80 bulbs? Damn, man, if you have a house
with 80 lightbulbs, I think you can afford a few
hundred dollars to switch to CF!
I have... (making a quick mental count)... 26
lightbulbs (including rarely-used ones in the
attic and cellar that I still haven't changed
over to CF because I only turn them on for around
ten minutes per year), and multi-bulb fixtures
that I currently only keep one active bulb in).
And I have a pretty decent sized place - two
stories, three bedrooms, formal diningroom...
80 bulbs? C'mon, you counted things like
tinka-tinka lights you put in the windows
for the holidays, right? At my per-room
rate of lightbulb existance, I'd need
another three bathrooms, two livingrooms,
and ten bedrooms to hit 80 bulbs.
Oh! Sir Gates? I didn't realize... Hey, I have
this great idea for a program...
What is it that.NET gives the malware
authors in terms of abilities that they
can't have without it?
You could ask the same question of any.NET project. You could also answer that
question (and many similar ones) with "nothing,
just use Win32 and ANSI C".
Personally, after my most recent project at
work has required me to get nice and comfy
with.NET, I still don't see the point. Okay,
the STL seems like a useful improvement (perhaps
around version 5 or 6 they'll have the worst of
the bugs out), but (in the case of C#) why the
hell would anyone want C-like code (and non-cross-platform
C-like code at that) to run under an
interpreter/VM? Okay, if you already use
mostly Java, I can see this as basically a pure
improvement. But for C or even VB? Don't
waste your time.
Hmm, does that answer your question? If not,
let me summarize: "Someone's boss thought having.NET on a product description looked good
without having any idea what that means".
they are forcing them to give the names of
the employees who BROKE THE LAW by disobeying
their NDA's and giving the info out
Wah, wah, wah. Cry me a frickin' river.
Unless you can also show me the text of the NDA,
I won't put much stock in that excuse. Such
agreements frequently prove either too narrow to
apply, or too broad to enforce.
They also frequently don't even exist in the case of
internal employees... For example, I know a good
number of juicy tidbits about my employer, and have
no obligation whatsoever not to disclose them. I keep
them to myself because I currently enjoy my job and
don't particularly feel like betraying my employer's
trust, but it amounts to only that - trust.
"I feel betrayed" doesn't mean a hell of a lot in
court.
So, let's say I disclose such a "secret"... My employer
would have basically no recourse against me in court, but
would certainly fire me on the spot. Considering that
lack of actual legal recourse, why should a third party
have to disclose me as their source of that info? Our
legal system, in theory, doesn't cater to those with a
petty vindictive axe to grind; it deals with people who
break the law, and it, not the victim, punishes
the crime.
Going further, I've only considered those that actually
"should" know somewhat secret information. How about
the janitor, overhearing a random group of engineers talking
about the next big product? Do you suppose he signed
an NDA? How about an engineer's wife, casually mentioning it
to friends and it slowly leaks out? How about a journalist
engaging in the 100% court-approved legal act of trash-picking
to piece together juicy details of the next big product?
So yes, I have rather a big problem with the courts forcing
journalists to disclose their sources just because Apple can
wave the phrase "NDA" around. Apple may well have an NDA, but
a very good chance exists that it doesn't apply to the
people who actually leaked the info - But that fact won't
stop Apple from doing as much as possible to destroy such peoples'
lives.
Next time RTFA
Tell me, oh most insightful one, how do we
get "TFA" if the courts keep forcing
journalists to disclose their sources?
The first amendment guarantees freedom of the
press (in the US, anyway). Once upon a time,
that included freedom after the press
as well. Guess times have changed to protect
corporate profits, eh?
along with complaints about the fact that
songs purchased from its iTunes music service
don't work with music players other than its
own
What an absurd complaint! Thanks to "DVD" Jon
Johansen, iTunes-bought songs work just fine on
any device capable of playing back AAC.
As for the rest, well, nothing new here. The
only "new" part about this comes from the fact
that Apple fanboys have actually acknowledged
the existance of such bullying (though invariably
in an apologist tone). But Apple has used exactly
these sort of bullying tactics for a great many
years... Anyone remember the suits over the
original iMac? Or how about their reaction to
3rd-party Aqua theme clones? And god forbid you
get a hot anonymous tip about the contents of an
upcoming MacWorld - At best you get sued, and
if you actually get some real info, Apple
will petulantly threaten to pull out altogether!
I was going to back you up by finding out how many
thousands of years it takes to go from organic material
to oil
To "oil", in the sense of the big underground lakes
of black goo, it takes a VERY long time, on the order
of millions of years rather than thousands.
To turn plants into something useable as fuel, however?
It takes a few hours to a few months, depending on what
you want.
Slashdot itself recently covered a fellow who
has come up with a way to turn just about anything organic
into substances similar to the end products of oil refining
(gasoline, kerosene, diesel), which even proveably produces
more energy than it consumes (discounting the organic waste
that goes in for processing, of course), as it uses just the
gasseous fractions produced to power the entire process.
And of course, turning corn (or any high sugar or starch content
plant matter) into ethanol (really quite a good fuel - clean,
high energy content, no exotic conditions needed to burn it,
and not even toxic to humans in reasonable quantities) we've
known how to do throughout all of known history.
And let's not skip the obvious one - firewood. Granted, the
way we get it now taps into a resource that takes decades or
even centuries to regenerate, but we could specifically
use five to ten year rotating microforests of ultra-fast growing
plants such as paulownia (particularly interesting because you
don't need to replant them when you cut them down - With a bit
of care in the first year, a new one just grows from the stump
when you chop it down).
So, can we get new underground-viscous-black-goo-oil on a
timescale of a few years? No. But currently, and for at
least the next decade or two, the single most efficient
way to use solar energy (the only real "source" of
new energy available on our planet) has existed on this
planet for longer than we have - Photosynthetic
green plants. We just need to exercise some care in
how we make use of them so as to minimize the environmental
impact of harvesting.
First, and most obvious, is cost. To outfit
our house with all CF was nearly $350.
You might want to comparison-shop just a bit...
I have changed over every bulb in my house. It
cost me well under $100.
Try Walmart and Home Depot. I don't particularly
care for WallyWorld, but when I last looked, they
had a 5-pack of... 17W(?) CF bulbs for $9. Still
almost 5x the price of regular incandescents,
but cheap enough that anyone worried about the
paying for the cost of their own electricity use
should have no trouble coming up with the
cash.
Home Depot had a similar deal (I actually got
most of mine there) for a little bit more money
(I think $14.99 for a five pack).
So, that comes to maybe $30-$45 for the whole
house, right? You'll pay that again in replacing three or four bulbs that very specifically take a
normal-sized-and-shape incandescent. I had three
such bulbs, two that fit into recessed sockets,
and one table-lamp with the shade mounted on
the bulb (I said just replace the lamp, but
nooooooo, the SO likes the tacky piece of
crap <G>). For the two recessed ones I
found some perfect very-small 7W CFs that fit (they fit within the overall shape of an
incandescent, but don't actually look anything
like a normal bulb shape), $6 each. Actually very bright for 7W (I've learned that
the number they quote has nothing to do with
actual output, just input, so if you have the
opportunity, you might want to compare as
many different brands and models as possible).
For the last one, I found a CF bulb that they
actually put inside a lightbulb-shaped outer
bulb, it works perfect even for bulb-mounted
lampshades. $12 by itself, though, so if you
have a lot of functional table lamps with bulb
mounted shades, it might cost less to outright replace the lamps themselves.
This is also totally avoidable by applying
modern security practices to old protocols
Even easier than that - Just run an NTP server
on your LAN.
RFC1323 specifies a resolution down to 1ms.
Below that, the proposed fingerprinting
method can't tell anything. Now, I keep one
internal machine as a stratum-3 timeserver,
and the rest get a feed off that directly over
the local ethernet. "ntpq" -p tells me that I
have (as of 22 seconds ago) a jitter of 2 to
7ms compared with the outside world.
On the inside... Oooh, 0.082ms. Guess what
snooping technique will reveal absolutely nothing
about my LAN (or any LAN with
all machines sync'ed to a common internal
source)?
In general, this technique will fail absolutely
miserably. The author acknowledges the non-uniqueness
of time offsets, but makes the mistake of assuming
a more-or-less uniform distribution within a small
range of true. In reality, the distribution will
fit very tightly inside the 25ms range (oddly
enough, thanks to Microsoft including their
hack-of-an-NTP-client in Windows XP, and having it
on by default), with only one or two percent of
machines straying beyond 100ms drift. If this technique
can only see down to 1ms, it effectively ends up
lumping somewhere around 100 million machines into
200 buckets. Not exactly what I'd call a positive ID,
when even a fully-populated class-C would almost certainly
result in offset collisions...
Is it true that DC-to-DC is just a
combination of DC-AC and AC-DC?
No.
In that case, then there are still two
conversion steps. (Still more efficient
than when separate, but not by half).
For DC-DC, you get 90-95% efficient. For
AC-DC and vice-versa, you can get into the
90% range, but much more commonly see 80% and
below.
But, for argument's sake, let's take each as
90% (the low end of DC-DC and the high end of
AC<->DC) efficent. For DC-DC, you do it
once, giving 90% overall. For AC->DC->AC,
you need two steps, giving 90% * 90% = 81%
total. So, you'd still do better to use DC-DC
conversion.
Also, the above assumes an arbitrary DC voltage
to another arbitrary DC voltage. If you have a
starting voltage very slightly higher than your
desired voltage (say, 9.2V to 9V), you can "perfectly"
throw away the excess, giving only the drop as your
overall loss (so 9.2V to 9V would mean 98% efficient).
Yeah, but if all the major manufacturers are
signed up, you're left with crappy third world
hardware or warranty-void gear.
Since this flag won't exist in 95% of the world
(population-wise), do you really think
major non-US companies like Sony won't produce
any products without this flag?
Our neighbors-to-the-North, if no one else, will
provide sufficient demand (and an easy place for
us Northern US residents to go to get such products)
to guarantee the existance of flagless TVs.
I expect that the rest of the world will want
nothing to do with this BS, and, if the US courts
don't outright shoot down the whole idea, Americans
will end up paying more for the same products
with the flag enabled. Or as an in-between step,
we'll have something like we have now with DVD
players, where most of them have a trivial means
of disabling the flag (such as pressing "*11<MENU>27"
or just telling the TV you live in Canada the first time
you set it up).
AFAIK, no laws currently exist against loaning
a friend your cellphone. I don't even think
I've ever seen a TOS that prevents such a use.
So why should I need to authenticate myself to my
phone? If I lose it, I have it deactivated and
get a replacement anyway, so even that
rather rare possibility doesn't pose enough of
a risk to bother.
Or does this just go along with out steady
descent into an Orwellian nightmare, where
the government needs to know where (already
have mandatory GPS in new phones) a given
communications device gets used, and who uses
it? "But I just wanted to order a pizza!" "Oh,
and you consider that no big deal? I'll have
you know the DHS/TSA considers it a huge red
flag to order pepperoni and hamburg, but not
with bacon or sausage! Ooops, I've said too
much, sorry... Bailiff, would you please make
the defendant dissapear?"
Actually I think standard english says that the
period should go inside the quotation marks, but
my programming trained mind refuses to let me do so.
Same here, that rule drives me absolutely batty... In my opinion,
if I put the period in the quotes, I effectively tell the parser
(aka "person reading my text" in the case of normal English
communication) that I attribute the period to the source of
the quote, while simultaneously leaving my own sentence un-terminated.
However, I realized that you just need to apply the rules a little
bit more literally to find a simple exploit that lets you do whichever
you want. The rule says that, if you end your sentence with a quote,
you put the period inside the quotes. But, if you put
a period outside the close-quote, then technically the quote
hasn't ended your sentence - the period following it has.
The companies paid federal fines of $1.5
million for the accident.
Alright, now that I can read your link, it does
indeed say that. I retract the bulk of my
vitriol. However, in the interest of finding
out the "right" answer, I looked around a bit
more...
The Washington Post says "Oct. 25: The NRC fines Metropolitan
Edison, TMI's operator, $155,000."
From reasonably trustable sources, I couldn't find any
other sites supporting either of our numbers,
though personally I would consider the Post the best
of the three.
However, I think I can explain the number your link
gives... It seems that TMI itself has received
numerous fines over the years for its chronic safety
problems. I found one at $210k, a few at $55k,
a few at $50k, possibly one at $160k. I suspect these
probably all add up to somewhere around $1.5 million.
"The" Three Mile Island incident we all know about
only earned Met Ed a $155k, but it only counts as
one of many.
As an aside... Did you somehow edit your
post to which I responded one round back?
I would have sworn it contained another
sentence when I first read it the other day, but
when I went to quote it just now, I found it not
there.
How is this 5+ Insightful? It's 5+ "preaching
what Slashdot wants to hear" but that doesn't make
it factually sound.
As opposed to the classic "Let's attack a highly-rated
post on a controversial topic and hope the few mods who
strongly disagree with it will toss me a few points"?
Difference here, I gave accurate information as
corroborated in multiple locations. As far as I can tell,
you completely made yours up.
A quick google * yielded fines of $1.5
million, and $80 million in medical settlements.
A tad bit more than $150,000, don't you
think?
If you could support it, yes. Instead, you
posted a registration-required link and mentioned
Google.
But, lest I commit the same erro myself,
here you go:
The plant came within 30 minutes of a full
meltdown. The reactor vessel was destroyed, and large
amounts of unmonitored radiation was released directly
into the community.
Or how about a choice line from the PA governor's address
on the problem?
The company has informed us that from about
11 a.m. until about 1:30 p.m., Three-Mile Island discharged
into the air, steam that contained detectable amounts of
radiation.
And what did they end up paying in fines?
On October 25, 1979, the NRC issued a Notice of
Violation (NOV) to Met Ed for causing the accident. The
Commission also recommended the maximum fine, $155,000,
permitted under law Met Ed denied all NRC charges, but agreed
to pay the NRC fine on December 15, 1979.
and $80 million in medical settlements.
"Liability" for damages does not equal "fines". I can
find no source for that $80M claim, but even if I could,
it wouldn't much matter, since it doesn't fall into
the category of "punitive" actions. The same holds true
for...
And of course, lets not take into account any new
laws or regulations in the past 20 years.
Just because it might end up bothering those it directly
affects, new laws do not directly punish someone,
they merely (attempt to) improve the overall situation,
for all players.
Excluding the people who disagree, and then saying "everyone agrees"
really doesn't tell us much. Not that I don't agree with your basic point,
I just think you need to work on your argument a little.
Normally, I would agree - That sentence counts as an invalid
argument.
In this case, however, it forms a central theme to the argument...
Namely, we CAN disagree on whether or not Janet's nipple
actually hurts anyone. We can throw various developmental psych
theories back and forth, each supporting our point of view
more-or-less equally well.
You can measure radiation levels. You can calculate economic
damages based on evacuating and totally closing an area off
indefinitely. You can count the dead birds in Alaska.
It strikes me as absurd that we would punish something that
some people find vaguely "offensive" at anywhere
near the level we would punish an objectively
damage-causing act (It actually baffles me that we would punish
the former category at all, but that gets into an
entirely different topic).
True, my choice of phrasing committed a fallacy. But,
IMO, a very revealing fallacy, once corrected.
You seem to miss the point that media giants
are disproportionately wealthy and that $155,000
fine is absolutely nothing in the face of spending
$2.7 million for 30 seconds of publicity.
Disproportionately wealthy? Do you have
any idea how much money the "energy"
industry pulls in? From CNN, "Exxon Mobil,
the world's largest publicly traded oil
company, just missed $300 billion in sales
for the year". By comparison, from the Motley
Fool, "Few if any Wall Street watchers believe
that AOL Time Warner will make its aggressive
$40 billion sales goal and $11 billion EBITDA
goal this year". Yeah, I'll agree that seems
fairly disproportionate, but I think you have
the balance off by just a tad.
Even ignoring how much they make,
though, what about how much damage
they can cause?. Outraged parents and
Christians aside, most otherwise-sane people
would agree that a 1.5 second nipple shot
doesn't cause all that much "damage" to
anyone, not even to uber-horny early-teens
males.
On the other side of that, would you consider
turning half of PA into an uninhabitable nuclear
wasteland as some pretty serious damage? Would
you consider Bhopal (not in the US, but the same
thing COULD happen here) as something
worth some pretty hefty "preventative" fines
to avoid?
Even methamphetamines help the pharmaceutical
companies. Who do you think makes methadone?
I agree with the rest of your points, but on this one...
Methadone helps people slowly withdraw from opiate
addiction, such as heroin. It has no effect on methamphetamine
users (well, it still has an "effect", but nothing related to
softening the actual withdrawal therefrom).
They're seperate of any nuclear commission.
Why compare the two?
Perhaps you missed the "wronful death"
comment...
The FP author compared the two because they
both exist as government regulatory agencies,
and, in a more abstract sense, they both act
to protect the public from what they oversee.
Now, if you consider what they actually
protect us from, you'll understand why the
fines levied appear vastly disproportionate
to the public risk of the violation....
Janet's breast, no public risk ("But think of
the kids!" Yeah, the same kids that started
life sucking on a pair of the same things) -
$550,000 fine.
Three mile island, by comparison, did
release quite a bit of radiation into the
nearboy Middletown area, and came within half
an hour of rendering half of Pennsylvania
uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years
- $155,000 fine.
Howard stern discusses topics with the maturity
of a group of 3rd-grade boys. Fined $495,000
and, on the bigger issue of immature radio
hosts, Clear Channel gets whacked for 1.75
MILLION dollars.
The Hanford site in Washington, which had a
rather lengthy history of very serious
"accidents", releases 25,000 gallons of water
contaminated with plutonium in 1997. Fined?
$140,625.
Things like THAT leads us to wonder
just how far the FCC has its head stuck up
its netherregion. "Turn the earth to sand,
and still commit no crime", but don't you
dare use any colorful four-letter words,
or show any perfectly natural humal parts not
shared by both genders...
Unlike CPUs which become worthless in less
than 2 years, RAID h/w last a bit longer.
Obviously this depends on your particular needs,
but I would say exactly the opposite.
I keep a Linux fileserver on my home LAN, and
roughly once per year I upgrade its oldest HDD
(four total), by which time I couldn't even
give away the one I swap out, a mere
three years old.
OTOH, I built my current main desktop machine
just under five years ago, using a Tyan S1834
motherboard and a pair of PIII/933s, all of
which already counted as slightly older, fairly
cheap parts ($150 for the MB, $70 per CPU, IIRC).
Compared to my machines at work (a Pentium M
2GHz laptop and a loaded P4/3.2GHz desktop), my
home desktop still "feels" a hell of a lot faster.
I'll probably upgrade in another year, once
the dual core Athlons come down in price a bit,
but for now, I really have no need.
To those who call dual core (or older SMP)
nothing but hype - Try using one before you
criticize it. They don't "just" run more
things at the same speed, they run a lot
of things quite a bit faster. Anything
multithreaded, my 5YO home desktop can actually
keep up with the P4/3.2 at work. Anything
single threaded and CPU-sucking, the P4 will
do it in less total time, but the difference in
responsiveness while running flat-out (even at
low priority) absolutely amazes me. 5-10s to
open an explorer window? No thanks! I can have
a half dozen CPU-intensive apps running at once
and explorer still pops open in less than two
seconds.
No, not all businesses are parasitic, but most are.
I disagree... An increasing number of businesses appear parasitic,
just shuffling things around (in this case, personal data) and skimming
off the top. But these must occupy the minority of businesses,
or the entire economy would collapse (someone has to actually
produce something).
Personally, I work in IT at a non-parasitic company. We manufacture
real, physical products that people buy. We properly recycle (or dispose
of, when we can't recycle) our waste, we have good relations with the
community, and people feel happy about trading their green paper
for our products. Even a company like Walmart does something
(I would consider them more of a cancer than a parasite - They grow
faster than nearby competition, eventually choking out the "healthy"
businessses).
But companies like iDownload? They do absolutely
nothing but leech of otherwise "healthy" people and organizations.
Almost a plant/aphid/ant relationship... With we mere humans at the
bottom of that food-chain.
That's two references to "drawn and
quartered". Doesn't anyone believe in a good
old-fashioned public stoning anymore?
Actually, I'd prefer to give them a proper
keel-hauling or two. But "drawn and quartered"
has a much more... "Elegant" sound to it.
Keel-hauling happens to drunk sailors, while
even deposed nobles get drawn and
quartered...
A claim of defamation has to prove malice or
be proved false, but still has to prove loss of
reputation.
That one seems fairly easy to win. Prove malice
and loss of reputation? No autoGodwin intended
here, but this strikes me as similar to identifying
someone as a former high-ranking Nazi living in
Israel.
When a company makes spyware, of course
we feel malice toward them! Personally, I would
like nothing short of their total dissolution,
with the entire executive board drawn and
quartered. And outing them as such,
particularly when true, basically
destroys their reputation so badly that they
need to vanish and reappear as a new company
(as happened with Gator/Claria).
Do I consider this right? You can probably
tell from my general tone that I do not... Parasitic
companies should have no legal recourse when
someone correctly names them as scum. But most
people don't have deep enough pockets to fight back.
you obviously haven't used bluetooth in a
real world environment, it's no quite as
fantastic as the marketing departments would
have you believe
I've used a number of bluetooth devices in a
VERY electrically-noisy manufacturing environment.
It goes through a wall or two, and with line-of-sight,
I've gotten better than 60ft range.
The key? Don't use cheap consumer-grade bluetooth
devices, you get what you pay for here. For example,
we have a few barcode scanners that cost almost $500
each, compared with $200ish for a wired version. But
absolutely no problems with range or signal
integrity.
In my experience, digital isn't really that
much higher quality than analog.
Then you either had a really high quality
TV before the HDTV-era, or only watch
NTSC-upsampled-to-HDTV-and-called-digital
(actually pretty common, the majority
of the broadcast "HDTV" channels do exactly
that).
Personally, I went from a typical 29" NTSC TV
to a mid-range 720p HDTV, and just watching
progressive scan DVDs (aka 480p), I notice a
drastic difference in quality. Not
just some subtle improvement, but a night-and-day
difference. And for console gaming, let me tell
you, component-in 720p-capable games make the older
generation of consoles look little better than
an etch-a-sketch by comparison.
why are most shows now about previously unknown
twits who will sell their soul to get on TV eating
llama nipples?
Because, pathetically enough, a lot of
people (who fit a niche demographic, which while
considerably smaller than "everyone", can still
bring in big bucks) will watch unknown
twits eating llama nipples.
TV stations don't just make crap to avoid
dead-air. They take a few risks per season,
and stick with 99% formulaic crap-that-sells.
If that means selling llama-nipple-eating,
as stupid as it sounds, you can bet some
station will carry it... In some cases, changing
their entire format to carry it (MTV abandoning
actual videos to turn itself into the all
"real life"/"road rules" channel a few years
back as an example).
Slashdot Mirror
At around 80 bulbs inside and outside the house
80 bulbs? Damn, man, if you have a house with 80 lightbulbs, I think you can afford a few hundred dollars to switch to CF!
I have... (making a quick mental count)... 26 lightbulbs (including rarely-used ones in the attic and cellar that I still haven't changed over to CF because I only turn them on for around ten minutes per year), and multi-bulb fixtures that I currently only keep one active bulb in). And I have a pretty decent sized place - two stories, three bedrooms, formal diningroom...
80 bulbs? C'mon, you counted things like tinka-tinka lights you put in the windows for the holidays, right? At my per-room rate of lightbulb existance, I'd need another three bathrooms, two livingrooms, and ten bedrooms to hit 80 bulbs.
Oh! Sir Gates? I didn't realize... Hey, I have this great idea for a program...
What is it that .NET gives the malware
authors in terms of abilities that they
can't have without it?
.NET project. You could also answer that
question (and many similar ones) with "nothing,
just use Win32 and ANSI C".
.NET, I still don't see the point. Okay,
the STL seems like a useful improvement (perhaps
around version 5 or 6 they'll have the worst of
the bugs out), but (in the case of C#) why the
hell would anyone want C-like code (and non-cross-platform
C-like code at that) to run under an
interpreter/VM? Okay, if you already use
mostly Java, I can see this as basically a pure
improvement. But for C or even VB? Don't
waste your time.
.NET on a product description looked good
without having any idea what that means".
You could ask the same question of any
Personally, after my most recent project at work has required me to get nice and comfy with
Hmm, does that answer your question? If not, let me summarize: "Someone's boss thought having
they are forcing them to give the names of the employees who BROKE THE LAW by disobeying their NDA's and giving the info out
Wah, wah, wah. Cry me a frickin' river.
Unless you can also show me the text of the NDA, I won't put much stock in that excuse. Such agreements frequently prove either too narrow to apply, or too broad to enforce.
They also frequently don't even exist in the case of internal employees... For example, I know a good number of juicy tidbits about my employer, and have no obligation whatsoever not to disclose them. I keep them to myself because I currently enjoy my job and don't particularly feel like betraying my employer's trust, but it amounts to only that - trust. "I feel betrayed" doesn't mean a hell of a lot in court.
So, let's say I disclose such a "secret"... My employer would have basically no recourse against me in court, but would certainly fire me on the spot. Considering that lack of actual legal recourse, why should a third party have to disclose me as their source of that info? Our legal system, in theory, doesn't cater to those with a petty vindictive axe to grind; it deals with people who break the law, and it, not the victim, punishes the crime.
Going further, I've only considered those that actually "should" know somewhat secret information. How about the janitor, overhearing a random group of engineers talking about the next big product? Do you suppose he signed an NDA? How about an engineer's wife, casually mentioning it to friends and it slowly leaks out? How about a journalist engaging in the 100% court-approved legal act of trash-picking to piece together juicy details of the next big product?
So yes, I have rather a big problem with the courts forcing journalists to disclose their sources just because Apple can wave the phrase "NDA" around. Apple may well have an NDA, but a very good chance exists that it doesn't apply to the people who actually leaked the info - But that fact won't stop Apple from doing as much as possible to destroy such peoples' lives.
Next time RTFA
Tell me, oh most insightful one, how do we get "TFA" if the courts keep forcing journalists to disclose their sources?
The first amendment guarantees freedom of the press (in the US, anyway). Once upon a time, that included freedom after the press as well. Guess times have changed to protect corporate profits, eh?
along with complaints about the fact that songs purchased from its iTunes music service don't work with music players other than its own
What an absurd complaint! Thanks to "DVD" Jon Johansen, iTunes-bought songs work just fine on any device capable of playing back AAC.
As for the rest, well, nothing new here. The only "new" part about this comes from the fact that Apple fanboys have actually acknowledged the existance of such bullying (though invariably in an apologist tone). But Apple has used exactly these sort of bullying tactics for a great many years... Anyone remember the suits over the original iMac? Or how about their reaction to 3rd-party Aqua theme clones? And god forbid you get a hot anonymous tip about the contents of an upcoming MacWorld - At best you get sued, and if you actually get some real info, Apple will petulantly threaten to pull out altogether!
Nothing to see here, people, move along.
I was going to back you up by finding out how many thousands of years it takes to go from organic material to oil
To "oil", in the sense of the big underground lakes of black goo, it takes a VERY long time, on the order of millions of years rather than thousands.
To turn plants into something useable as fuel, however? It takes a few hours to a few months, depending on what you want.
Slashdot itself recently covered a fellow who has come up with a way to turn just about anything organic into substances similar to the end products of oil refining (gasoline, kerosene, diesel), which even proveably produces more energy than it consumes (discounting the organic waste that goes in for processing, of course), as it uses just the gasseous fractions produced to power the entire process.
And of course, turning corn (or any high sugar or starch content plant matter) into ethanol (really quite a good fuel - clean, high energy content, no exotic conditions needed to burn it, and not even toxic to humans in reasonable quantities) we've known how to do throughout all of known history.
And let's not skip the obvious one - firewood. Granted, the way we get it now taps into a resource that takes decades or even centuries to regenerate, but we could specifically use five to ten year rotating microforests of ultra-fast growing plants such as paulownia (particularly interesting because you don't need to replant them when you cut them down - With a bit of care in the first year, a new one just grows from the stump when you chop it down).
So, can we get new underground-viscous-black-goo-oil on a timescale of a few years? No. But currently, and for at least the next decade or two, the single most efficient way to use solar energy (the only real "source" of new energy available on our planet) has existed on this planet for longer than we have - Photosynthetic green plants. We just need to exercise some care in how we make use of them so as to minimize the environmental impact of harvesting.
First, and most obvious, is cost. To outfit our house with all CF was nearly $350.
You might want to comparison-shop just a bit...
I have changed over every bulb in my house. It cost me well under $100.
Try Walmart and Home Depot. I don't particularly care for WallyWorld, but when I last looked, they had a 5-pack of... 17W(?) CF bulbs for $9. Still almost 5x the price of regular incandescents, but cheap enough that anyone worried about the paying for the cost of their own electricity use should have no trouble coming up with the cash.
Home Depot had a similar deal (I actually got most of mine there) for a little bit more money (I think $14.99 for a five pack).
So, that comes to maybe $30-$45 for the whole house, right? You'll pay that again in replacing three or four bulbs that very specifically take a normal-sized-and-shape incandescent. I had three such bulbs, two that fit into recessed sockets, and one table-lamp with the shade mounted on the bulb (I said just replace the lamp, but nooooooo, the SO likes the tacky piece of crap <G>). For the two recessed ones I found some perfect very-small 7W CFs that fit (they fit within the overall shape of an incandescent, but don't actually look anything like a normal bulb shape), $6 each. Actually very bright for 7W (I've learned that the number they quote has nothing to do with actual output, just input, so if you have the opportunity, you might want to compare as many different brands and models as possible). For the last one, I found a CF bulb that they actually put inside a lightbulb-shaped outer bulb, it works perfect even for bulb-mounted lampshades. $12 by itself, though, so if you have a lot of functional table lamps with bulb mounted shades, it might cost less to outright replace the lamps themselves.
This is also totally avoidable by applying modern security practices to old protocols
Even easier than that - Just run an NTP server on your LAN.
RFC1323 specifies a resolution down to 1ms. Below that, the proposed fingerprinting method can't tell anything. Now, I keep one internal machine as a stratum-3 timeserver, and the rest get a feed off that directly over the local ethernet. "ntpq" -p tells me that I have (as of 22 seconds ago) a jitter of 2 to 7ms compared with the outside world. On the inside... Oooh, 0.082ms. Guess what snooping technique will reveal absolutely nothing about my LAN (or any LAN with all machines sync'ed to a common internal source)?
In general, this technique will fail absolutely miserably. The author acknowledges the non-uniqueness of time offsets, but makes the mistake of assuming a more-or-less uniform distribution within a small range of true. In reality, the distribution will fit very tightly inside the 25ms range (oddly enough, thanks to Microsoft including their hack-of-an-NTP-client in Windows XP, and having it on by default), with only one or two percent of machines straying beyond 100ms drift. If this technique can only see down to 1ms, it effectively ends up lumping somewhere around 100 million machines into 200 buckets. Not exactly what I'd call a positive ID, when even a fully-populated class-C would almost certainly result in offset collisions...
Is it true that DC-to-DC is just a combination of DC-AC and AC-DC?
No.
In that case, then there are still two conversion steps. (Still more efficient than when separate, but not by half).
For DC-DC, you get 90-95% efficient. For AC-DC and vice-versa, you can get into the 90% range, but much more commonly see 80% and below.
But, for argument's sake, let's take each as 90% (the low end of DC-DC and the high end of AC<->DC) efficent. For DC-DC, you do it once, giving 90% overall. For AC->DC->AC, you need two steps, giving 90% * 90% = 81% total. So, you'd still do better to use DC-DC conversion.
Also, the above assumes an arbitrary DC voltage to another arbitrary DC voltage. If you have a starting voltage very slightly higher than your desired voltage (say, 9.2V to 9V), you can "perfectly" throw away the excess, giving only the drop as your overall loss (so 9.2V to 9V would mean 98% efficient).
Yeah, but if all the major manufacturers are signed up, you're left with crappy third world hardware or warranty-void gear.
Since this flag won't exist in 95% of the world (population-wise), do you really think major non-US companies like Sony won't produce any products without this flag?
Our neighbors-to-the-North, if no one else, will provide sufficient demand (and an easy place for us Northern US residents to go to get such products) to guarantee the existance of flagless TVs.
I expect that the rest of the world will want nothing to do with this BS, and, if the US courts don't outright shoot down the whole idea, Americans will end up paying more for the same products with the flag enabled. Or as an in-between step, we'll have something like we have now with DVD players, where most of them have a trivial means of disabling the flag (such as pressing "*11<MENU>27" or just telling the TV you live in Canada the first time you set it up).
AFAIK, no laws currently exist against loaning a friend your cellphone. I don't even think I've ever seen a TOS that prevents such a use.
So why should I need to authenticate myself to my phone? If I lose it, I have it deactivated and get a replacement anyway, so even that rather rare possibility doesn't pose enough of a risk to bother.
Or does this just go along with out steady descent into an Orwellian nightmare, where the government needs to know where (already have mandatory GPS in new phones) a given communications device gets used, and who uses it? "But I just wanted to order a pizza!" "Oh, and you consider that no big deal? I'll have you know the DHS/TSA considers it a huge red flag to order pepperoni and hamburg, but not with bacon or sausage! Ooops, I've said too much, sorry... Bailiff, would you please make the defendant dissapear?"
Actually I think standard english says that the period should go inside the quotation marks, but my programming trained mind refuses to let me do so.
Same here, that rule drives me absolutely batty... In my opinion, if I put the period in the quotes, I effectively tell the parser (aka "person reading my text" in the case of normal English communication) that I attribute the period to the source of the quote, while simultaneously leaving my own sentence un-terminated.
However, I realized that you just need to apply the rules a little bit more literally to find a simple exploit that lets you do whichever you want. The rule says that, if you end your sentence with a quote, you put the period inside the quotes. But, if you put a period outside the close-quote, then technically the quote hasn't ended your sentence - the period following it has.
The companies paid federal fines of $1.5 million for the accident.
Alright, now that I can read your link, it does indeed say that. I retract the bulk of my vitriol. However, in the interest of finding out the "right" answer, I looked around a bit more...
The Washington Post says "Oct. 25: The NRC fines Metropolitan Edison, TMI's operator, $155,000."
From reasonably trustable sources, I couldn't find any other sites supporting either of our numbers, though personally I would consider the Post the best of the three.
However, I think I can explain the number your link gives... It seems that TMI itself has received numerous fines over the years for its chronic safety problems. I found one at $210k, a few at $55k, a few at $50k, possibly one at $160k. I suspect these probably all add up to somewhere around $1.5 million. "The" Three Mile Island incident we all know about only earned Met Ed a $155k, but it only counts as one of many.
As an aside... Did you somehow edit your post to which I responded one round back? I would have sworn it contained another sentence when I first read it the other day, but when I went to quote it just now, I found it not there.
Wierd...
As opposed to the classic "Let's attack a highly-rated post on a controversial topic and hope the few mods who strongly disagree with it will toss me a few points"?
Difference here, I gave accurate information as corroborated in multiple locations. As far as I can tell, you completely made yours up.
A quick google * yielded fines of $1.5 million, and $80 million in medical settlements. A tad bit more than $150,000, don't you think?
If you could support it, yes. Instead, you posted a registration-required link and mentioned Google.
But, lest I commit the same erro myself, here you go:
Or how about a choice line from the PA governor's address on the problem? And what did they end up paying in fines?
and $80 million in medical settlements.
"Liability" for damages does not equal "fines". I can find no source for that $80M claim, but even if I could, it wouldn't much matter, since it doesn't fall into the category of "punitive" actions. The same holds true for...
And of course, lets not take into account any new laws or regulations in the past 20 years.
Just because it might end up bothering those it directly affects, new laws do not directly punish someone, they merely (attempt to) improve the overall situation, for all players.
Excluding the people who disagree, and then saying "everyone agrees" really doesn't tell us much. Not that I don't agree with your basic point, I just think you need to work on your argument a little.
Normally, I would agree - That sentence counts as an invalid argument.
In this case, however, it forms a central theme to the argument... Namely, we CAN disagree on whether or not Janet's nipple actually hurts anyone. We can throw various developmental psych theories back and forth, each supporting our point of view more-or-less equally well.
You can measure radiation levels. You can calculate economic damages based on evacuating and totally closing an area off indefinitely. You can count the dead birds in Alaska.
It strikes me as absurd that we would punish something that some people find vaguely "offensive" at anywhere near the level we would punish an objectively damage-causing act (It actually baffles me that we would punish the former category at all, but that gets into an entirely different topic).
True, my choice of phrasing committed a fallacy. But, IMO, a very revealing fallacy, once corrected.
You seem to miss the point that media giants are disproportionately wealthy and that $155,000 fine is absolutely nothing in the face of spending $2.7 million for 30 seconds of publicity.
Disproportionately wealthy? Do you have any idea how much money the "energy" industry pulls in? From CNN, "Exxon Mobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, just missed $300 billion in sales for the year". By comparison, from the Motley Fool, "Few if any Wall Street watchers believe that AOL Time Warner will make its aggressive $40 billion sales goal and $11 billion EBITDA goal this year". Yeah, I'll agree that seems fairly disproportionate, but I think you have the balance off by just a tad.
Even ignoring how much they make, though, what about how much damage they can cause?. Outraged parents and Christians aside, most otherwise-sane people would agree that a 1.5 second nipple shot doesn't cause all that much "damage" to anyone, not even to uber-horny early-teens males.
On the other side of that, would you consider turning half of PA into an uninhabitable nuclear wasteland as some pretty serious damage? Would you consider Bhopal (not in the US, but the same thing COULD happen here) as something worth some pretty hefty "preventative" fines to avoid?
Even methamphetamines help the pharmaceutical companies. Who do you think makes methadone?
I agree with the rest of your points, but on this one...
Methadone helps people slowly withdraw from opiate addiction, such as heroin. It has no effect on methamphetamine users (well, it still has an "effect", but nothing related to softening the actual withdrawal therefrom).
They're seperate of any nuclear commission. Why compare the two?
Perhaps you missed the "wronful death" comment...
The FP author compared the two because they both exist as government regulatory agencies, and, in a more abstract sense, they both act to protect the public from what they oversee.
Now, if you consider what they actually protect us from, you'll understand why the fines levied appear vastly disproportionate to the public risk of the violation....
Janet's breast, no public risk ("But think of the kids!" Yeah, the same kids that started life sucking on a pair of the same things) - $550,000 fine.
Three mile island, by comparison, did release quite a bit of radiation into the nearboy Middletown area, and came within half an hour of rendering half of Pennsylvania uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years - $155,000 fine.
Howard stern discusses topics with the maturity of a group of 3rd-grade boys. Fined $495,000 and, on the bigger issue of immature radio hosts, Clear Channel gets whacked for 1.75 MILLION dollars.
The Hanford site in Washington, which had a rather lengthy history of very serious "accidents", releases 25,000 gallons of water contaminated with plutonium in 1997. Fined? $140,625.
Things like THAT leads us to wonder just how far the FCC has its head stuck up its netherregion. "Turn the earth to sand, and still commit no crime", but don't you dare use any colorful four-letter words, or show any perfectly natural humal parts not shared by both genders...
Or do you think they mught just be committing quiet obscenities? Better ban it anyway just in case.
Why not? They went after The Kingsmen for "Louie Louie", taking its unintelligibility as "proof" that it has nasties in it...
Unlike CPUs which become worthless in less than 2 years, RAID h/w last a bit longer.
Obviously this depends on your particular needs, but I would say exactly the opposite.
I keep a Linux fileserver on my home LAN, and roughly once per year I upgrade its oldest HDD (four total), by which time I couldn't even give away the one I swap out, a mere three years old.
OTOH, I built my current main desktop machine just under five years ago, using a Tyan S1834 motherboard and a pair of PIII/933s, all of which already counted as slightly older, fairly cheap parts ($150 for the MB, $70 per CPU, IIRC). Compared to my machines at work (a Pentium M 2GHz laptop and a loaded P4/3.2GHz desktop), my home desktop still "feels" a hell of a lot faster. I'll probably upgrade in another year, once the dual core Athlons come down in price a bit, but for now, I really have no need.
To those who call dual core (or older SMP) nothing but hype - Try using one before you criticize it. They don't "just" run more things at the same speed, they run a lot of things quite a bit faster. Anything multithreaded, my 5YO home desktop can actually keep up with the P4/3.2 at work. Anything single threaded and CPU-sucking, the P4 will do it in less total time, but the difference in responsiveness while running flat-out (even at low priority) absolutely amazes me. 5-10s to open an explorer window? No thanks! I can have a half dozen CPU-intensive apps running at once and explorer still pops open in less than two seconds.
No, not all businesses are parasitic, but most are.
I disagree... An increasing number of businesses appear parasitic, just shuffling things around (in this case, personal data) and skimming off the top. But these must occupy the minority of businesses, or the entire economy would collapse (someone has to actually produce something).
Personally, I work in IT at a non-parasitic company. We manufacture real, physical products that people buy. We properly recycle (or dispose of, when we can't recycle) our waste, we have good relations with the community, and people feel happy about trading their green paper for our products. Even a company like Walmart does something (I would consider them more of a cancer than a parasite - They grow faster than nearby competition, eventually choking out the "healthy" businessses).
But companies like iDownload? They do absolutely nothing but leech of otherwise "healthy" people and organizations. Almost a plant/aphid/ant relationship... With we mere humans at the bottom of that food-chain.
That's two references to "drawn and quartered". Doesn't anyone believe in a good old-fashioned public stoning anymore?
Actually, I'd prefer to give them a proper keel-hauling or two. But "drawn and quartered" has a much more... "Elegant" sound to it. Keel-hauling happens to drunk sailors, while even deposed nobles get drawn and quartered...
A claim of defamation has to prove malice or be proved false, but still has to prove loss of reputation.
That one seems fairly easy to win. Prove malice and loss of reputation? No autoGodwin intended here, but this strikes me as similar to identifying someone as a former high-ranking Nazi living in Israel.
When a company makes spyware, of course we feel malice toward them! Personally, I would like nothing short of their total dissolution, with the entire executive board drawn and quartered. And outing them as such, particularly when true, basically destroys their reputation so badly that they need to vanish and reappear as a new company (as happened with Gator/Claria).
Do I consider this right? You can probably tell from my general tone that I do not... Parasitic companies should have no legal recourse when someone correctly names them as scum. But most people don't have deep enough pockets to fight back.
you obviously haven't used bluetooth in a real world environment, it's no quite as fantastic as the marketing departments would have you believe
I've used a number of bluetooth devices in a VERY electrically-noisy manufacturing environment. It goes through a wall or two, and with line-of-sight, I've gotten better than 60ft range.
The key? Don't use cheap consumer-grade bluetooth devices, you get what you pay for here. For example, we have a few barcode scanners that cost almost $500 each, compared with $200ish for a wired version. But absolutely no problems with range or signal integrity.
In my experience, digital isn't really that much higher quality than analog.
Then you either had a really high quality TV before the HDTV-era, or only watch NTSC-upsampled-to-HDTV-and-called-digital (actually pretty common, the majority of the broadcast "HDTV" channels do exactly that).
Personally, I went from a typical 29" NTSC TV to a mid-range 720p HDTV, and just watching progressive scan DVDs (aka 480p), I notice a drastic difference in quality. Not just some subtle improvement, but a night-and-day difference. And for console gaming, let me tell you, component-in 720p-capable games make the older generation of consoles look little better than an etch-a-sketch by comparison.
why are most shows now about previously unknown twits who will sell their soul to get on TV eating llama nipples?
Because, pathetically enough, a lot of people (who fit a niche demographic, which while considerably smaller than "everyone", can still bring in big bucks) will watch unknown twits eating llama nipples.
TV stations don't just make crap to avoid dead-air. They take a few risks per season, and stick with 99% formulaic crap-that-sells. If that means selling llama-nipple-eating, as stupid as it sounds, you can bet some station will carry it... In some cases, changing their entire format to carry it (MTV abandoning actual videos to turn itself into the all "real life"/"road rules" channel a few years back as an example).