Read the specs, please. It doesn't prefetch ALL links, only those explicitly set as such in the web page. Which, as far as I know, accounts for exactly zero web pages in existence today.
However, it only takes a minimal amount of underhandedness to start screwing people over. Banner ads are everywhere, and a large percentage of them are implemented by having a site drop in a block of code that references a CGI script on a server run by the company managing the distribution of banner ads. If the company running the banner distribution server decides that having their advertising clients' linked pages load faster is a valuable feature, all they would have to do is add the prefetch code to the output of their CGI script -- both Mozilla and IE will happily process a META tag in the body of an HTML document, even though by the specification, a META tag should occur only inside the HEAD tag block. So the user's network connection bandwidth would get usurped to prefetch the advertiser's web page, even if the user has no intention of clicking on the banner ad.
If you are not willing to give up a few freedoms, which you will never notice when they are gone, to save a life. GET THE F*CK OUT OF MY COUNTRY. This is worth fighting for.
If you want to give up your freedoms, then go live in a country where you don't have them; don't try to dictate what we should have to give up.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety. Nor, are they likely to end up with either."
-- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
You are free to consider any of the freedoms you enjoy as a citizen of this country as 'unessential', but do not presume to make that judgement for everyone else. Or maybe you just can't see the fundamental hypocrisy of your last two paragraphs -- being willing to defend our right to hold our own opinion, even if it is different from yours, and demanding that we move out of the country if we disagree with you.
So, where exactly in the second amendment does it say that "people could have armed militias?" Where does it say that the militia is there to "check" the government? The oh so short second amendment reads as follows.
A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. - Ammendment II of the Constitution
Notice the "well regulated" part? Also, notice that "Arms" is a proper noun? That means that WE can decide what regulations to place upon gun ownership and militias and WE can decide what the definition of "Arms" is. Do fully-automatic machine guns and rocket-launchers count as "Arms?" They most certainly are, but them being prohibited doesn't counter the 2nd Am. because "Arms" is defined by the individual States and by Congress itself.
Unfortunately for your premise, you are misinterpreting the term 'regulate' as 'controlled, restricted, or governed by law or rule'. The Random House College Dictionary (1980) gives four definitions for the word "regulate," which were all in use during the Colonial period (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 1989):
To control or direct by a rule, principle, method, etc.
To adjust to some standard or requirement as for amount, degree, etc.
To adjust so as to ensure accuracy of operation.
To put in good order.
The first definition, to control by law in this case, was already provided for in the Constitution. It would have been unnecessary to repeat the need for that kind of regulation. For reference, here is the passage from Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, granting the federal government the power to regulate the militia:
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
The third definition is also inappropriate, because regulation for accuracy or function is somethiing that is done to the arms, not the militia. Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Paper No. 29, described clearly what a well-regulated militia entailed:
The project of disciplining all the militia of the United States is as futile as it would be injurious if it were capable of being carried into execution. A tolerable expertness in military movements is a business that requires time and practice. It is not a day, nor a week nor even a month, that will suffice for the attainment of it. To oblige the great body of the yeomanry and of the other classes of the citizens to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people and a serious public inconvenience and loss.
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, (1989) defines regulated in 1690 to have meant "properly disciplined" when describing soldiers:
[obsolete sense]
b. Of troops: Properly disciplined. Obs. rare-1.
1690 Lond. Gaz. No. 2568/3 We hear likewise that the French are in a great Allarm in Dauphine and Bresse, not having at present 1500 Men of regulated Troops on that side.
The text itself also suggests the fourth definition ("to put in good order"). Considering the adjective "well" and the context of the militia clause, which is more likely to ensure the security of a free state, a militia governed by numerous laws (or just the right amount of laws [depending on the meaning of "well"] ) or a well-disciplined and trained militia?
A "good starting point" are words we would probably hear describe the DMCA at its inception. However, instead of moving back to a more reasoned approach, it continues toward even more draconian measures such as Fritz's most recent incantation of what Fair Use and infringement mean. Of the now infamous, "skipping commercials is a contract violation" speach.
It's the same 'negotiating' tactics you find in the g*n c*ntr*l arena -- you have one side pushing for more individual freedom and one side pushing for more control. The control side is arguing for 10, and the freedom side is arguing for 0, then the control side proposes a compromise at 5, which the freedom side accepts, figuring that they've preserved some of what they wanted at the cost of conceding some things to the control side. Then the control side turns around and says "You've conceded to 5; we want 10", and the freedom side is back looking at the original chain-to-the-wall restrictions the control side wanted, except that they've already given up half their negotiating room.
And in the time it takes for the freedom side to retrench and accuse the control side (accurately) of hypocrisy and negotiating under false colors, the control side has established the 'compromise' at 5 as the 'natural state of affairs', and has painted the freedom side as reactionary and anarchistic because they want to go back to their previous position of 0 ("We've already got 5, but it doesn't solve the problem; all we're asking is 7, but they want to go all the way to 0; we can't have that kind of lawlessness").
A compromise is a solution only when there is a meeting of minds and a commitment on both sides to honor the compromise; when one side immediately returns to their original position and looks at a compromise only as the other side having given up half their negotiating room, what you have is grounds for repudiating the original compromise -- but it's so much harder to get a law repealed than it is to get it enacted in the first place.
3: Pouring liquid nitrogen on your hand (the back, not your cupped hand)
In college, the TA running a physics lab on instrumentation had an amusing sense of humor. The day we did the thermocouple experiment (measuring the resistance of a thermocouple in water of various temperatures from freezing to boiling, and in liquid nitrogen), he showed us the 'proper' way to dispose of the liquid nitrogen (each of us having about four ounces in a styrofoam cup) -- you go out into the hall, and listen at other doors to determine which ones have lectures going on, then make a standard bowling delivery at the door, shooting the contents of the cup under the bottom of the door. The liquid nitrogen evaporates almost instantly upon hitting the floor, so all that happens is a cloud of fog suddenly billowing under the door.
The professors apparently were long familiar with these disposals, because we never heard one of them miss a beat on their lectures. However, if you could catch a Freshman Physics class, who'd never been exposed to the joke, the shrieks were amazing to hear.
Something my chem teather did was take a pringles can (or any other can about the same size and shape) and put a pin-hole in the top and bottom. Fill the can with 100% hydrogen. Light the top of the can. At this point my chem teacher acted all dissapointed and moved on to another demo. Meanwhile, the hydrogen was burning (though no one could see or hear it). Eventually enough of the hydrogen had burnt up (and enough oxygen had gotten in to the can) that the flame mad its way into the can. The result was the can shooting up into the ceiling, a small fireball, and a LOUD noise. Everyone was in shock for a second or two before they realized that the demo had, in fact, really gone as planned.
My high-school chemistry teacher had a variation on this that he used to show why gas leaks caused explosions. He would have all the desks moved to the edge of the classroom, and then brought out a 1-gallon paint can that had a hole punched in the center of the lid and another punched in the side at the bottom. A hose from the gas line was stuck into the hole on the side, and gas was fed into the can until it could be smelled at the hole in the lid. The gas was turned off, the holes were covered with two fingers, and the can was placed in the center of the cleared space. Unblocking the holes, we would hold a lit match to the hole in the top and back away. The lights were turned off, and we could see a small blue flame at the top hole, which would get smaller and smaller. About 1 second after it disappeared, there would be a dull *WHUMP*, and the lid of the can would fly up and bounce off the ceiling.
The gas burned at the top hole while air came in through the bottom hole until the mixture inside the can reached an explosive combination, which detonated. The fixture of the lid to the can being weaker than the can, the lid would blow off.
i always remember what my high school chemistry teacher told us. when she was in college, they showed anyone wanting to be a science teacher why you should always test out your experiments before you do them in front of a class. it was a sort of "science experiments gone wrong" kind of video.
I got to attend one of those 'oops' demonstrations in high school. Our chemistry teacher, Mr. Swift, was going to demonstrate the thermite reaction. So he set a ring stand up on the floor, with a crucible holder clamped to the ring stand, and a small crucible in the holder full of the thermite mixture (powdered iron oxide and aluminum), with a magnesium strip for a fuze. Under the crucible was a bucket to catch the crucible.
Mr. Swift lit the magnesium and turned out the classroom lights. We all watched as the magnesium burned down, and then watched the fountain of tiny glowing bits of molten iron. Then we heard a *crack* as the crucible broke. No problem, that's what the bucket is there for. So the glob of white-hot molten iron hits the bottom of the bucket... and burns through. Then burns through the base of the ring stand. And the linoleum flooring. And into the concrete foundation.
The next time Mr. Swift did that demonstration, there was six inches of sand in the bucket.
OTOH, I see no valid reason why consumers should lack the right to do whatever they want with an XBox. While they can license the *media*, can they actually say the purchaser doesn't own the hardware itself? Tricky.
Particularly in that, unlike a software package on CD, the unit isn't sealed in an envelope with a shrinkwrap license agreement on it. You pay your money, the dealer gives you an Xbox, and you take it home; the transaction is a sale, not a license, and you own the hardware -- you can do anything to it you want to, whether it's installing modified BIOS chips to run other software or using the unit as a boat anchor.
Now, the creator of a mod chip is in a much grayer area; they have to take steps to ensure that they don't use Microsoft's code when creating their chip, or they are in violation of copyright on the code.
How about My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Numerous Pizzas Quickly. Then we no longer have the scalability problem.
Or the one from Robert Heinlein's novel Have Spacesuit Will Travel, 'Mother Very Thoughtfully Made A Jelly Sandwich Under No Protest'. Append ', Quickly' and you've got it covered, as well as getting the asteroids in between Mars and Jupiter. It does refer to Earth as 'Terra', though, which may confuse people.
Re:Does anybody have more info?
on
3D LCD Display
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The parallax blocker is not switchable; in 2d mode the same image is sent to both fields.
Read closer:
But the main challenge was making it possible to switch between the ordinary 2-D mode and 3-D with the push of a button, while providing the same image resolution in the 2-D mode as in a standard display without 3-D capability.
The parallax blocker, when activated, makes half the pixels in the display visible to the left eye and half visible to the right eye (presumably in vertical stripes, from the available information). When the parallax blocker is turned off, both sets of pixels are visible to both eyes. If you have a display with a resolution of 1024x768 in 2D mode, then it would have a resolution of 512x768 in 3D mode.
Re:Sharp isn't the first to do it
on
3D LCD Display
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· Score: 1
The DTI process uses a special illumination mechanism behind the LCD array to control which pixels get seen by which eye; the Sharp process uses a second LCD array in front of the main LCD array to control visibility of the pixels by each eye. The results look to be similar, but the mechanism is different. The Sharp process is likely to be cheaper, because manufacturing of monochrome LCD panels is a mature technology.
The article about the Russian development is too vague to be able to extract a mechanism from.
Re:Does anybody have more info?
on
3D LCD Display
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm curious to see what principle this screen operates on, and what makes it different technologically from the previous 3d LCD screens we've already seen (I think it's the 2d/3d nature of the screen without loss of resolution, as the article says, but I'd like to know how they get this to work)
From reading the article, I suspect that it has something to do with either increasing the number of transparent electrodes on the front face of the display panel, or changing how they're energized in relationship to the electrodes on the rear face of the panel, to change the liquid crystal alignment angles so that the viewing cone for pixels gets shifted. This would result in a 50% loss of resolution in the horizontal axis, though. The article does make a point about how the display won't have a reduced resolution in 2D mode, so the 3D functionality has to be achieved by a mechanism that restricts pixels to being viewed by a specific eye.
The glass could kill, or at least damage me, if I hold on to it for too long?
Unfortunately for us all, if you're holding on to the glass, you're blocking the sunlight necessary for the reaction to work -- and while it may work well for the typical dust and grime particle, I'm sure you'll admit that you're _considerably_ thicker than a layer of dust.
I've bought lots of Macs over the past 20 years, and since '95 or so I've seen a pattern develop. Here's my theory: buy the most expensive brand-new system you can afford at the instant you're ready to buy.
This is similar to a rule that I ran across almost ten years ago, which was to either buy hardware at the bleeding edge of development to get the longest time-til-obsolescence, or buy one step back from the leading edge to maximize the tradeoff between obsolescence and stability. Either absolute fresh-out-of-R&D top-of-the-line or two development steps more mature. It's worked reasonably well for me.
If it wasn't for the requirement that the data be accessible to law enforcement, there wouldn't be a problem; WOM (Write-Only Memory) with capacities in the high exabyte range has been around for decades, and could be expanded to zettabyte and yottabyte ranges with very little research expenditure or manufacturing cost.
I'd advocate spending Pre-algebra and the first part of algebra the first year of junior high, and follow through in eighth grade with algebra/algebra2/trig and a good dose of AP Chemistry. Ninth grade, you get trig/pre-calc with AP Physics. Tenth grade, you get AP Bio with statistics. Eleventh grade, you do 2 sememsters of college calculus (AP calc is weak, for get it). Twelfth grade, you take shitloads of standardized tests, and optional linear algebra with multivariable calculus.
Well, I went through junior high and high school in Southern California; it's been a while, but let's see what I can remember about my math and science classes. Algebra, algebra II, trigonometry, geometry, calculus I and II (for the AP calc tests AB and BC respectively), electronics, chemistry, AP chemistry (for the AP chemistry test), biology, AP biology (for the AP biology test), physics, AP physics, and an extra semester of independent-study physics (I blew the EM part of the AP physics test the first time because we didn't have enough time to cover it properly, so I went back to study EM physics and did the AP physics test over -- Halliday & Resnick was a fun textbook). I went into college with 30 units of advanced placement credit. There are good high schools in California that give a damn about the students and try to teach them to learn, not just memorize, and there are teachers who make the effort to get their students to want to learn.
Re:WTF. It's 5/7/5, people.
on
Haiku vs Spam
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· Score: 1
Insulting posters You feel superior, but are less than the wind
But to argue on the one hand that Government should be required to use open source no matter what, while on the other hand arguing that the government should always use the best products is nuttiness as best, and idiocy at worst.
Particularly in the ugly transition period between the existing closed-source products and the open-source products that will be replacing them.
Requiring that only products with open data formats is a good idea; if the internal format for all stored data has to be disclosed, it will prevent the loss of data in the future from the inability to get old, proprietary software to work, and encourage the use of common file formats between different products, in the same way that OpenOffice reads MS Office documents. Agencies won't be locked into the "We bought X for our entire organization, but we need to upgrade, and if we don't buy X 2.0, we're not going to be able to read all our old records" straightjacket. But requiring open source for all new procurement turns the prejudice around the other way, and is just as bad as the current closed-source proprietary products.
In the federal government, in order to purchase a product from a specific vendor, rather than open it to the lowest-bidder competition, an agency has to produce a Sole Source Justification document, detailing why the product they want to buy is the only one that will meet their needs. Instead of requiring open source, require that any procurement of a closed-source product go through an approval process similar to the Sole Source Justification review; the agency that wants to purchase the closed-source product will have to justify their choice of that product.
Having seen what can be done to game the Sole Source procurement approval process, I have no doubt that agencies who really need a particular closed-source product will be able to write a Closed Source Justification document that will sweep through the approval process without a hitch. Most open-source products will already be in a position of advantage in procurement, because of the lower initial cost of the product compared to a closed-source product.
The package better say in 36-point bright red type "This product may only be used on equipment posessing an active connection to the Internet", then, or they're misrepresenting the product grossly.
And what happens when their server is inaccessible, either because the machine is down, or their network connection has failed for one reason or another? Is it an actionable denial of service if Sony, for whatever reason, fails to supply the validation end of the DRM verification process?
Since the US government accepted that it's legal to prosecute and convict the operators of a website hosted in state A under the pornography laws of state B, where someone viewed the pictures on their computer, then it seems to me that it's lost the right to object when the police in Italy enforce their laws on a website hosted in the US. If the law does not apply equally, then it's worthless.
If you go trolling the site for links that work, under the 'last 7 days weather report', the last date for which weather is listed is 3/1/96; it's a reasonable assumption that the site is defunct.
One does not expect one's guest to remove a tightly fitting lid first, nor to perform said operation without the stability and protection of a table.
Presumably, however, the guest will be sapient enough to realize the latter and decline to clamp the cup between their thighs -- presenting large areas of skin to be splashed by hot beverage -- before attempting to remove the lid, particularly when the pressure of their thighs against the cup will cause -- once the structural reinforcement provided by the lid is removed -- the cup to deform, forcibly ejecting the contents of the cup.
Slashdot Mirror
However, it only takes a minimal amount of underhandedness to start screwing people over. Banner ads are everywhere, and a large percentage of them are implemented by having a site drop in a block of code that references a CGI script on a server run by the company managing the distribution of banner ads. If the company running the banner distribution server decides that having their advertising clients' linked pages load faster is a valuable feature, all they would have to do is add the prefetch code to the output of their CGI script -- both Mozilla and IE will happily process a META tag in the body of an HTML document, even though by the specification, a META tag should occur only inside the HEAD tag block. So the user's network connection bandwidth would get usurped to prefetch the advertiser's web page, even if the user has no intention of clicking on the banner ad.
If you want to give up your freedoms, then go live in a country where you don't have them; don't try to dictate what we should have to give up.
You are free to consider any of the freedoms you enjoy as a citizen of this country as 'unessential', but do not presume to make that judgement for everyone else. Or maybe you just can't see the fundamental hypocrisy of your last two paragraphs -- being willing to defend our right to hold our own opinion, even if it is different from yours, and demanding that we move out of the country if we disagree with you.
Unfortunately for your premise, you are misinterpreting the term 'regulate' as 'controlled, restricted, or governed by law or rule'. The Random House College Dictionary (1980) gives four definitions for the word "regulate," which were all in use during the Colonial period (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 1989):
The first definition, to control by law in this case, was already provided for in the Constitution. It would have been unnecessary to repeat the need for that kind of regulation. For reference, here is the passage from Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, granting the federal government the power to regulate the militia:
The third definition is also inappropriate, because regulation for accuracy or function is somethiing that is done to the arms, not the militia.
Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Paper No. 29, described clearly what a well-regulated militia entailed:
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, (1989) defines regulated in 1690 to have meant "properly disciplined" when describing soldiers:
The text itself also suggests the fourth definition ("to put in good order"). Considering the adjective "well" and the context of the militia clause, which is more likely to ensure the security of a free state, a militia governed by numerous laws (or just the right amount of laws [depending on the meaning of "well"] ) or a well-disciplined and trained militia?
It's the same 'negotiating' tactics you find in the g*n c*ntr*l arena -- you have one side pushing for more individual freedom and one side pushing for more control. The control side is arguing for 10, and the freedom side is arguing for 0, then the control side proposes a compromise at 5, which the freedom side accepts, figuring that they've preserved some of what they wanted at the cost of conceding some things to the control side. Then the control side turns around and says "You've conceded to 5; we want 10", and the freedom side is back looking at the original chain-to-the-wall restrictions the control side wanted, except that they've already given up half their negotiating room.
And in the time it takes for the freedom side to retrench and accuse the control side (accurately) of hypocrisy and negotiating under false colors, the control side has established the 'compromise' at 5 as the 'natural state of affairs', and has painted the freedom side as reactionary and anarchistic because they want to go back to their previous position of 0 ("We've already got 5, but it doesn't solve the problem; all we're asking is 7, but they want to go all the way to 0; we can't have that kind of lawlessness").
A compromise is a solution only when there is a meeting of minds and a commitment on both sides to honor the compromise; when one side immediately returns to their original position and looks at a compromise only as the other side having given up half their negotiating room, what you have is grounds for repudiating the original compromise -- but it's so much harder to get a law repealed than it is to get it enacted in the first place.
As the methane burns at the top, air comes in through the hole at the bottom until an explosive mixture is reached inside the can.
In college, the TA running a physics lab on instrumentation had an amusing sense of humor. The day we did the thermocouple experiment (measuring the resistance of a thermocouple in water of various temperatures from freezing to boiling, and in liquid nitrogen), he showed us the 'proper' way to dispose of the liquid nitrogen (each of us having about four ounces in a styrofoam cup) -- you go out into the hall, and listen at other doors to determine which ones have lectures going on, then make a standard bowling delivery at the door, shooting the contents of the cup under the bottom of the door. The liquid nitrogen evaporates almost instantly upon hitting the floor, so all that happens is a cloud of fog suddenly billowing under the door.
The professors apparently were long familiar with these disposals, because we never heard one of them miss a beat on their lectures. However, if you could catch a Freshman Physics class, who'd never been exposed to the joke, the shrieks were amazing to hear.
My high-school chemistry teacher had a variation on this that he used to show why gas leaks caused explosions. He would have all the desks moved to the edge of the classroom, and then brought out a 1-gallon paint can that had a hole punched in the center of the lid and another punched in the side at the bottom. A hose from the gas line was stuck into the hole on the side, and gas was fed into the can until it could be smelled at the hole in the lid. The gas was turned off, the holes were covered with two fingers, and the can was placed in the center of the cleared space. Unblocking the holes, we would hold a lit match to the hole in the top and back away. The lights were turned off, and we could see a small blue flame at the top hole, which would get smaller and smaller. About 1 second after it disappeared, there would be a dull *WHUMP*, and the lid of the can would fly up and bounce off the ceiling.
The gas burned at the top hole while air came in through the bottom hole until the mixture inside the can reached an explosive combination, which detonated. The fixture of the lid to the can being weaker than the can, the lid would blow off.
I got to attend one of those 'oops' demonstrations in high school. Our chemistry teacher, Mr. Swift, was going to demonstrate the thermite reaction. So he set a ring stand up on the floor, with a crucible holder clamped to the ring stand, and a small crucible in the holder full of the thermite mixture (powdered iron oxide and aluminum), with a magnesium strip for a fuze. Under the crucible was a bucket to catch the crucible.
Mr. Swift lit the magnesium and turned out the classroom lights. We all watched as the magnesium burned down, and then watched the fountain of tiny glowing bits of molten iron. Then we heard a *crack* as the crucible broke. No problem, that's what the bucket is there for. So the glob of white-hot molten iron hits the bottom of the bucket... and burns through. Then burns through the base of the ring stand. And the linoleum flooring. And into the concrete foundation.
The next time Mr. Swift did that demonstration, there was six inches of sand in the bucket.
Particularly in that, unlike a software package on CD, the unit isn't sealed in an envelope with a shrinkwrap license agreement on it. You pay your money, the dealer gives you an Xbox, and you take it home; the transaction is a sale, not a license, and you own the hardware -- you can do anything to it you want to, whether it's installing modified BIOS chips to run other software or using the unit as a boat anchor.
Now, the creator of a mod chip is in a much grayer area; they have to take steps to ensure that they don't use Microsoft's code when creating their chip, or they are in violation of copyright on the code.
Or the one from Robert Heinlein's novel Have Spacesuit Will Travel, 'Mother Very Thoughtfully Made A Jelly Sandwich Under No Protest'. Append ', Quickly' and you've got it covered, as well as getting the asteroids in between Mars and Jupiter. It does refer to Earth as 'Terra', though, which may confuse people.
Read closer:
The parallax blocker, when activated, makes half the pixels in the display visible to the left eye and half visible to the right eye (presumably in vertical stripes, from the available information). When the parallax blocker is turned off, both sets of pixels are visible to both eyes. If you have a display with a resolution of 1024x768 in 2D mode, then it would have a resolution of 512x768 in 3D mode.
The DTI process uses a special illumination mechanism behind the LCD array to control which pixels get seen by which eye; the Sharp process uses a second LCD array in front of the main LCD array to control visibility of the pixels by each eye. The results look to be similar, but the mechanism is different. The Sharp process is likely to be cheaper, because manufacturing of monochrome LCD panels is a mature technology.
The article about the Russian development is too vague to be able to extract a mechanism from.
From reading the article, I suspect that it has something to do with either increasing the number of transparent electrodes on the front face of the display panel, or changing how they're energized in relationship to the electrodes on the rear face of the panel, to change the liquid crystal alignment angles so that the viewing cone for pixels gets shifted. This would result in a 50% loss of resolution in the horizontal axis, though. The article does make a point about how the display won't have a reduced resolution in 2D mode, so the 3D functionality has to be achieved by a mechanism that restricts pixels to being viewed by a specific eye.
Unfortunately for us all, if you're holding on to the glass, you're blocking the sunlight necessary for the reaction to work -- and while it may work well for the typical dust and grime particle, I'm sure you'll admit that you're _considerably_ thicker than a layer of dust.
This is similar to a rule that I ran across almost ten years ago, which was to either buy hardware at the bleeding edge of development to get the longest time-til-obsolescence, or buy one step back from the leading edge to maximize the tradeoff between obsolescence and stability. Either absolute fresh-out-of-R&D top-of-the-line or two development steps more mature. It's worked reasonably well for me.
If it wasn't for the requirement that the data be accessible to law enforcement, there wouldn't be a problem; WOM (Write-Only Memory) with capacities in the high exabyte range has been around for decades, and could be expanded to zettabyte and yottabyte ranges with very little research expenditure or manufacturing cost.
Well, I went through junior high and high school in Southern California; it's been a while, but let's see what I can remember about my math and science classes. Algebra, algebra II, trigonometry, geometry, calculus I and II (for the AP calc tests AB and BC respectively), electronics, chemistry, AP chemistry (for the AP chemistry test), biology, AP biology (for the AP biology test), physics, AP physics, and an extra semester of independent-study physics (I blew the EM part of the AP physics test the first time because we didn't have enough time to cover it properly, so I went back to study EM physics and did the AP physics test over -- Halliday & Resnick was a fun textbook). I went into college with 30 units of advanced placement credit. There are good high schools in California that give a damn about the students and try to teach them to learn, not just memorize, and there are teachers who make the effort to get their students to want to learn.
Insulting posters
You feel superior, but
are less than the wind
Spam fills my mailbox
Alas! If it were paper
We could recycle
If zealots do suck
How much less are they who live
Only to mock them?
Particularly in the ugly transition period between the existing closed-source products and the open-source products that will be replacing them.
Requiring that only products with open data formats is a good idea; if the internal format for all stored data has to be disclosed, it will prevent the loss of data in the future from the inability to get old, proprietary software to work, and encourage the use of common file formats between different products, in the same way that OpenOffice reads MS Office documents. Agencies won't be locked into the "We bought X for our entire organization, but we need to upgrade, and if we don't buy X 2.0, we're not going to be able to read all our old records" straightjacket. But requiring open source for all new procurement turns the prejudice around the other way, and is just as bad as the current closed-source proprietary products.
In the federal government, in order to purchase a product from a specific vendor, rather than open it to the lowest-bidder competition, an agency has to produce a Sole Source Justification document, detailing why the product they want to buy is the only one that will meet their needs. Instead of requiring open source, require that any procurement of a closed-source product go through an approval process similar to the Sole Source Justification review; the agency that wants to purchase the closed-source product will have to justify their choice of that product.
Having seen what can be done to game the Sole Source procurement approval process, I have no doubt that agencies who really need a particular closed-source product will be able to write a Closed Source Justification document that will sweep through the approval process without a hitch. Most open-source products will already be in a position of advantage in procurement, because of the lower initial cost of the product compared to a closed-source product.
The package better say in 36-point bright red type "This product may only be used on equipment posessing an active connection to the Internet", then, or they're misrepresenting the product grossly.
And what happens when their server is inaccessible, either because the machine is down, or their network connection has failed for one reason or another? Is it an actionable denial of service if Sony, for whatever reason, fails to supply the validation end of the DRM verification process?
Since the US government accepted that it's legal to prosecute and convict the operators of a website hosted in state A under the pornography laws of state B, where someone viewed the pictures on their computer, then it seems to me that it's lost the right to object when the police in Italy enforce their laws on a website hosted in the US. If the law does not apply equally, then it's worthless.
If you go trolling the site for links that work, under the 'last 7 days weather report', the last date for which weather is listed is 3/1/96; it's a reasonable assumption that the site is defunct.
That is why God created cup holders.