Not specifically because of its radioactivity, but because it counts as SOOOOOO toxic - IIRC, inhaling just a few nanograms of Pu dust guarantees death from cancer within a few years; a few micrograms just outright kills you directly.