Kod*k hired me to do some work (support dual ported disks across two independant computers and maintain filesyatem consistency). Payment was set contractually, net 10 days. After they were 10 weeks in arrears (and owed the last billing in a few days for a total of 12 shortly), with almost 14 weeks unpaid I did what any sensible contractor would do after nearly daily getting nowhere with the management and accounting to get the funds authorized to be released and a check cut. I told them the end of the week would be my last day of work until paid, then when not paid I called in to work and said when a check was ready I'd show up. I asked that in light of the nature of the arrears I'd resume work when all of the unpaid work was paid in full. My boss tried a power game where all the appropriate checks where cut but he held back the last one having his secretary tell me I'd have to resume work to collect that last check. I said I'd resume work when all the outstanding work was paid for. Kod*k still owes me $3500 plus around 20 years interest. Rather than burn the bridges with all of Kodak since I did work for other divisions, I just refused contracts with that division or any other division that that manager worked for. In an interesting and twisted justification for keeping the funds when I delclined to return to work until they'd pay me, they sent me a letter saying that they were deducting the cost of training my replacement to rewrite a driver I had done for them (which is really funny since I took a stock Digital RSX-11M Plus driver and changed the drive designation letters to RO: so that the batch scripts could easily be read and have one know that was the Read Only port for the drive by convention). The really fun part was they said it was poorly written and lacked documentation! This after a full functional specification as well as a design document for all the parts of the system. Somewhat of a rarity back then.
So even contracts don't always keep things straight. Sometimes you can't afford to get too many folks at a longterm customer riled too much.
His claim of ownership of the domain is a bit weak. He's not the Macomb Sheriff. The sheriff's office could very well create a trademark and then sue for posession of the domain name.
Not likely. A friend of mine created a domain (I'll avoid slashdoting him) for hosting some pictures. A company in Indiana sued him. After seven years in federal court and 100,000s of thousands of dollars he has finally and decidedly won the right to keep his domain name. One deciding factor was the attempt by the company to trademark the name after the dispute was started.
Armor piercing rounds generally have steel cores. The main use of steel core ammunition in the US is for cheap surplus rounds sold and mainly used for target practice.The don't make good rounds for hunting (or assassination) as they tend to pass through the target without shedding much energy. Good rounds for hunting are soft-tipped or hollow core and expand and stay in the animal. That way they transmit the most energy and create a more lethal wound channel.
If you consider the size of a buck deer, moose, or elk it quickly becomes apparent that if you allow sportsmen to hunt these animals, then you must have appropriate ammunition available that will dispatch them with a high probability with one shot. If you look at the rounds used in the past to hunt elephants you'll see they are huge are in fact not very common, and the rifles that can fire them are quite expensive, and even more uncommon. And, if you disallow hunting, then you have to reintroduce natural predators for game animal population control; look at New Jersy's experiment with elimination of deer hunting. Famine in the deer population as it grew, increase in disease in the deer population and increase in related vectors that directly and adversly affect other animals and humans.
If you want to change the rights of gun ownership in the US have the courtesy to attack the problem head on. Make an attempt to change the 2d amendment. Legislation that violates the 2d Amendment is just an affront to the legal basis that supports all our laws. When you do, remember that over 50% of US housholds own guns, legally. Guns are _so_ easy to manufacture that a plant in NJ was set up by organized crime and operated for years creating blackmarket firearms. We dropped (in WWII) leaflets showing how with simple mechanics tools a reliable fully automatic weapon (the so called "grease guns") could be made my resistance fighters. Make sure you address all the potential avenues for criminal creation of firearms when you try to make a legal ban of them. And then consider what other rights you have to give up to allow enforcement of those provisions to assure crimminals don't have firearms. And consider those who legally use a firearm in self-defense and assure a way to protect all the citizens all the times. I see very large budget increases for the new police state you'll need to implement this.
Feel free to mode this down along with the parent. Now if only he'd have suggested RFIDs in bullets or handguns...
Newsflash: Walmart forces legislation to modify the so called Laws of Physics Starting today the Laws of Physics, specifically those which allow for our use of electromagnetism have been modified by Congress and signed into law by the President at the request of Walmart and other RFID using retailers so that Faraday cages will no longer be permitted and if constructed will fail to function. A special relativity exemption has been granted to political candidates and to charities.
Don't both bodies in a two body relationship actually orbit the combined center of gravity of the system of the two bodies? Extend this for "N" bodies and then the math gets wacked because the combined center of gravity moves...
Depends on the ice makeup. I had 3/4 of an inch of nice clear ice after the last freezing rain storm and no loss of signal. I have had a dusting (1/4 inch) of whitish mixed sleet and freezing rain and had total loss of signal (easily fixed by moving the dish off the near ground mounting spot the next spring). The loss was for only as long as it took for me to dust off the dish.
Compression artifacts are actually getting more common on DirecTv as they spend more of their total bandwidth on HDTV (and during the peak winter sports season, action takes more bandwidth obviously).
As the sats. increase the compression and space the I frames farther out, channel changes seem to take longer. However, if you flip to a sports channel or movie channel showing an action picture, then the I frames come more often. Switch to a cartoon and the I frames can be fairly far apart. Depends on content on DirecTv (and presumably Dish). Cable is more static in the definition of a channel and so should always be consistent. DirecTiVo boxes (and tivo boxes or other PVRs with tuners) may be doing housekeeping chores and may delay for that reason. And if you add a huge amount of disk capacity to your TiVo or DirecTiVo expect long delays in the "Now Playing" menu (entering, ocassionaly while in). There may be a hack for this shortly.
I was really hoping the merger between Dish and Direct Tv would go through and then they could resolve the incompatible equipment issue by moving to MPEG4 (one can hope) and in the process gaining lots of bandwidth and reducing their sat ownership costs. W/o the merger there is no economic drive to replace the equipment in the field. DTV is almost MPEG2 based and Dish is MPEG2 based. Going to MPEG4 would allow all the current programming for both systems to sit at one "slot". The transponders most liekly don't really care about the format anyway. All the rest of their sat. assets could then be rented while they developed programming to fill them, or they could go HDTV on all the channels (with really good scan converters at their headends. Then downsample for the non-HDTV output of the boxes. The technology refresh would also allow them to eliminate the current holes in security that exist in order to support the generation one equipment. Depending on their budget (money spent fighting piracy, sat rental vs. ownership), maybe they should anyway.
Consider asking if you can mount the antenna to their roof. Suprisingly some allow you to. Let them know, that if they like, you can leave the dish installed for the next tenent so your apartment will be more easily rented. When you move, DirecTv lets you leave the dish (they'll be selling the new occupants service is the presumption) and provide a new install at your new address. Dish may do the same. Consider seeing if your complex will drop cable in favor of Dish or DirecTv. Both do deals with aprtment complexes. It provides "product differentiation" for your complex, and additional revenue for them.
I had horrible experience with cable back when DirecTV was starting up. I had the cable de-installed and the service man said "Well there are two choices for cable here, OURS or YOURS." I took the DirecTV boxes out of my car at that point and said "I'll take mine."
I wouldn't ever go back to cable. I now have multiple DirecTiVos. The integrated receiver/TiVo is better in that it has two tuners so watch one, record two more at the same time is possible. Unlike the standalone, however, you can't record local off-the-air, or video in. It is generally cheaper than standalones as well, and the subscription may be moot depending on what channel package you order.
TiVo is very hacker friendly (network options and upgrade disk capacity cheap and easy, and web access, etc.). DirecTv enables all the DirecTiVos from one master subscription. I originally choose lifetime, they've since made TiVo service free with most of the "packaged" services.
Now as to weather. We get some severe weather in the Puget Sound convergence zone. I get maybe 2-3 minutes of bad (LOS) rain fade a month for the six rainest months. The signal on the spot-beam (local channels) has never disapperaed. I get occasional macro-block errors (looks like bad pixelation on part of the image) another 4-5 minutes a month. I could correct all these problems by going to a 1 meter dish now that the Channel Master "Gain Master" antenna is around. I didn't want to go bigger earlier because previous 1 meter dishes mounted a single LNB assembly (still dual channel, just points at one sat.). The Gain Master supports all the satellites. It should eliminate all the rain fade issues. I should also point out we are in a non-optimal position as a ridge with trees and houses blocks a portion of the sky where the sat. is. Cable is just not truthful. I have less outages now than anytime I've ever had cable and I am in a very poor site as far as the satellites are concerned.
The last point is that regardless of cable or sat. you will lose signal twice a year for a few minutes a day for 1-3 days as the sun is directly behind the sat you are pointed at. For cable this is spread over a wider range as they point at multiple sats. DirecTv hosts the majority of their programming on a single "slot" at 101.5 degrees. However HDTV (and some other local and foriegn language programming) has program content at 110 degrees and NASA Select (and some foriegn language content) sits at 119 degrees. So to get NASA you'll need multiple LNB assemblies, but it is still one dish (although if you wanted the maximum signal strength with reasonable install and cost, you could point a 1 meter dish at each sat. If you are in a real fring area, like Alaska, there are 2 meter, 3 meter and larger dishes, or you can fixed mounth a C band bigger dish and mount the LNB to it. Hope this helps.
And just to underline the point: Names are mangled the same way between GCC and XLC so one linker knows what the string of trashcharacters means (the mangled name of C++ functions to account for overloading).
I've been violating this patent for over ten years.
Hmmm... wait for it...
Since over 6 years before the FILED the despicable application.
And since NSI doesn't assign the email addresses they can't hope to get them except on the claims of {machine named after you}.domain.tld.. Wait. They don't assign the {machine named after you} portion...
It will IMHO be just days before this is dropped unless the federal circuit that gets it is totally clueless. This is _the_ standard way of naming things. The only possible violation, and that is very slight, is if the claim 2 linking the convention to a profession is brought into play, but since the tld.MD (I think that was the first country to sellout) already did this before the filing date. Well. OHMYGAWD they don't have a leg to stand on.
The scientists just haven't had enough time to oversee the photoshopped photos of the set. Just ask the original Capricorn 1 crew, the management can slip up in a number of ways. The next set should have the appropriate difussers over the stage lights. The next "lander" should be 100% CGI if the Capricorn group can pull it all together.
Which brings up the problem of intellectual property. I know this forum is all for open source, but when you pay a developer to create intellectual property you expect that your companies code will not be resold without some return on your investment in those programmer man hours. Or that you can strictly control the distribution of special algorithms, techniques, etc. that are proprietary to your company. Sure if you are a major player globally they might not compromise your code, but small companies seem to be fair game. Hence if they wrote one "Outlook" replacement the next one could be pretty cheap at the expense of reuse of the code the first company bought. Watch your contracts in the area of intellectual property and penalties for violations.
It's much more likely that your support representative was arrogant because these jobs go to the top-notch -- people who are used to being at the top of their classes all the time.
They are really in trouble if the nations top-notch talent is doing tech support. This does not bode well for the staff doing their high-risk programming (guided missiles, space operations, etc.)
So most likely they are among the better educated and think they are better than they actually are, much like some number of support specialists I've run into in the US, from Sprint PCS Vision specialists (over 100 hours logged to solve one problem, solved by one smart tech on the last call in under 10 minutes by resetting the password on my PCS mail account machine access, which was somehow out of step with my normal web access, wonders of seperate databases) to the good folks at Microsoft tech support where the few I knew worked at one of the MS contractors for support and while knowledgeable had holes in that knowledge that were vast.
The short of it is I think the support job gathers that style of personality for some fraction of its staff. Folks who think they should be working at5 a more advanced position, but lack the skills.
Not all atomic clocks are based on the same standard oscillations (atomic weight of the studied material is different, orbital diameters, energies involved in the oscillations, etc.) so they would generate family descrepencies. And there are standards with short term stability that would not be affected the same way and would show unlikely errors enmasse. And, if it is just messing with the scale/rate of the passage of time in some other grander way, then it would be a NOP since it would affect all items within our frame of reference equally. Not to mention the gravity wave detectors should spot the gravity waves in question.
Well, I know it was meant to be funny, but electric cars do pollute. The contribute all the normal stuff one expects, they just pollute (well, the vast majority of their pollution) by proxy. Power generation isn't pollution free (well, hydro power is close, but it has its own environmental problems), and when it comes time to swap out all thos batteries in a pure electric or recycle that fuel cell in a co-gen car, there plenty-o pullution to bill that consumers environmental karma account.
Personally I like the quick charge by swapping fluids batteries approach. At least one of those systems all the chemicals of the battery were in solution, and you'd exchange your "discharged" fluids for "charged" ones. Of course our lowest environmental cost power generation is the one with the blackest reputation, and that would be nuke plants. By far and away more radiation is released into the environment through the use of coal for power plant fuel, and more people die processing it per KWH generated. I'd really like to see commercial pebble bed nuke plant design that was standardized or even a CANDU reactor that does not require highly enriched fuel and also fails safe by design. Lots of options so we don't kill off endagered spiecies of birds with wind power gen. stop spawning fish/kill off whole river ecologies with hydro-dams, or create greenhouse gases, acid rain, etc. from coal (or mainly greenhouse gases from gas) generator plants. And solar, unless it is point of use, covers lots of wilderness or desert ecological systems and alters them.
And besides, BE-OTCH I am one of those Mustang GT drivers who can get out of the way of folks who run lights where current (get the pun;-) electrics will become some varient of techno-streetpizza art. And in the case of gas burning cars, at least in an accident I won't leek substantial amounts of really nasty hazardous waste ('cept that fairly easy to clean up average half tank-o-gasoline, which may just burn away).
Of yes, just kill the engine on that limo... Or kill all the engines of all the nearby cars in a major city like Paris, London, NYC, LA, or Rome (well who'd notice in Rome;).
Of course one could use the existing physical format, the bulk of the "layout" portion of the spec for the current DVDs and expand the encoding formats to include the HDTV ones plus 1080p, and change the encoder to optionally be MPEG4. You could easily produce a DVD with a non-HD side where you pick widescreen or standard format, and the HD side were the smarts of the recorder downsample or scale up to the screens resolution. Or you could downsample to the current widescreen and have a two sided three layer disk. The new media format is really just a play for creation of a cash cow from royalties.
If the disk size is consistent players could be developed to a dual standard. Either two heads/lasers or if close enough a common head and software. Dual headed optical drives are not new technology, so no big deal.
Micosoft's official position as of a few years ago was to insist that when you refered to the OS it was always Microsoft Windows and never just Windows. Vendors of software whose manuals misused the term and only used Windows were chastised by MS with a note from marketing or legal IIRC. They also preferred the usage Microsoft Windows operating system or Microsoft Windows. This may be useful in civil cases at least in the US if MS pushes Lindows to court for infringment in the US jurisdiction.
Slashdot Mirror
Kod*k hired me to do some work (support dual ported disks across two independant computers and maintain filesyatem consistency). Payment was set contractually, net 10 days. After they were 10 weeks in arrears (and owed the last billing in a few days for a total of 12 shortly), with almost 14 weeks unpaid I did what any sensible contractor would do after nearly daily getting nowhere with the management and accounting to get the funds authorized to be released and a check cut. I told them the end of the week would be my last day of work until paid, then when not paid I called in to work and said when a check was ready I'd show up. I asked that in light of the nature of the arrears I'd resume work when all of the unpaid work was paid in full. My boss tried a power game where all the appropriate checks where cut but he held back the last one having his secretary tell me I'd have to resume work to collect that last check. I said I'd resume work when all the outstanding work was paid for. Kod*k still owes me $3500 plus around 20 years interest. Rather than burn the bridges with all of Kodak since I did work for other divisions, I just refused contracts with that division or any other division that that manager worked for. In an interesting and twisted justification for keeping the funds when I delclined to return to work until they'd pay me, they sent me a letter saying that they were deducting the cost of training my replacement to rewrite a driver I had done for them (which is really funny since I took a stock Digital RSX-11M Plus driver and changed the drive designation letters to RO: so that the batch scripts could easily be read and have one know that was the Read Only port for the drive by convention). The really fun part was they said it was poorly written and lacked documentation! This after a full functional specification as well as a design document for all the parts of the system. Somewhat of a rarity back then.
So even contracts don't always keep things straight. Sometimes you can't afford to get too many folks at a longterm customer riled too much.
His claim of ownership of the domain is a bit weak. He's not the Macomb Sheriff. The sheriff's office could very well create a trademark and then sue for posession of the domain name.
Not likely. A friend of mine created a domain (I'll avoid slashdoting him) for hosting some pictures. A company in Indiana sued him. After seven years in federal court and 100,000s of thousands of dollars he has finally and decidedly won the right to keep his domain name. One deciding factor was the attempt by the company to trademark the name after the dispute was started.
That was the approximate weight of the first Apple Macintosh portable. Or more to the point "luggable".
You can find humor everywhere, but it is particularly special when you find it in the technology "wheel of reincarnation".
Armor piercing rounds generally have steel cores. The main use of steel core ammunition in the US is for cheap surplus rounds sold and mainly used for target practice.The don't make good rounds for hunting (or assassination) as they tend to pass through the target without shedding much energy. Good rounds for hunting are soft-tipped or hollow core and expand and stay in the animal. That way they transmit the most energy and create a more lethal wound channel.
...
If you consider the size of a buck deer, moose, or elk it quickly becomes apparent that if you allow sportsmen to hunt these animals, then you must have appropriate ammunition available that will dispatch them with a high probability with one shot. If you look at the rounds used in the past to hunt elephants you'll see they are huge are in fact not very common, and the rifles that can fire them are quite expensive, and even more uncommon. And, if you disallow hunting, then you have to reintroduce natural predators for game animal population control; look at New Jersy's experiment with elimination of deer hunting. Famine in the deer population as it grew, increase in disease in the deer population and increase in related vectors that directly and adversly affect other animals and humans.
If you want to change the rights of gun ownership in the US have the courtesy to attack the problem head on. Make an attempt to change the 2d amendment. Legislation that violates the 2d Amendment is just an affront to the legal basis that supports all our laws. When you do, remember that over 50% of US housholds own guns, legally. Guns are _so_ easy to manufacture that a plant in NJ was set up by organized crime and operated for years creating blackmarket firearms. We dropped (in WWII) leaflets showing how with simple mechanics tools a reliable fully automatic weapon (the so called "grease guns") could be made my resistance fighters. Make sure you address all the potential avenues for criminal creation of firearms when you try to make a legal ban of them. And then consider what other rights you have to give up to allow enforcement of those provisions to assure crimminals don't have firearms. And consider those who legally use a firearm in self-defense and assure a way to protect all the citizens all the times. I see very large budget increases for the new police state you'll need to implement this.
Feel free to mode this down along with the parent. Now if only he'd have suggested RFIDs in bullets or handguns
Newsflash: Walmart forces legislation to modify the so called Laws of Physics
Starting today the Laws of Physics, specifically those which allow for our use of electromagnetism have been modified by Congress and signed into law by the President at the request of Walmart and other RFID using retailers so that Faraday cages will no longer be permitted and if constructed will fail to function. A special relativity exemption has been granted to political candidates and to charities.
Don't both bodies in a two body relationship actually orbit the combined center of gravity of the system of the two bodies? Extend this for "N" bodies and then the math gets wacked because the combined center of gravity moves...
Depends on the ice makeup. I had 3/4 of an inch of nice clear ice after the last freezing rain storm and no loss of signal. I have had a dusting (1/4 inch) of whitish mixed sleet and freezing rain and had total loss of signal (easily fixed by moving the dish off the near ground mounting spot the next spring). The loss was for only as long as it took for me to dust off the dish.
Compression artifacts are actually getting more common on DirecTv as they spend more of their total bandwidth on HDTV (and during the peak winter sports season, action takes more bandwidth obviously).
As the sats. increase the compression and space the I frames farther out, channel changes seem to take longer. However, if you flip to a sports channel or movie channel showing an action picture, then the I frames come more often. Switch to a cartoon and the I frames can be fairly far apart. Depends on content on DirecTv (and presumably Dish). Cable is more static in the definition of a channel and so should always be consistent. DirecTiVo boxes (and tivo boxes or other PVRs with tuners) may be doing housekeeping chores and may delay for that reason. And if you add a huge amount of disk capacity to your TiVo or DirecTiVo expect long delays in the "Now Playing" menu (entering, ocassionaly while in). There may be a hack for this shortly.
I was really hoping the merger between Dish and Direct Tv would go through and then they could resolve the incompatible equipment issue by moving to MPEG4 (one can hope) and in the process gaining lots of bandwidth and reducing their sat ownership costs. W/o the merger there is no economic drive to replace the equipment in the field. DTV is almost MPEG2 based and Dish is MPEG2 based. Going to MPEG4 would allow all the current programming for both systems to sit at one "slot". The transponders most liekly don't really care about the format anyway. All the rest of their sat. assets could then be rented while they developed programming to fill them, or they could go HDTV on all the channels (with really good scan converters at their headends. Then downsample for the non-HDTV output of the boxes. The technology refresh would also allow them to eliminate the current holes in security that exist in order to support the generation one equipment. Depending on their budget (money spent fighting piracy, sat rental vs. ownership), maybe they should anyway.
Consider asking if you can mount the antenna to their roof. Suprisingly some allow you to. Let them know, that if they like, you can leave the dish installed for the next tenent so your apartment will be more easily rented. When you move, DirecTv lets you leave the dish (they'll be selling the new occupants service is the presumption) and provide a new install at your new address. Dish may do the same. Consider seeing if your complex will drop cable in favor of Dish or DirecTv. Both do deals with aprtment complexes. It provides "product differentiation" for your complex, and additional revenue for them.
I had horrible experience with cable back when DirecTV was starting up. I had the cable de-installed and the service man said "Well there are two choices for cable here, OURS or YOURS." I took the DirecTV boxes out of my car at that point and said "I'll take mine."
I wouldn't ever go back to cable. I now have multiple DirecTiVos. The integrated receiver/TiVo is better in that it has two tuners so watch one, record two more at the same time is possible. Unlike the standalone, however, you can't record local off-the-air, or video in. It is generally cheaper than standalones as well, and the subscription may be moot depending on what channel package you order.
TiVo is very hacker friendly (network options and upgrade disk capacity cheap and easy, and web access, etc.). DirecTv enables all the DirecTiVos from one master subscription. I originally choose lifetime, they've since made TiVo service free with most of the "packaged" services.
Now as to weather. We get some severe weather in the Puget Sound convergence zone. I get maybe 2-3 minutes of bad (LOS) rain fade a month for the six rainest months. The signal on the spot-beam (local channels) has never disapperaed. I get occasional macro-block errors (looks like bad pixelation on part of the image) another 4-5 minutes a month. I could correct all these problems by going to a 1 meter dish now that the Channel Master "Gain Master" antenna is around. I didn't want to go bigger earlier because previous 1 meter dishes mounted a single LNB assembly (still dual channel, just points at one sat.). The Gain Master supports all the satellites. It should eliminate all the rain fade issues. I should also point out we are in a non-optimal position as a ridge with trees and houses blocks a portion of the sky where the sat. is. Cable is just not truthful. I have less outages now than anytime I've ever had cable and I am in a very poor site as far as the satellites are concerned.
The last point is that regardless of cable or sat. you will lose signal twice a year for a few minutes a day for 1-3 days as the sun is directly behind the sat you are pointed at. For cable this is spread over a wider range as they point at multiple sats. DirecTv hosts the majority of their programming on a single "slot" at 101.5 degrees. However HDTV (and some other local and foriegn language programming) has program content at 110 degrees and NASA Select (and some foriegn language content) sits at 119 degrees. So to get NASA you'll need multiple LNB assemblies, but it is still one dish (although if you wanted the maximum signal strength with reasonable install and cost, you could point a 1 meter dish at each sat. If you are in a real fring area, like Alaska, there are 2 meter, 3 meter and larger dishes, or you can fixed mounth a C band bigger dish and mount the LNB to it. Hope this helps.
Don't forget VAT.
http://wap.slashdot.org/
And just to underline the point: Names are mangled the same way between GCC and XLC so one linker knows what the string of trashcharacters means (the mangled name of C++ functions to account for overloading).
I've been violating this patent for over ten years.
...
.. Wait. They don't assign the {machine named after you} portion...
.MD (I think that was the first country to sellout) already did this before the filing date. Well. OHMYGAWD they don't have a leg to stand on.
Hmmm... wait for it
Since over 6 years before the FILED the despicable application.
And since NSI doesn't assign the email addresses they can't hope to get them except on the claims of {machine named after you}.domain.tld
It will IMHO be just days before this is dropped unless the federal circuit that gets it is totally clueless. This is _the_ standard way of naming things. The only possible violation, and that is very slight, is if the claim 2 linking the convention to a profession is brought into play, but since the tld
Sheesh...
The scientists just haven't had enough time to oversee the photoshopped photos of the set. Just ask the original Capricorn 1 crew, the management can slip up in a number of ways. The next set should have the appropriate difussers over the stage lights. The next "lander" should be 100% CGI if the Capricorn group can pull it all together.
Which brings up the problem of intellectual property. I know this forum is all for open source, but when you pay a developer to create intellectual property you expect that your companies code will not be resold without some return on your investment in those programmer man hours. Or that you can strictly control the distribution of special algorithms, techniques, etc. that are proprietary to your company. Sure if you are a major player globally they might not compromise your code, but small companies seem to be fair game. Hence if they wrote one "Outlook" replacement the next one could be pretty cheap at the expense of reuse of the code the first company bought. Watch your contracts in the area of intellectual property and penalties for violations.
It's much more likely that your support representative was arrogant because these jobs go to the top-notch -- people who are used to being at the top of their classes all the time.
They are really in trouble if the nations top-notch talent is doing tech support. This does not bode well for the staff doing their high-risk programming (guided missiles, space operations, etc.)
So most likely they are among the better educated and think they are better than they actually are, much like some number of support specialists I've run into in the US, from Sprint PCS Vision specialists (over 100 hours logged to solve one problem, solved by one smart tech on the last call in under 10 minutes by resetting the password on my PCS mail account machine access, which was somehow out of step with my normal web access, wonders of seperate databases) to the good folks at Microsoft tech support where the few I knew worked at one of the MS contractors for support and while knowledgeable had holes in that knowledge that were vast.
The short of it is I think the support job gathers that style of personality for some fraction of its staff. Folks who think they should be working at5 a more advanced position, but lack the skills.
Not all atomic clocks are based on the same standard oscillations (atomic weight of the studied material is different, orbital diameters, energies involved in the oscillations, etc.) so they would generate family descrepencies. And there are standards with short term stability that would not be affected the same way and would show unlikely errors enmasse. And, if it is just messing with the scale/rate of the passage of time in some other grander way, then it would be a NOP since it would affect all items within our frame of reference equally. Not to mention the gravity wave detectors should spot the gravity waves in question.
It is just running in circles and won't stop to ask directions. So it is masculine.
Well, I know it was meant to be funny, but electric cars do pollute. The contribute all the normal stuff one expects, they just pollute (well, the vast majority of their pollution) by proxy. Power generation isn't pollution free (well, hydro power is close, but it has its own environmental problems), and when it comes time to swap out all thos batteries in a pure electric or recycle that fuel cell in a co-gen car, there plenty-o pullution to bill that consumers environmental karma account.
/kill off whole river ecologies with hydro-dams, or create greenhouse gases, acid rain, etc. from coal (or mainly greenhouse gases from gas) generator plants. And solar, unless it is point of use, covers lots of wilderness or desert ecological systems and alters them.
;-) electrics will become some varient of techno-streetpizza art. And in the case of gas burning cars, at least in an accident I won't leek substantial amounts of really nasty hazardous waste ('cept that fairly easy to clean up average half tank-o-gasoline, which may just burn away).
Personally I like the quick charge by swapping fluids batteries approach. At least one of those systems all the chemicals of the battery were in solution, and you'd exchange your "discharged" fluids for "charged" ones. Of course our lowest environmental cost power generation is the one with the blackest reputation, and that would be nuke plants. By far and away more radiation is released into the environment through the use of coal for power plant fuel, and more people die processing it per KWH generated. I'd really like to see commercial pebble bed nuke plant design that was standardized or even a CANDU reactor that does not require highly enriched fuel and also fails safe by design. Lots of options so we don't kill off endagered spiecies of birds with wind power gen. stop spawning fish
And besides, BE-OTCH I am one of those Mustang GT drivers who can get out of the way of folks who run lights where current (get the pun
Of yes, just kill the engine on that limo ... Or kill all the engines of all the nearby cars in a major city like Paris, London, NYC, LA, or Rome (well who'd notice in Rome ;).
Of course one could use the existing physical format, the bulk of the "layout" portion of the spec for the current DVDs and expand the encoding formats to include the HDTV ones plus 1080p, and change the encoder to optionally be MPEG4. You could easily produce a DVD with a non-HD side where you pick widescreen or standard format, and the HD side were the smarts of the recorder downsample or scale up to the screens resolution. Or you could downsample to the current widescreen and have a two sided three layer disk. The new media format is really just a play for creation of a cash cow from royalties.
If the disk size is consistent players could be developed to a dual standard. Either two heads/lasers or if close enough a common head and software. Dual headed optical drives are not new technology, so no big deal.
Micosoft's official position as of a few years ago was to insist that when you refered to the OS it was always Microsoft Windows and never just Windows. Vendors of software whose manuals misused the term and only used Windows were chastised by MS with a note from marketing or legal IIRC. They also preferred the usage Microsoft Windows operating system or Microsoft Windows. This may be useful in civil cases at least in the US if MS pushes Lindows to court for infringment in the US jurisdiction.
Of course this is in Finland and Sweden, not the US court system.
Obviously you need to contract this out to off-shore companies to implement. And run.
This is a joke for the humor impaired. Or is it?