I didn't buy an SUV, I bought a truck - a short-bed full-size four-door truck, with a real back seat and a bed tonneau cover. I paid about the same price for it as I would have for a sedan that I would have bought instead. (about == "within $3000")
This vehicle lets me carry 4 people (driver + 3) and scuba diving gear for 4 people, comfortably (5 if we're feeling friendly), without smelling stinky dive gear on a several-hour drive back from the dive site. I thought about an SUV, and having to breathe the same air as the cargo area was a deal killer for me.
I pay about the same in maintenance for the truck as I would for a sedan. I get about half the gas mileage that I'd have gotten with the sedan, so in a year gas costs me about $700 more than it would if I had the sedan. Renting an equivalent truck would run about $50/day (more?), and would likely be a 2-day rental most times. (I like long days diving.) So, 7 dive trips in a year would be breakeven, and any more than that and I lose money. In the past 12 months, I've done 13 little dive trips like this.
I made a good decision, financially.
Outside of scuba diving, would I need this vehicle? Nope, I'd have gotten the sedan. Probably. Because, I admit, I also like sitting high and being able to see what's happening in the traffic around me.
Perhaps I'm one of those "few people - who I mentioned - who actually uses the capabilities provided by the vehicle".
But then again, I also bought it simply because I like it, so maybe I'm not one of those few people.
Copyright law only says that you, as a creator of your work, have exclusive control on whom else you wish to allow to distribute that work.
Kinda, but not quite.
Copyright law governs "copy and distribute". It doesn't care too much about either by itself.
I can make as many copies of some something as I wish without the copyright holder's permission, so long as those copies don't go anywhere outside my immediate control. This is where you get legal backup copies of stuff.
I can distribute as many copies of something as I wish without the copyright holder's permission, so long as I purchase/acquire those copies legally. This is "right of first sale" and basically says after a copy is sold the first time, the copyright holder has no control of how it is sold or disposed of after that, so long as no additional copies are made from it.
Now, I cannot copy something and distribute those copies without the copyright holder's poermission. That is what copyright law controls. (Sounds like you knew that, just didn't really state it properly.)
NDA you signed very probably does not cover your own personal tax return
Your tax return in not public information. This is part of the reason that candidates for public office (and news reporters) make a big deal of the candidate disclosing their tax returns and related financial information. IRS agents are not allowed to publicly disclose information in a person's filing. You cannot file a FOIA request for someone's tax return. In this case, the government is presumed to be a confidential holder of information. Along the lines of "You cannot sign a legal contract giving someone the right to murder you" (it's invalid on its face) you also cannot sign a contract that obligates you to commit tax fraud, therefor tax-related records are exempt from NDAs and presumed confidential.
companies you worked for are pretty much obligated to verify the dates of your employment
Nope. If they want to, they can hire you just because you made a really good impression in an interview. Or jsut because you seemed a really happy guy skipping down the sidewalk towards the store. You might have a point about they *should* do a background/employment history check if they are giving you a position of some responsibility, but there is no legal requirement.
I got a call on my cell.
The caller-ID was shown as Private Number, and when I answered
You answer those? Wow.
Call me on my cell with CID-blocking, and I'll drop you straight to voicemail. If you don't want me to know who you are, you don't really want to talk to me. (CID is non-authoritative anyway, so this is easily gotten around, but it's also easy to hit *xx to disable CID-blocking for a single outgoing call. If the call isn't that important to you, it isn't that important to me.)
It's because reserves of coal/oil that were deemed uneconomic in the 70's can now be mined because of (a) improvements in technique and (b) people are willing to pay more for it.
Rough estimates today put this shortage to be in the late 2000's - early 2100's. Of course, what we'll be doing then is anyone's guess.
Coal and oil reserves are a fun game to play, but you have to understand the rules they play by.
First, they are based on current exploration. There's a reason oil and gas companies keep doing (or trying to do, where environmental issues prevent them) exploration to find new sources of coal, oil, and natural gas. And we're getting better at finding stuff. Oil/natural gas companies have some really nice computer models for seismic events and subsurface layers, where they can set off soundings (explosives) and record the transmission of seismic waves, telling them a lot about surrounding composition. Cool stuff.
Second, all estimates of longevity of reserves is based on a certain level of extraction technology. There may be xx billion barrels of oil in a field, but you can only get out some percentage of it with extraction technique A. Well, if you change your extraction technique, you can get more. That's why research continues in oil and gas extraction techniques.
Third, these estimates also have an economic variable to them. For $30/barrel it is economically feasable to extract xx barrels of oil from a certain field. Well, for $40/barrel, it suddenly becomes economically feasable to extract more oil from the same field, even for the same tech level. For $80/barrel... Supply, in this case, really does depend on price, not necessarily demand.
Now, given all this, the supply is still finite, and no one really knows when it will "run out" to the point that it no longer makes sense to get that last 4% left down there. But most people in the industry accept that it will run out, eventually. That's part of why the oil/gas companies are trying to become "energy companies" instead of "oil companies" because, when it does run out, they don't want to suddenly see their business die, just change into something new. Of course, they also want to milk the oil/gas business for all it is worth, which is where you get the great conspiracy theories about them hoarding new wonderufl energy technologies, and preventing car makers from building the 200mile/gallon engine.
From a certain point of view...
on
SCO's Plan Examined
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· Score: 4, Informative
So is SCO really alleging that there's tons and tons of lines of UNIX code?
SCO's position on this is... well, it seems to go something like this:
The original UNIX licenses most companies signed with AT&T stated that modifications to the UNIX codebase would be treated as derivatives of UNIX, and is owned by the UNIX copyright holder (now SCO). Therefore, anything any UNIX licensee installs in their UNIX instantly becomes a derivative of UNIX, and owned by SCO. Therefore, any code contributed by any UNIX licensee from their UNIX codebase to Linux is therefore SCO's property. Therefore, by including this code in Linux, Linux becomes a derivative of UNIX, and becomes owned by SCO.
Now, this is really... creative reasoning at just about every step of the way. But it does seem to explain SCO's statements about millions of lines of code that they own in Linux. Basically, they are claiming that any code that comes from a UNIX licensee is their intellectual property, because it is a derivative of the AT&T-licensed UNIX code.
So, you're saying, you want to be able to lie to your insurance company, and then the court, about how fast you were going?
That's exactly what I'm saying.
Or, more specifically, I am demanding the right to not be forced to incriminate myself in court. (Does the Fifth Amendment mean anything to you?) And to not have my property incriminate me also, when the government mandates data logging equipment on it.
Now, the other issue here is "my property"... when your insurance company pays your claim for a totalled vehicle, they just *bought* that vehicle from you, and that black box then becomes the property of the insurance company. And that becomes a completely different problem, because I just willingly sold something that can be used to incriminate me, and have no reasonable expectation of privacy there. Dammit.
Note also that (in Florida, at least) if you are given a speeding ticket by a police officer in "moving mode" (his vehicle is moving when he tags you with the radar gun) the speedometer of the police cruiser must have been calibrated within the 6 months before you were issued the ticket. If you contest the ticket in court, the officer should supply the calibration paperwork at the hearing. If this is not supplied, the judge should dismiss the ticket before you even say anything beyond "I'm here."
remember the slashdot excuse pre-crackdown: go after the offenders, not the technology. support going after the offenders.
Oh, I still support going after the offenders.
But I have problems with giving subpeona power to any major company or consortium without judicial oversight, which is what the DMCA did. And that's what the RIAA is using, explicitly-granted subpeona power with no judicial oversight of any kind.
This is the full force of the United States government (that's "guys with guns and the power to use them") backing up a company saying "give us anything we order you to" with no oversight by the government of the US. Congress *should* be examing this closely.
Of course, I also support the RIAA going after the people doing the file sharing for another reason. I tend to believe that these are, otherwise, the best customers of the various recording studios, and they are therefore pissing off their best customers. I will not object (much, except as noted above) to a business I don't like doing something that I think will end their business. >:)
25 4"x6" prints, an index print, and a cdr of the images?
Walmart runs prints from a digital camera (bring in your own cdr or flash card) for $0.29/print. That runs about $7 for 25. Index print and cd-r will be an extra $1-2.
That's $8 in product, for $11, or only $3 for the rental of a 2MP digital camera, which makes perfectly good 4"x6" prints. (Bearable, but not good, 8"x10"s.)
That's not bad at all, for people that primarily want prints, and not just digital images. Myself, I have a digital camera, and my preferred output is just the cd-r with image files. I get prints made, but far fewer than I keep image files on cd-r.
I'm curious how many rentals each camera has to make to pay for itself. $3/rental, camera probably costs... less than $100. Say about 30 rentals to pay for the camera and related labor expenses?
I can see how this would be a good thing at theme parks, where people are likely to rent and return them in the same day, possibly several times per day... They'd reach break-even in a month, and after that actually start making money.
The nice thing from the business point of view is that the continuing costs are lower. You just wipe the storage card and recharge the batteries, and you rent it again. Don't have to pay a couple bucks in film every time you rent the camera. The battery cost is higher than for a "disposable" film camera because the power draw is higher, but without the LCD, not that much higher.
Rechargable batteries are wonderful things. Like a lot of other/. readers, I have a pocketful of AA NiMH batteries. There are some things you should be aware of with rechargables before you jump into them, though.
(Mostly AA specific)
First, make sure your battery-powered device is rated to handle rechargable batteries. Alkaline AA batteries are nominally 1.5volts. "Fresh" batteries will probably test to 1.56volts in a digital multimeter. NiMH AA batteries are nominally 1.2volts, and will usually test as 1.26volts freshly-charged. If your device has a voltage meter (if it shows "battery power remaining" it does) then you need to be sure it can handle running with the different voltage. My old family-band radios (some motorola model, don't remember which) were made assuming alkalines at 1.5volts, and gave noticably less powered-on time with NiMH batteries than with Alkalines. The batteries still had juice in them, but were putting out a slightly lower voltage than the radio wanted, and the radio turned itself off.
Second, all rechargable batteries (except possibly lead-acid/gel-cells) have a normal charge cycle rating. This means, effectively, that they can be recahrged that many times, and then they stop holding a charge, the chemistry inside breaks down after that many charge cycles. By chemistry: NiCad = 500 charge cycles. NiMH = 400 charge cycles Lithium Ion = 350 charge cycles
After you recharge them that many times, expect them to become noticably less useful. This is part of why laptop batteries are only warranted for a year, incidentally... 350 charge cycles, 350 days of charge/discharge (about a year), and you have a battery that doesn't last nearly as long as when it was new. This is also why people that buy laptops like intelligent chargers, and don't recharge immediately upon reconnecting to a wall regardless of charge remaining. Recharge based on charge % remaining, and the battery lasts a lot longer, so wait until the battery gets below, say, 85% charge, and it will last 2-4 years instead of one. Intelligent chargers in laptops will check the charge remaining automatically, and only charge when it drops below a given threshold.
Third, you have different self-discharge rates with different batteries, aka, the shelf life. Alkalines are really good here, they have a quite long shelf life, usually measured in years. NiCads are less good than alkalines, and especially with the multi-cell NiCad packs where you are concerned with polarity reversal, you want to recharge your NiCads every few months, to keep the charge level above a certain minimum where one cell in a pack might get too low, reverse polarity, and basically kill your multi-cell battery pack. NiMH batteries self-discharge at about 1-2% per day. Yes, a "freshly-charged" battery that is left on a shelf for a month will be down by 25-50% charge. This is environment dependent, of course, varying with temp and humidity mostly. Lithium Ion batteries have about the best shelf-life of rechargables, about the same as NiCads, really. Still nowhere near alkalines, though. (Again, leave your laptop sitting on a shelf for 3 months, you'll probably have a dead battery. Be aware, and plan accordingly.)
With all this said, I still love rechargable batteries, and use them whereever they fit the device specs.
Oh, and fair warning, if you travel outside the US. Most of the cheap NiMH chargers you see in Walmart and everywhere else are US voltage only, they work with 110V 60Hz AC ONLY. If you are travelling anywhere outside the US and Canada, get an international charger, that can handle 50/60Hz and 110/120/220V. You'll be much happier, and not unpleasantly surprised when your charger gets very very warm and then suddenly stops charging. Bear in mind that the carribbean, while very near the US and supposedly US power specs, has crappy power regulation on wall plugs, and you'll want an international charger there too. Just another thing to be careful of.
This Linux based handheld with a built in qwerty keyboard with decent connectivity.
I know... expecting proper grammar from a site that can't handle spelling things properly is a bit much to ask... but I had to read that two before my pet peeve would let me continue.
(How many typos and grammar mistakes did I just put in a post complaining about typos and grammar? Well, I found two, but corrected them before hitting 'submit.')
"If source code is copied from protected Unix code," the SCO document adds, "there is no way for Linus Torvalds to identify that fact."
Yep, I'd say that's an accurate statement, really.
If you are trying to identify closed source/proprietary origins of submitted linux code, there is just one thing you need.
God-like omniscience.
Linus is good, but he isn't that good.
Oh, if you wanted a horrible paperwork audit trail, you could make people include a signed document stating "I am the copyright holder for submitted code" or something like that. But part of the draw of working on OSS is to get away from all the icky lawyers and legal documents.
In this one specific instance, SCO is correct. It doesn't really affect their case at all, but they are still correct about this.
Sony's Movies Division has more power than Sonys electronics division.
What these dumb companies cant understand is, that their electronics divisions wont exist if they end piracy.
Interesting you should use Sony as an example. In their last fiscal year they had some interesting results...
Profits of about $1billion (yes, that's a 'b') on sales of about $62billion, total. Which looks a lot more interesting when you break it down by division...
Sony Pictures showed operating income of $492million on sales of $6billion. Sony Music showed an operating loss of $73million on sales of $5billion. Sony Videogames showed an operating income of $942million on sales of $8billion. Sony Electronics showed an operating income of $345million on sales of $41billion.
Sony is doing everything they can to stop IP piracy to protect their movie and entertainment divisions, because that's the best way they have to make money. They have to work a *lot* harder in their electronics division (8 times the sales) to make 2/3 the operating income of the movie division. 5 times more sales in electronics than in videogames, and they made 1/3 the income.
The profit margins in consumer electronics suck. The profit margins in movies/entertainment are great. They are making a conscious rational decision about how best to protect their profits.
we must consider the other benefits free software provides. Remember, it's free as in speech, not free as in beer.
Look at what the federal government has been doing since Bush got elected in 2000. You seem to be operating under the incorrect assumption that the Bush administration cares about freedom of speech.
Actually, I don't think the Bush admin really cares either way about freedom of speech, but from his actions, I'd say Ashcroft finds this whole 1st/4st/5th amendment stuff really annoying, and would be happier without them.
Yes, I'm aware this discussion has been primarily centered on state and local government, not federal government, but you have to look at what priorities are for the people in charge. And once you start assuming corrupt politicians are running the game, you have to toss out the notion that they support freedom of speech and other nice things like that.
Besides, my idiotic chatting with friends is worth endagering the lives of 150 people around me, isn't it? I thought it was my responsibility as an American to be self-centered to a ridiculous degree...
Not that different from using cell phones while driving, just the cost of the accident (dollars and lives) increases.
Well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, and half a picture is prolly worth about 500...
Well, the best way I know to get bent is to go scuba diving for longer than your dive ocmputer or dive tables say you can, and ascend rapidly with no decompresison stops. 30 minutes at 130ft should do it, diving air.
As so many other's have commented, it's not a computer monitor. It's a TV that happens to do double-duty as a computer monitor.
Now, my problem with it is more with the TV capabilities. Specifically, with the native resolution, interestingly enough.
It's max resolution is 1280x768 as a computer monitor. This tells you what the native TV resolution is, also, and I'm disappointed.
It's native HDTV resolution is 720p. (At least, I assume from the specs it is, I'm too disappointed to bother checking the product specs on the manufacturer's website, and this review doesn't mention native hdtv resolution specifically.)
In order for it to display a 1080i signal, it has to downsample it to 720p. I'm not terribly happy with that. Though I might, if forced, admit that most hdtv displays use 720p as their native display resolution, and either downsample 1080i or upsample 480p to display in the native format of the tv.
I'd rather have seen 2048x1280 max for the computer, and give native 1080i hdtv. But I suspect that would more than double the price. Probably *way* more than double the price.
Look, even here on this "geek" board, loud are the arguments made for the current "analog" standard (paper).
That's because a lot of/. geeks are avid sci-fi readers, and they know what a good interface for a book is. Reference books are good candidates for ebooks (in open formats) because you want to search in a reference book. But for pleasure reading, the primary user requirements seem to be:
No electricity OR
Very long battery life (and very long battery shelf life)
easy portability
very durable - I can drop a paperback and just brush the dirt off... I drop an ebook reader, do I have to buy a new one to replace the cracked screen?
sharable - I can loan my paperbacks to friends, I want to be able to do the same with an ebook (note that: "loan" not "copy")
long-term accessible - I have paperbacks from 1968 (cover price is about 60cents, I think) and hardbacks from about 1890 (family bibles, mostly), and you know, my eyes have no problems reading them... show me an ebook that will still be accessible in 35 years
Better resolution - paperbacks are printed at better than 300dpi (I heard 2400dpi once, but I don't really believe it with the quality of paper of recent paperbacks I've bought), and are easy to read and recognize for eyes. EBook screens are mostly in the 100ppi range, which is noticably worse.
The main place ebooks beat paperbacks are in density, you can have many ebooks in a single reader, and in searchability and bookmarking. Many ebooks in a single reader doesn't help much if your battery is only good for 4 hours. Searchability doesn't help much either, for pleasure reading, but is very useful for reference books and school books. Bookmarking is good for starting up where you left off, but that is already a solved problem in paperbacks, it isn't a new capability.
The problem is that, at this point in development, ebooks are a *worse* way to read just about anything people buy for pleasure reading.
When the technology develops sufficiently to solve at least most, if not all, of the issues I noted above, I'll look more at ebooks... but until then, I'll stick with paperbacks, because they are *better*.
You can bet that the publishing industry is not racing to embrace any seachanges in distribution if even the bleeding edge slashdotters are uncertain of any value to be found in the change.
I'm not so sure about this. Book publishers like the idea of ebooks, because they can build in more limitations than are legal with current physical book publishing. EBooks kill "right of first sale" because they license the work, they don't sell it. EBooks remove the publisher's major gripe about "more than one person reads each copy of a book/magazine". Publishers like ebooks because they can severely limit readers' rights with them, and think they can do it legally, or at least with fewer court hassles.
It's a bad deal for readers/consumers, but hey, that's part of why book publishers like it. It changes the power relationship in the publisher's favor.
Hmm... on reading through this... this has *got* to be -1, Redundant. At least, I hope it is. Karma to burn...:)
That law *replaced* and *superseded* the existing copyright law, and fully criminalized things that were either legal before, or else were only civil matters before.
You'll want to look at sections 1201, 1202, and 1204. Section 1204 talks about criminal offenses, defined as violating 1201 and 1202 "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain".
Section 1201 and 1202 are circumvention of copy control mechanisms, and copyright management systems.
Section 1203 talks about civil penalties, incidentally.
Nothing in this makes violating copyright a criminal offense. It is still a civil offense to violate copyright. It is a criminal offense to circumvent a copy control mechanism willfully with intent to financially gain.
Subtle difference, and really meaningless in the current environment, but subtle differences matter in the law.
And I just dislike seeing people modded "insightful" when they are incorrect.
There never was a Federal speed limit. The Federal government never passed a speed limit law for interstates.
Well, not exactly. What they did, instead, was to tell states that they would only get matching federal highway money if the states enacted a speed limit that the feds wanted. Set your speed limit too high, and you lose many millions of dollars of federal highway funding dollars.
Several laws around where the federal government has no authority to pass a law, but still bribes/extorts a law from the states. Interesting way to do business, huh?
If 10 people break the law, they goto jail...
If a million people break the law, they change the law.
Hasn't worked for drug laws. Well, not yet.
I've heard the saying before, but it doesn't explicitly acknowledge the lag time that sometimes exists between jailing 1,000,000 people, and changing the law. Especially if the million people being jailed are "undersirables", aka minorities, like most drug convictions seem to apply to.
The saying also assumes a fair legal system, which I'm not sure has really ever existed in this country.
If the government paid IBM (or RedHat or whomever) half of what they currently spend on Microsoft software they could almost certainly get a real service contract for a huge pile of Free Software, and if they didn't like the service they got, they could take that money next year and hire someone else without having to switch software.
I've thought about this before.
The US Navy has a computer hardware/services/support contract called NMCI (Navy Marine Corp Intranet) with EDS. (EDS is bleeding money over this.)
They are rolling out a standard software load for between 300,000 and 400,000 computers, all with Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Office 2000, among other stuff. Do a web search, you can probably find the NMCI Gold Disk software contents.
Look at that again... 300,000 to 400,000 desktops with MS Windows 2k and Office 2k. Now, I'd hope they're getting a nice volume licensing deal. But even so, they are spending (in licensing costs along, not including support costs) probably in the range of... Let's see, $300 for Windows 2000 and $500 for Office 2000. Probably with a nice 70% volume discount? (Okay, the volume discount % is nothing but a guess, feel free to correct it.) 300,000 * ($300 + $500) * 0.3 = $72million. And that's probably "renewed" every 3 years. That's just in licensing costs, just for Microsoft software, just for the US Navy alone. Just for client software, not server software licensing too.
It would be nice to see that spent on OSS development instead, and use some free software tools. After all, the NMCI contract includes paying for software support anyway, as a separate cost from the licensing.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't buy an SUV, I bought a truck - a short-bed full-size four-door truck, with a real back seat and a bed tonneau cover. I paid about the same price for it as I would have for a sedan that I would have bought instead. (about == "within $3000")
This vehicle lets me carry 4 people (driver + 3) and scuba diving gear for 4 people, comfortably (5 if we're feeling friendly), without smelling stinky dive gear on a several-hour drive back from the dive site. I thought about an SUV, and having to breathe the same air as the cargo area was a deal killer for me.
I pay about the same in maintenance for the truck as I would for a sedan. I get about half the gas mileage that I'd have gotten with the sedan, so in a year gas costs me about $700 more than it would if I had the sedan. Renting an equivalent truck would run about $50/day (more?), and would likely be a 2-day rental most times. (I like long days diving.) So, 7 dive trips in a year would be breakeven, and any more than that and I lose money. In the past 12 months, I've done 13 little dive trips like this.
I made a good decision, financially.
Outside of scuba diving, would I need this vehicle? Nope, I'd have gotten the sedan. Probably. Because, I admit, I also like sitting high and being able to see what's happening in the traffic around me.
Perhaps I'm one of those "few people - who I mentioned - who actually uses the capabilities provided by the vehicle".
But then again, I also bought it simply because I like it, so maybe I'm not one of those few people.
Kinda, but not quite.
Copyright law governs "copy and distribute". It doesn't care too much about either by itself.
I can make as many copies of some something as I wish without the copyright holder's permission, so long as those copies don't go anywhere outside my immediate control. This is where you get legal backup copies of stuff.
I can distribute as many copies of something as I wish without the copyright holder's permission, so long as I purchase/acquire those copies legally. This is "right of first sale" and basically says after a copy is sold the first time, the copyright holder has no control of how it is sold or disposed of after that, so long as no additional copies are made from it.
Now, I cannot copy something and distribute those copies without the copyright holder's poermission. That is what copyright law controls. (Sounds like you knew that, just didn't really state it properly.)
Your tax return in not public information. This is part of the reason that candidates for public office (and news reporters) make a big deal of the candidate disclosing their tax returns and related financial information. IRS agents are not allowed to publicly disclose information in a person's filing. You cannot file a FOIA request for someone's tax return. In this case, the government is presumed to be a confidential holder of information. Along the lines of "You cannot sign a legal contract giving someone the right to murder you" (it's invalid on its face) you also cannot sign a contract that obligates you to commit tax fraud, therefor tax-related records are exempt from NDAs and presumed confidential.
Nope. If they want to, they can hire you just because you made a really good impression in an interview. Or jsut because you seemed a really happy guy skipping down the sidewalk towards the store. You might have a point about they *should* do a background/employment history check if they are giving you a position of some responsibility, but there is no legal requirement.
Very good advice.
You answer those? Wow.
Call me on my cell with CID-blocking, and I'll drop you straight to voicemail. If you don't want me to know who you are, you don't really want to talk to me. (CID is non-authoritative anyway, so this is easily gotten around, but it's also easy to hit *xx to disable CID-blocking for a single outgoing call. If the call isn't that important to you, it isn't that important to me.)
Coal and oil reserves are a fun game to play, but you have to understand the rules they play by.
First, they are based on current exploration. There's a reason oil and gas companies keep doing (or trying to do, where environmental issues prevent them) exploration to find new sources of coal, oil, and natural gas. And we're getting better at finding stuff. Oil/natural gas companies have some really nice computer models for seismic events and subsurface layers, where they can set off soundings (explosives) and record the transmission of seismic waves, telling them a lot about surrounding composition. Cool stuff.
Second, all estimates of longevity of reserves is based on a certain level of extraction technology. There may be xx billion barrels of oil in a field, but you can only get out some percentage of it with extraction technique A. Well, if you change your extraction technique, you can get more. That's why research continues in oil and gas extraction techniques.
Third, these estimates also have an economic variable to them. For $30/barrel it is economically feasable to extract xx barrels of oil from a certain field. Well, for $40/barrel, it suddenly becomes economically feasable to extract more oil from the same field, even for the same tech level. For $80/barrel... Supply, in this case, really does depend on price, not necessarily demand.
Now, given all this, the supply is still finite, and no one really knows when it will "run out" to the point that it no longer makes sense to get that last 4% left down there. But most people in the industry accept that it will run out, eventually. That's part of why the oil/gas companies are trying to become "energy companies" instead of "oil companies" because, when it does run out, they don't want to suddenly see their business die, just change into something new. Of course, they also want to milk the oil/gas business for all it is worth, which is where you get the great conspiracy theories about them hoarding new wonderufl energy technologies, and preventing car makers from building the 200mile/gallon engine.
SCO's position on this is... well, it seems to go something like this:
The original UNIX licenses most companies signed with AT&T stated that modifications to the UNIX codebase would be treated as derivatives of UNIX, and is owned by the UNIX copyright holder (now SCO).
Therefore, anything any UNIX licensee installs in their UNIX instantly becomes a derivative of UNIX, and owned by SCO.
Therefore, any code contributed by any UNIX licensee from their UNIX codebase to Linux is therefore SCO's property.
Therefore, by including this code in Linux, Linux becomes a derivative of UNIX, and becomes owned by SCO.
Now, this is really... creative reasoning at just about every step of the way. But it does seem to explain SCO's statements about millions of lines of code that they own in Linux. Basically, they are claiming that any code that comes from a UNIX licensee is their intellectual property, because it is a derivative of the AT&T-licensed UNIX code.
Or at least, I think that's the story this week.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
Or, more specifically, I am demanding the right to not be forced to incriminate myself in court. (Does the Fifth Amendment mean anything to you?) And to not have my property incriminate me also, when the government mandates data logging equipment on it.
Now, the other issue here is "my property"... when your insurance company pays your claim for a totalled vehicle, they just *bought* that vehicle from you, and that black box then becomes the property of the insurance company. And that becomes a completely different problem, because I just willingly sold something that can be used to incriminate me, and have no reasonable expectation of privacy there. Dammit.
Note also that (in Florida, at least) if you are given a speeding ticket by a police officer in "moving mode" (his vehicle is moving when he tags you with the radar gun) the speedometer of the police cruiser must have been calibrated within the 6 months before you were issued the ticket. If you contest the ticket in court, the officer should supply the calibration paperwork at the hearing. If this is not supplied, the judge should dismiss the ticket before you even say anything beyond "I'm here."
But I have problems with giving subpeona power to any major company or consortium without judicial oversight, which is what the DMCA did. And that's what the RIAA is using, explicitly-granted subpeona power with no judicial oversight of any kind.
This is the full force of the United States government (that's "guys with guns and the power to use them") backing up a company saying "give us anything we order you to" with no oversight by the government of the US. Congress *should* be examing this closely.
Of course, I also support the RIAA going after the people doing the file sharing for another reason. I tend to believe that these are, otherwise, the best customers of the various recording studios, and they are therefore pissing off their best customers. I will not object (much, except as noted above) to a business I don't like doing something that I think will end their business. >:)
25 4"x6" prints, an index print, and a cdr of the images?
Walmart runs prints from a digital camera (bring in your own cdr or flash card) for $0.29/print. That runs about $7 for 25. Index print and cd-r will be an extra $1-2.
That's $8 in product, for $11, or only $3 for the rental of a 2MP digital camera, which makes perfectly good 4"x6" prints. (Bearable, but not good, 8"x10"s.)
That's not bad at all, for people that primarily want prints, and not just digital images. Myself, I have a digital camera, and my preferred output is just the cd-r with image files. I get prints made, but far fewer than I keep image files on cd-r.
I'm curious how many rentals each camera has to make to pay for itself. $3/rental, camera probably costs... less than $100. Say about 30 rentals to pay for the camera and related labor expenses?
I can see how this would be a good thing at theme parks, where people are likely to rent and return them in the same day, possibly several times per day... They'd reach break-even in a month, and after that actually start making money.
The nice thing from the business point of view is that the continuing costs are lower. You just wipe the storage card and recharge the batteries, and you rent it again. Don't have to pay a couple bucks in film every time you rent the camera. The battery cost is higher than for a "disposable" film camera because the power draw is higher, but without the LCD, not that much higher.
Rechargable batteries are wonderful things. Like a lot of other /. readers, I have a pocketful of AA NiMH batteries. There are some things you should be aware of with rechargables before you jump into them, though.
(Mostly AA specific)
First, make sure your battery-powered device is rated to handle rechargable batteries. Alkaline AA batteries are nominally 1.5volts. "Fresh" batteries will probably test to 1.56volts in a digital multimeter. NiMH AA batteries are nominally 1.2volts, and will usually test as 1.26volts freshly-charged. If your device has a voltage meter (if it shows "battery power remaining" it does) then you need to be sure it can handle running with the different voltage. My old family-band radios (some motorola model, don't remember which) were made assuming alkalines at 1.5volts, and gave noticably less powered-on time with NiMH batteries than with Alkalines. The batteries still had juice in them, but were putting out a slightly lower voltage than the radio wanted, and the radio turned itself off.
Second, all rechargable batteries (except possibly lead-acid/gel-cells) have a normal charge cycle rating. This means, effectively, that they can be recahrged that many times, and then they stop holding a charge, the chemistry inside breaks down after that many charge cycles. By chemistry:
NiCad = 500 charge cycles.
NiMH = 400 charge cycles
Lithium Ion = 350 charge cycles
After you recharge them that many times, expect them to become noticably less useful. This is part of why laptop batteries are only warranted for a year, incidentally... 350 charge cycles, 350 days of charge/discharge (about a year), and you have a battery that doesn't last nearly as long as when it was new. This is also why people that buy laptops like intelligent chargers, and don't recharge immediately upon reconnecting to a wall regardless of charge remaining. Recharge based on charge % remaining, and the battery lasts a lot longer, so wait until the battery gets below, say, 85% charge, and it will last 2-4 years instead of one. Intelligent chargers in laptops will check the charge remaining automatically, and only charge when it drops below a given threshold.
Third, you have different self-discharge rates with different batteries, aka, the shelf life. Alkalines are really good here, they have a quite long shelf life, usually measured in years.
NiCads are less good than alkalines, and especially with the multi-cell NiCad packs where you are concerned with polarity reversal, you want to recharge your NiCads every few months, to keep the charge level above a certain minimum where one cell in a pack might get too low, reverse polarity, and basically kill your multi-cell battery pack.
NiMH batteries self-discharge at about 1-2% per day. Yes, a "freshly-charged" battery that is left on a shelf for a month will be down by 25-50% charge. This is environment dependent, of course, varying with temp and humidity mostly.
Lithium Ion batteries have about the best shelf-life of rechargables, about the same as NiCads, really. Still nowhere near alkalines, though. (Again, leave your laptop sitting on a shelf for 3 months, you'll probably have a dead battery. Be aware, and plan accordingly.)
With all this said, I still love rechargable batteries, and use them whereever they fit the device specs.
Oh, and fair warning, if you travel outside the US. Most of the cheap NiMH chargers you see in Walmart and everywhere else are US voltage only, they work with 110V 60Hz AC ONLY. If you are travelling anywhere outside the US and Canada, get an international charger, that can handle 50/60Hz and 110/120/220V. You'll be much happier, and not unpleasantly surprised when your charger gets very very warm and then suddenly stops charging. Bear in mind that the carribbean, while very near the US and supposedly US power specs, has crappy power regulation on wall plugs, and you'll want an international charger there too. Just another thing to be careful of.
I know... expecting proper grammar from a site that can't handle spelling things properly is a bit much to ask... but I had to read that two before my pet peeve would let me continue.
(How many typos and grammar mistakes did I just put in a post complaining about typos and grammar? Well, I found two, but corrected them before hitting 'submit.')
Yep, I'd say that's an accurate statement, really.
If you are trying to identify closed source/proprietary origins of submitted linux code, there is just one thing you need.
God-like omniscience.
Linus is good, but he isn't that good.
Oh, if you wanted a horrible paperwork audit trail, you could make people include a signed document stating "I am the copyright holder for submitted code" or something like that. But part of the draw of working on OSS is to get away from all the icky lawyers and legal documents.
In this one specific instance, SCO is correct. It doesn't really affect their case at all, but they are still correct about this.
Interesting you should use Sony as an example. In their last fiscal year they had some interesting results...
Profits of about $1billion (yes, that's a 'b') on sales of about $62billion, total. Which looks a lot more interesting when you break it down by division...
Sony Pictures showed operating income of $492million on sales of $6billion.
Sony Music showed an operating loss of $73million on sales of $5billion.
Sony Videogames showed an operating income of $942million on sales of $8billion.
Sony Electronics showed an operating income of $345million on sales of $41billion.
Sony is doing everything they can to stop IP piracy to protect their movie and entertainment divisions, because that's the best way they have to make money. They have to work a *lot* harder in their electronics division (8 times the sales) to make 2/3 the operating income of the movie division. 5 times more sales in electronics than in videogames, and they made 1/3 the income.
The profit margins in consumer electronics suck. The profit margins in movies/entertainment are great. They are making a conscious rational decision about how best to protect their profits.
Sales don't matter. Income and profits matter.
Look at what the federal government has been doing since Bush got elected in 2000. You seem to be operating under the incorrect assumption that the Bush administration cares about freedom of speech.
Actually, I don't think the Bush admin really cares either way about freedom of speech, but from his actions, I'd say Ashcroft finds this whole 1st/4st/5th amendment stuff really annoying, and would be happier without them.
Yes, I'm aware this discussion has been primarily centered on state and local government, not federal government, but you have to look at what priorities are for the people in charge. And once you start assuming corrupt politicians are running the game, you have to toss out the notion that they support freedom of speech and other nice things like that.
That's what backup systems are for, right?
Besides, my idiotic chatting with friends is worth endagering the lives of 150 people around me, isn't it? I thought it was my responsibility as an American to be self-centered to a ridiculous degree...
Not that different from using cell phones while driving, just the cost of the accident (dollars and lives) increases.
But in the article:
That was just too perfect.
Well, the best way I know to get bent is to go scuba diving for longer than your dive ocmputer or dive tables say you can, and ascend rapidly with no decompresison stops. 30 minutes at 130ft should do it, diving air.
But that took way less than 500 words.
As so many other's have commented, it's not a computer monitor. It's a TV that happens to do double-duty as a computer monitor.
Now, my problem with it is more with the TV capabilities. Specifically, with the native resolution, interestingly enough.
It's max resolution is 1280x768 as a computer monitor. This tells you what the native TV resolution is, also, and I'm disappointed.
It's native HDTV resolution is 720p. (At least, I assume from the specs it is, I'm too disappointed to bother checking the product specs on the manufacturer's website, and this review doesn't mention native hdtv resolution specifically.)
In order for it to display a 1080i signal, it has to downsample it to 720p. I'm not terribly happy with that. Though I might, if forced, admit that most hdtv displays use 720p as their native display resolution, and either downsample 1080i or upsample 480p to display in the native format of the tv.
I'd rather have seen 2048x1280 max for the computer, and give native 1080i hdtv. But I suspect that would more than double the price. Probably *way* more than double the price.
That's because a lot of
The main place ebooks beat paperbacks are in density, you can have many ebooks in a single reader, and in searchability and bookmarking. Many ebooks in a single reader doesn't help much if your battery is only good for 4 hours. Searchability doesn't help much either, for pleasure reading, but is very useful for reference books and school books. Bookmarking is good for starting up where you left off, but that is already a solved problem in paperbacks, it isn't a new capability.
The problem is that, at this point in development, ebooks are a *worse* way to read just about anything people buy for pleasure reading.
When the technology develops sufficiently to solve at least most, if not all, of the issues I noted above, I'll look more at ebooks... but until then, I'll stick with paperbacks, because they are *better*.
I'm not so sure about this. Book publishers like the idea of ebooks, because they can build in more limitations than are legal with current physical book publishing. EBooks kill "right of first sale" because they license the work, they don't sell it. EBooks remove the publisher's major gripe about "more than one person reads each copy of a book/magazine". Publishers like ebooks because they can severely limit readers' rights with them, and think they can do it legally, or at least with fewer court hassles.
It's a bad deal for readers/consumers, but hey, that's part of why book publishers like it. It changes the power relationship in the publisher's favor.
Hmm... on reading through this... this has *got* to be -1, Redundant. At least, I hope it is. Karma to burn...
Hmm... I dunno, I've benefitted from that myself a few times.
Course, after it was pointed out to me, I did tend to feel vaguely embarrassed.
*BZZT* Wrong answer.
Look at the EFF copy of the actual DMCA legislation.
You'll want to look at sections 1201, 1202, and 1204. Section 1204 talks about criminal offenses, defined as violating 1201 and 1202 "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain".
Section 1201 and 1202 are circumvention of copy control mechanisms, and copyright management systems.
Section 1203 talks about civil penalties, incidentally.
Nothing in this makes violating copyright a criminal offense. It is still a civil offense to violate copyright. It is a criminal offense to circumvent a copy control mechanism willfully with intent to financially gain.
Subtle difference, and really meaningless in the current environment, but subtle differences matter in the law.
And I just dislike seeing people modded "insightful" when they are incorrect.
There never was a Federal speed limit. The Federal government never passed a speed limit law for interstates.
Well, not exactly. What they did, instead, was to tell states that they would only get matching federal highway money if the states enacted a speed limit that the feds wanted. Set your speed limit too high, and you lose many millions of dollars of federal highway funding dollars.
Several laws around where the federal government has no authority to pass a law, but still bribes/extorts a law from the states. Interesting way to do business, huh?
Hasn't worked for drug laws. Well, not yet.
I've heard the saying before, but it doesn't explicitly acknowledge the lag time that sometimes exists between jailing 1,000,000 people, and changing the law. Especially if the million people being jailed are "undersirables", aka minorities, like most drug convictions seem to apply to.
The saying also assumes a fair legal system, which I'm not sure has really ever existed in this country.
I've thought about this before.
The US Navy has a computer hardware/services/support contract called NMCI (Navy Marine Corp Intranet) with EDS. (EDS is bleeding money over this.)
They are rolling out a standard software load for between 300,000 and 400,000 computers, all with Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Office 2000, among other stuff. Do a web search, you can probably find the NMCI Gold Disk software contents.
Look at that again... 300,000 to 400,000 desktops with MS Windows 2k and Office 2k. Now, I'd hope they're getting a nice volume licensing deal. But even so, they are spending (in licensing costs along, not including support costs) probably in the range of
Let's see, $300 for Windows 2000 and $500 for Office 2000. Probably with a nice 70% volume discount? (Okay, the volume discount % is nothing but a guess, feel free to correct it.)
300,000 * ($300 + $500) * 0.3 = $72million.
And that's probably "renewed" every 3 years. That's just in licensing costs, just for Microsoft software, just for the US Navy alone. Just for client software, not server software licensing too.
It would be nice to see that spent on OSS development instead, and use some free software tools. After all, the NMCI contract includes paying for software support anyway, as a separate cost from the licensing.
Your tax dollars at work. Mine too.