If it runs like a dog, bump upwards. No excuses, Mr Allchin...
Since Windows 3.1, I've always taken the "minimum system requirement" as the specification for a system that will run the product... and nothing else. If I want to run any actual software, the system has to be more powerful.
Except that, in a nod to the fact that the sun is a fusion reactor, they will have changed the name to "Duke Thermonukem Forever" as a publicity stunt to distract people from the additional delay.
No, no -- they don't need to file anything. Audit them. If the RIAA/MPAA is accurate about the value of the 'loss' from each individual instance of unauthorized copying, then they are, by their own admission, guilty of having failed to declare the true value of their assets as capital gains. It could wipe out the National Debt if the IRS could collect on all the back taxes...
The only effective way to kill something like this is to supplant it using an equally-powerful perception by the public. One of the best examples of this is the rumor that McDonald's used worms in its burger meat; denials by various managers did nothing to halt the rumors, but were more effectively addressed by Ray Kroc:
Ray Kroc, who bought McDonald's from Mac and Dick McDonald in 1955, added his own assurances: "We couldn't afford to grind worms into our meat," he countered. "Hamburger costs a dollar and a half a pound, and night crawlers six dollars."
By playing to the perception of McDonald's being fixated on the bottom line, Kroc linked a more powerful meme into the rebuttal. Unfortunately, there is no comparably strong meme for the Julius Baer bank to use; they are stuck with the association that their actions have built.
IANAL, either, but you will also note that the document also states:
This promise applies to the identified version of the following specifications. New versions of previously covered specifications will be separately considered for addition to the list.
As I read that, in other words, it says "You can use the specifications listed below in those specific versions. Should we choose to update those specifications and make our OOXML implementation conformant to and dependent upon any new features in those specifications, we reserve the right to not add them to the document and sue your ass off if you try to maintain compliance with OOXML in our full implementation."
I strongly recommend that everyone read Spider Robinson's short story "Melancholy Elephants"; it is a cautionary tale regarding the untrammeled expansion of copyright, as we have seen with the successful efforts of the House of Mouse to keep the earliest depictions of Mickey from falling into the public domain. Imagine what the entertainment industry would be like if the producers of West Side Story could be sued for copyright infringement by the heirs of William Shakespeare for creating a derivative work of his Romeo and Juliet...
Going to the URL with both IE and Firefox showed nothing but a black browser window and a button to download and install Microsoft Silverlight. "We're going to give you the opportunity to win something, but you have to let us install our latest proprietary extension." No, thanks.
...and that Canadians pay a tax on blank recording media that was imposed to compensate copyright holders for the presumed use of the media to make unauthorized copies. So it's possible that either Canada has been holding on to the revenue from that tax, or, more likely, the RIAA/MPAA feels that the tax does not "fully compensate" them for the multi-thousand-dollar 'loss' from the existence of a bootleg copy of a CD.
The majority of islamic terrorist organizations actually fight to 'end the foreign influence in Muslim countries and the creation of a new Islamic caliphate'. Seriously, don't bother then and they won't bother you.
The existence of non-Islamic countries is, by definition, a threat to Islam; the terrorist organizations are merely working their way down the list of threats, starting with the ones that exhibit the most willingness and ability to coerce other countries into removing the Sharia from its natural place as the foundation for all law and government.
More importantly for shooting down the 'perpetual motion' crap is that from his description, the base configuration has the wheel of magnets inducing current in the coil placed at the rim, thereby dumping energy into the coil that is wasted. Then he connects the coil back into the system, essentially dumping the induced energy back into the motor to strengthen the field in the motor's coils. Yes, the motor will speed up; the system is recovering energy that was lost into the coil, which overall reduces the load on the motor, allowing its speed to increase until the load again matches the energy being put in. But the speedup is no different from the speedup you'd get if you simply disconnected the wheel of magnets entirely, taking its load out of the system, except that you'd get a larger increase in motor speed, because you have inductive losses in the coupling of the magnets and the coil, and resistive losses in the coil and the wires back to the motor. So all he's demonstrated is "If I take a load off a motor, its speed increases." Definitely an earth-shattering discovery, fully worthy of high-school freshmen.
Air-drop testing established that ostriches do not have an acceptable glide ratio, and their roll rate was dependent on the amount of yaw or pitch that was induced by their departure from the carrier aircraft, with no evidence of active control. The obstruction of the flight path by cumulogranite formations prevented full examination of the aerodynamic characteristics of the species. It was determined after the first series of tests that no useful data would be obtained from further testing, so the remaining test subjects were turned over to a parallel investigation into the specifics of the Colonel's 'secret herbs and spices' recipe.
Every 2-bit nerd thinks he knows what's best for Microsoft...
You're right; however, "Crush every other producer of PC operating systems and any other software competing with our products and eliminate all restrictions on monopolistic practices, so that we can lock every PC user into buying the operating system and software products we want to develop and offer at prices we control, and force them to pay us again and again for the privilege of continuing to use our products, but only in the way we want to let them use our products" is not going to be viable in the real world.
You may have also noticed the report that Microsoft also reported that they're finally turning a profit on the Xbox line, driven mostly on the strength of Halo 3 for the Xbox 360...
Fewer flaws in Vista's first year than XP had in its? How many of Vista's flaws were the same flaws that had been found and patched in XP's first, or were those corrected during development of Vista, so that Vista's flaws were new and different ones, associated with the features of Vista that XP didn't have, or flaws that were common to both XP and Vista but had not been identified by the time Vista rolled out? If I complete a project, then fix the mistakes I made over the next year, when I go to do a similar project, I'm not going to make the same mistakes all over again, so the mistakes I make in the new project are likely to be more subtle and harder to find, or connected with things I'm doing in the new project I didn't do in the first one.
With new 'Truth in Product Warnings' legislation, green laser pointers will be required to carry a warning label, "Do Not Look Into Laser Beam With Remaining Eye".
It's one of my pet peeves, too. The usage in the illiteracism "ye olde" comes from the usage of the eth character 'ð' to spell 'the'; over time, the character was partially elided as a shortcut in writing the character, so that only the cross stroke and the upper end of the riser were drawn, looking like a superscripted 'y'. People who read period texts or signs would see what looked like 'yE' and took it to be a period usage, rather than an abbreviated form of 'the' (and pronounced the same way). Over time, the usage -- particularly in the phrase 'ye olde', has come to be impossible to eradicate.
The article is, unfortunately, vague on how the feature is activated; powering the speaker is a drain on the battery, so having it rattle or slosh every time it moves as it sits in your pocket or your purse or on your belt is not desirable (not to mention the additional aggravation that would be caused by the constant rattling or sloshing of cell phones around you), so there would logically be a need to, say, press a button on the cellphone before you shook it. Having an audio response in this manner does, however, represent an increase in utility over the message counter or battery indicator on the display. With display icons, you need to open the phone and look at the screen, distracting your attention from other tasks; with an audible feedback indicator, you take out the phone, press a button, and shake it, using a secondary sense -- your hearing -- to gauge the value being returned by the device. This could also be extended to non-audible responses if the phone's firmware supported it, such as triggering the internal vibrator for a length of time proportional to the remaining battery charge, or for a number of pulses equal to the number of stored messages.
I can't think of a single reason why it should be a crime to grow & smoke.
You probably don't have a vested interest in tobacco production, pharmaceutical research, nutritional supplements, petroleum production/distribution, cloth manufacture... etc.
Actually, it was pulp timberland that drove the criminalization of marijuana. William Randolph Hearst had vast holdings in pulp timberland and paper mills; the invention of the hemp decorticator allowed hemp pulp to be separated from the fiber (used to make manila line) cheaply, without chemical processing. An acre planted in hemp would produce four times the paper pulp of an acre of pulp timber; if hemp became widely cultivated, this would cause Hearst to lose millions of dollars. He instituted his propaganda campaign to get marijuana outlawed, counting on the fact that few people knew that hemp and marijuana were the same plant, and enlisted other industrialists like DuPont, whose budding synthetic-fiber industry also faced stiff competition from hemp textiles.
Essentially, all Germany could do was build a bunch of U-Boats that were just facelift improvements from World War I designs (the "modern" U-Boat came way too late to make a difference). Germany built two primary battleships - Bizmarck and Tirpitz. By contrast, the British built 5 battleships of the KGV class, more than a few aircraft carriers, and plenty of not only fighters, but also four engine heavy bombers. Germany could never build 4 engine bombers in number, becuase despite having an entire continent at her disposal, the Germans always had engine shortages...
And, why was that?
The biggest reason is that Germany never managed to pull itself up out of the 'craftsman' style of industry, where production relied on highly-trained workers who saw production of an individual item through from start to finish, instead of the assembly-line style of industry, where each worker performs a single specific task on a succession of items, and only has to be trained to do that one task, rather than on the whole production process.
The result of this was that German equipment, where it was not being built by slave labor, was extremely well-made and often years ahead of the equivalent Allied equipment in design, but production could not readily be increased, and the production costs were much higher than the Allies'. And the constant drive to come up with something better and more powerful kept design works cranking out concepts whose construction and testing consumed valuable manpower that could have more profitably been employed elsewhere.
You still want to have a laptop cooler if you've got a machine that runs hot; I have a dual-core Athlon 64 laptop that I've used on my TableMate II, which has acquired a touch of curve to the tray surface from a couple sessions without the cooler underneath. It hasn't affected the load-bearing capability, but it's noticeable when stacked next to my other ones.
Safety will increase by magnitudes when you are not restricted to driving in an almost 1-dimensional space, but rather have full access to the air.
I have to take exception to this; we have enough problems already with people engaging in major distractions -- putting on makeup, shaving, eating, drinking, carrying on a conversation -- as well as deliberately impairing their performance (i.e., alcohol). On the road, you need to be aware of the vehicles in a plane around you -- ahead, behind, to the right and left -- but in the air, the risks are multiplied. I don't care how long you drive, without being in extraordinary circumstances you don't have to worry about a car directly over you suddenly deciding to drop onto you, and you never have to worry about a car beneath you suddenly pulling up into your car's undercarriage. Hundreds of pilots died in WWII because they did not learn fast enough how to maintain awareness in three dimensions, shot down by enemy planes they never saw. And this was in an environment where they knew that the enemy pilots were out to get them, and that learning this awareness was one of the primary skills that would keep them alive; how much effort do you think the average driver is going to bother making, since a flying car is just a tool to get from here to there, and the other vehicles are just an annoyance when they get in your way?
Since the constitution enumerates the government's rights, then the fact that the constitution doesn't mention email means that the government has no right to fsck with email.
Just a nitpick. The government has no rights; it has authority delegated to it by the people within the limits of the specific powers enumerated in the Constitution.
Another thing to consider, with the reverse 911 programs now being set-up to call registered cell-phones, the blocked call may be one to you warning of your residence is in danger.
Indiscriminately blocking cellphones without notice may be less than responsible; however, if you go into a restaurant or theatre where there is a prominent sign stating "Cell Phone Use is Prohibited in this Establishment", with the proprietor either operating a jammer or having made a Faraday cage to isolate the interior, then it becomes your decision that renders your cellphone inoperative, just as if you'd switched your phone off. You don't have to enter the business; if you can't handle being out of touch for however long your inside, don't go in.
"Our position is that the proprietor of an enclosed space should have the right to control disturbances within that space. That could be a fight in a bar, that could be somebody yelling at his kid on a cell phone, or whatever."
"Your honor, my client was viciously raped after the attacker use the Jam-O-Matic 5000 to keep her from calling the police. We're asking $3.2 billion." I wonder to what extent a judge or jury would buy their rationalization.
"Your honor, my client was viciously raped after the attacker knocked her cell phone out of her hand and stepped on it to keep her from calling the police. We're asking $3.2 billion."
It's an aggravating circumstance to the rape, but it doesn't stand on its own.
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Since Windows 3.1, I've always taken the "minimum system requirement" as the specification for a system that will run the product... and nothing else. If I want to run any actual software, the system has to be more powerful.
Except that, in a nod to the fact that the sun is a fusion reactor, they will have changed the name to "Duke Thermonukem Forever" as a publicity stunt to distract people from the additional delay.
No, no -- they don't need to file anything. Audit them. If the RIAA/MPAA is accurate about the value of the 'loss' from each individual instance of unauthorized copying, then they are, by their own admission, guilty of having failed to declare the true value of their assets as capital gains. It could wipe out the National Debt if the IRS could collect on all the back taxes...
By playing to the perception of McDonald's being fixated on the bottom line, Kroc linked a more powerful meme into the rebuttal. Unfortunately, there is no comparably strong meme for the Julius Baer bank to use; they are stuck with the association that their actions have built.
As I read that, in other words, it says "You can use the specifications listed below in those specific versions. Should we choose to update those specifications and make our OOXML implementation conformant to and dependent upon any new features in those specifications, we reserve the right to not add them to the document and sue your ass off if you try to maintain compliance with OOXML in our full implementation."
I strongly recommend that everyone read Spider Robinson's short story "Melancholy Elephants"; it is a cautionary tale regarding the untrammeled expansion of copyright, as we have seen with the successful efforts of the House of Mouse to keep the earliest depictions of Mickey from falling into the public domain. Imagine what the entertainment industry would be like if the producers of West Side Story could be sued for copyright infringement by the heirs of William Shakespeare for creating a derivative work of his Romeo and Juliet...
Going to the URL with both IE and Firefox showed nothing but a black browser window and a button to download and install Microsoft Silverlight. "We're going to give you the opportunity to win something, but you have to let us install our latest proprietary extension." No, thanks.
...and that Canadians pay a tax on blank recording media that was imposed to compensate copyright holders for the presumed use of the media to make unauthorized copies. So it's possible that either Canada has been holding on to the revenue from that tax, or, more likely, the RIAA/MPAA feels that the tax does not "fully compensate" them for the multi-thousand-dollar 'loss' from the existence of a bootleg copy of a CD.
The existence of non-Islamic countries is, by definition, a threat to Islam; the terrorist organizations are merely working their way down the list of threats, starting with the ones that exhibit the most willingness and ability to coerce other countries into removing the Sharia from its natural place as the foundation for all law and government.
More importantly for shooting down the 'perpetual motion' crap is that from his description, the base configuration has the wheel of magnets inducing current in the coil placed at the rim, thereby dumping energy into the coil that is wasted. Then he connects the coil back into the system, essentially dumping the induced energy back into the motor to strengthen the field in the motor's coils. Yes, the motor will speed up; the system is recovering energy that was lost into the coil, which overall reduces the load on the motor, allowing its speed to increase until the load again matches the energy being put in. But the speedup is no different from the speedup you'd get if you simply disconnected the wheel of magnets entirely, taking its load out of the system, except that you'd get a larger increase in motor speed, because you have inductive losses in the coupling of the magnets and the coil, and resistive losses in the coil and the wires back to the motor. So all he's demonstrated is "If I take a load off a motor, its speed increases." Definitely an earth-shattering discovery, fully worthy of high-school freshmen.
Air-drop testing established that ostriches do not have an acceptable glide ratio, and their roll rate was dependent on the amount of yaw or pitch that was induced by their departure from the carrier aircraft, with no evidence of active control. The obstruction of the flight path by cumulogranite formations prevented full examination of the aerodynamic characteristics of the species. It was determined after the first series of tests that no useful data would be obtained from further testing, so the remaining test subjects were turned over to a parallel investigation into the specifics of the Colonel's 'secret herbs and spices' recipe.
You're right; however, "Crush every other producer of PC operating systems and any other software competing with our products and eliminate all restrictions on monopolistic practices, so that we can lock every PC user into buying the operating system and software products we want to develop and offer at prices we control, and force them to pay us again and again for the privilege of continuing to use our products, but only in the way we want to let them use our products" is not going to be viable in the real world.
You may have also noticed the report that Microsoft also reported that they're finally turning a profit on the Xbox line, driven mostly on the strength of Halo 3 for the Xbox 360...
Fewer flaws in Vista's first year than XP had in its? How many of Vista's flaws were the same flaws that had been found and patched in XP's first, or were those corrected during development of Vista, so that Vista's flaws were new and different ones, associated with the features of Vista that XP didn't have, or flaws that were common to both XP and Vista but had not been identified by the time Vista rolled out? If I complete a project, then fix the mistakes I made over the next year, when I go to do a similar project, I'm not going to make the same mistakes all over again, so the mistakes I make in the new project are likely to be more subtle and harder to find, or connected with things I'm doing in the new project I didn't do in the first one.
With new 'Truth in Product Warnings' legislation, green laser pointers will be required to carry a warning label, "Do Not Look Into Laser Beam With Remaining Eye".
It's one of my pet peeves, too. The usage in the illiteracism "ye olde" comes from the usage of the eth character 'ð' to spell 'the'; over time, the character was partially elided as a shortcut in writing the character, so that only the cross stroke and the upper end of the riser were drawn, looking like a superscripted 'y'. People who read period texts or signs would see what looked like 'yE' and took it to be a period usage, rather than an abbreviated form of 'the' (and pronounced the same way). Over time, the usage -- particularly in the phrase 'ye olde', has come to be impossible to eradicate.
Well, you have to figure that at some point you would reach the limit solution -- turning off Windows to get back to a sane system.
The article is, unfortunately, vague on how the feature is activated; powering the speaker is a drain on the battery, so having it rattle or slosh every time it moves as it sits in your pocket or your purse or on your belt is not desirable (not to mention the additional aggravation that would be caused by the constant rattling or sloshing of cell phones around you), so there would logically be a need to, say, press a button on the cellphone before you shook it. Having an audio response in this manner does, however, represent an increase in utility over the message counter or battery indicator on the display. With display icons, you need to open the phone and look at the screen, distracting your attention from other tasks; with an audible feedback indicator, you take out the phone, press a button, and shake it, using a secondary sense -- your hearing -- to gauge the value being returned by the device. This could also be extended to non-audible responses if the phone's firmware supported it, such as triggering the internal vibrator for a length of time proportional to the remaining battery charge, or for a number of pulses equal to the number of stored messages.
Actually, it was pulp timberland that drove the criminalization of marijuana. William Randolph Hearst had vast holdings in pulp timberland and paper mills; the invention of the hemp decorticator allowed hemp pulp to be separated from the fiber (used to make manila line) cheaply, without chemical processing. An acre planted in hemp would produce four times the paper pulp of an acre of pulp timber; if hemp became widely cultivated, this would cause Hearst to lose millions of dollars. He instituted his propaganda campaign to get marijuana outlawed, counting on the fact that few people knew that hemp and marijuana were the same plant, and enlisted other industrialists like DuPont, whose budding synthetic-fiber industry also faced stiff competition from hemp textiles.
The biggest reason is that Germany never managed to pull itself up out of the 'craftsman' style of industry, where production relied on highly-trained workers who saw production of an individual item through from start to finish, instead of the assembly-line style of industry, where each worker performs a single specific task on a succession of items, and only has to be trained to do that one task, rather than on the whole production process.
The result of this was that German equipment, where it was not being built by slave labor, was extremely well-made and often years ahead of the equivalent Allied equipment in design, but production could not readily be increased, and the production costs were much higher than the Allies'. And the constant drive to come up with something better and more powerful kept design works cranking out concepts whose construction and testing consumed valuable manpower that could have more profitably been employed elsewhere.
You still want to have a laptop cooler if you've got a machine that runs hot; I have a dual-core Athlon 64 laptop that I've used on my TableMate II, which has acquired a touch of curve to the tray surface from a couple sessions without the cooler underneath. It hasn't affected the load-bearing capability, but it's noticeable when stacked next to my other ones.
I have to take exception to this; we have enough problems already with people engaging in major distractions -- putting on makeup, shaving, eating, drinking, carrying on a conversation -- as well as deliberately impairing their performance (i.e., alcohol). On the road, you need to be aware of the vehicles in a plane around you -- ahead, behind, to the right and left -- but in the air, the risks are multiplied. I don't care how long you drive, without being in extraordinary circumstances you don't have to worry about a car directly over you suddenly deciding to drop onto you, and you never have to worry about a car beneath you suddenly pulling up into your car's undercarriage. Hundreds of pilots died in WWII because they did not learn fast enough how to maintain awareness in three dimensions, shot down by enemy planes they never saw. And this was in an environment where they knew that the enemy pilots were out to get them, and that learning this awareness was one of the primary skills that would keep them alive; how much effort do you think the average driver is going to bother making, since a flying car is just a tool to get from here to there, and the other vehicles are just an annoyance when they get in your way?
Just a nitpick. The government has no rights; it has authority delegated to it by the people within the limits of the specific powers enumerated in the Constitution.
Indiscriminately blocking cellphones without notice may be less than responsible; however, if you go into a restaurant or theatre where there is a prominent sign stating "Cell Phone Use is Prohibited in this Establishment", with the proprietor either operating a jammer or having made a Faraday cage to isolate the interior, then it becomes your decision that renders your cellphone inoperative, just as if you'd switched your phone off. You don't have to enter the business; if you can't handle being out of touch for however long your inside, don't go in.
"Your honor, my client was viciously raped after the attacker knocked her cell phone out of her hand and stepped on it to keep her from calling the police. We're asking $3.2 billion."
It's an aggravating circumstance to the rape, but it doesn't stand on its own.