Not only did you just show you knee-jerked a reaction without reading the article, you knee-jerked a reaction against a science as firmly confirmed as the basic tenets of physics or chemistry, regardless of what the politicos on Fox might tell you.
Of course, Slashdot is full of armchair climatologists who think their high-school chemistry class and the algebra class they took makes them qualified to comment on climate change, even if they never even took a statistics class. So you got modded up a bit. Perhaps the moderators didn't read anything other than the blurb, either?
The difference may be something glossed over in schools in the US, but the different was *important* to the people who created the US's system of government.
There is an excellent, IMO, book called MetaGame, by Sam Landstrom which (as part of its plot) deals with a future society where economic rewards in work and play are based on a system of points based on a sophisticated economic game design.
Its an interesting read, and very entertaining. There's a thesis presented in there that is very similar to this -- that a game-based reward system drives both workers and society to higher levels of productivity *and* happiness.
I have no idea if its available in print, but its a buck or two on Kindle.
I write checks for two things: paying my water bill, and paying for heating oil. Both are a pain in the ass, but cities in the US are crushed for money these days, and upgrading IT infrastructure loses. The oil companies, it seems, don't want to take the 2% hit in the cost of the oil.
The only time I ever receive a check is when a friend is paying me back, and frankly there just isn't any other good option other than the near crooks at Paypal.
There have been banks accepting home deposits of checks for a good year and a half now, so its nothing new even in the US. I've used my iPhone and JotNot to grab the images I need to deposit them a few times. (In fact, I did one last night...)
In 2010, who *doesn't* use a "hiding" service for a domain? For fifteen years now you'd basically have to throw away any e-mail address on a domain, and get inundated with physical spam on any mailing address used.
Black listing domains because the owner doesn't want to deal with jackass spammers and bulk mailers is just stupid.
Thankfully patent examiners understand there is a difference between obvious after the fact and obvious before the fact.
When no one was doing it, then suddenly everyone wants to be doing it, that's a pretty good example of something that was clearly not obvious before the fact and was after.
That's true of any patent. To anyone mechanically inclined, a huge percentage of mechanical patents (say, as an example, rack-and-pinion steering) are totally obvious once you've been shown there was a problem and have seen someone'e solution. It doesn't mean, a hundred years ago, that rack and pinion steering wasn't patentable -- because the examiners know if it was obvious and there were a hundred inventors looking at the problem, they'd be sitting on a hundred patent filings.
Multi-touch is an obvious solution to how you provide more complex gestural indications to a touch device... now. But five years ago when there were gobs of touch applications in industry, and gobs of touchpads on laptops there were gobs of people looking at how to provide better gestures, and not one of them came up with that *even though the hardware supported it in many cases*.
That tells you something about the patentability of multi-touch. Apple released it and suddenly everyone was wanting to duplicate it on phones, touchpads and touchscreen computers.
Patents are made to cover exactly that situation -- where someone finds a solution to a problem that no one else has *especially* where its obvious after the fact (since the obviousness makes it easy to copy).
To be in violation, they don't need to. And, although it gets lost in the noise every time I mention it on here, if you aren't a patent attorney or don't live and breathe patents, odds are you (and I mean the generic you, not you specifically) don't know how to interpret patents.
Ninety nine out of a hundred posts I see on/. about patents are from people who read the patent in question and actually don't understand how to read a patent and are drawing incorrect conclusions about what is claimed and isn't. (People seem to have a real issue understanding the difference between the disclosure, and the difference between dependent and independent claims.)
I haven't read the patent either, but I'd be willing to bet either the patent has claims that cover broader concepts as well as implementation specifics, or they've got a belief that a specific implementation can't be done in any other way and want to have the details of how it was implemented specified in court.
Also, the diagrams are most likely referenced in the disclosure not in the claims, so they're likely exemplary.
The answer you're going to get on here is going to be different between people thinking about the question you asked, and the question you should've asked.
The merits of the theory that the radiation is harmful may be debated, but there's a better reason not to buy it that there really is no debate on:
When you need to sell it, the next buyer will be asking the same question.
It doesn't matter if its safe or not, its going to make it hard to sell it the next time, unless you are enough experienced in the market to know how much its going to drop the value on a resale and ensure you buy at that much below market now.
Its like buying a house near powerlines. It may be perfectly safe, but selling the house later is going to be a pain in the ass.
Um, 100 million people without power for a few months is a much bigger deal than a few tens of thousands who chose to live below sea level, or chose to stop insuring their house when they no longer owed any payments on it.
The key problem about the flare is the rate of production of transformers -- it would be literally months before much of the northern part of the US and Canada got power back.
If that happens during the winter, you're talking a LOT of people freezing to death.
Yes, by all means we should pay many times the cost of cancelling it it to continue it, and then pay ten times the cost for every launch from that point forward.
A big problem in this country, no matter what side of the political coin you are on, is people like yourself that either deliberately, or because of a lack of understanding, spout bullshit not because there's a real issue, but purely because its against someone you don't like. Your position is not supportable, and yet you'll post it because it gives you a chance to tell everyone how much you don't like Obama.
There are lots of actions Obama has taken that have perfectly valid positions on either side of the coin, but this really isn't one. Politicians, lobbyists and people employed by the project were and are the only ones who *ever* supported it.
The UAC, in Vista, nagged constantly early on because of poorly written software. The UAC prompting means a program at launch either via code or manifest, or certain other compatibility-conditions (like being an installer) needs access to the user's administrative token, rather than the default neutered token. Typically that means its doing something it shouldn't have been doing, such as writing files into the installation directory rather than the user's profile (and thus needing administrative rights) or, for example, writing runtime settings into the local machine's registry rather than the user's registry.
The UAC prompts became far less common as time went on because publishers fixed their software that was doing things that even in XP they shouldn't have been doing (and getting more secure in the process).
They're reduced in Windows 7 primarily because a request for privilege escalation that is a direct result of a user action (based on a bunch of criteria, including a valid digital signature on the application, and I believe on the MSI that installed it) gets escalated automatically.
You *really* should almost never see a UAC prompt. Now, if you're a developer and are doing things that need to be escalated all the time, then no shit you're going to see it a lot. But a normal end user should virtually never see one on up-to-date versions of software on Vista or Windows 7. If you are, you should contact whoever publishes the software in question and tell them to fix it.
You may want to read up on winlogon, credential providers and user tokens, particularly relative to the UAC.
The Vista and Windows 7 security model is vastly more sophisticated than out-of-the-box Linux implementations, and the UAC is related to that. Unlike su/sudo, the user does *not* transition to the administrative user, they switch between their administrative token, and the default neutered token, but in both cases other security policies can still be applied, but most importantly (especially where network security is concerned) *they still are themselves*. The network provider may or may not allow transparent use of the token across the network using the administrative token, depending on policies, but it *can*.
The knee-jerk anti-Microsoft crowd on here tends to discount the sophistication of the Windows security model, but the reality is that its two decades more modern and more capable, particularly in networked environments, than the typical Linux system.
That crowd could learn something by learning, in more detail, about the things they (incorrectly) discredit.
Frightening, huh? CTO and, in fact, he has no idea what he's talking about.
Rather than blindly following presumed authority, perhaps you should make use of some critical thinking skills and a couple Google searches. You'll (apparently) be surprised what you learn.
I disagree. When my Mom asks me if I saw "that iPad thing" and the first thing she says is "it doesn't have a webcam!" then they've missed some boat, and its not a hard-core tinker-nerd boat.
I think they missed the boat for the meat of the market they were aiming for, and the webcam is a big part of that. Lack of a USB port, even if its limited to use to get photos onto it from a digital camera, is another.
Its like when GEnie shut down the Air Warrior servers!
(did I just date myself?)
Seriously, though. Halo2 is fun, but its 2010. Play Halo3. All of the rest of us know its identical to Halo2 only with better graphics. You'll barely even notice the change if you're on an equally old TV.
And it sure sounded to me like they aren't happy they're making the move and, unlike most companies that do it, are planning on interacting with the affected people *somehow*.
I know people on Slashdot hate Microsoft for just about everything, but once you pull your head out of that hole, I don't see how this is worth grabbing the pitchforks for. If you aren't one of the people impacted, why do you care so much, and if you are *they said they're going to work with you about it*. So why are you bent out of shape *before they have*?
Slashdot Mirror
Just to head off the arguments, you're an idiot.
Not only did you just show you knee-jerked a reaction without reading the article, you knee-jerked a reaction against a science as firmly confirmed as the basic tenets of physics or chemistry, regardless of what the politicos on Fox might tell you.
Of course, Slashdot is full of armchair climatologists who think their high-school chemistry class and the algebra class they took makes them qualified to comment on climate change, even if they never even took a statistics class. So you got modded up a bit. Perhaps the moderators didn't read anything other than the blurb, either?
The US is a republic, not a democracy.
The difference may be something glossed over in schools in the US, but the different was *important* to the people who created the US's system of government.
Thats anarchy, not democracy.
Look 'em up.
My cats are schitzo enough without having any damn quantum superpositions.
There is an excellent, IMO, book called MetaGame, by Sam Landstrom which (as part of its plot) deals with a future society where economic rewards in work and play are based on a system of points based on a sophisticated economic game design.
Its an interesting read, and very entertaining. There's a thesis presented in there that is very similar to this -- that a game-based reward system drives both workers and society to higher levels of productivity *and* happiness.
I have no idea if its available in print, but its a buck or two on Kindle.
I write checks for two things: paying my water bill, and paying for heating oil. Both are a pain in the ass, but cities in the US are crushed for money these days, and upgrading IT infrastructure loses. The oil companies, it seems, don't want to take the 2% hit in the cost of the oil.
The only time I ever receive a check is when a friend is paying me back, and frankly there just isn't any other good option other than the near crooks at Paypal.
There have been banks accepting home deposits of checks for a good year and a half now, so its nothing new even in the US. I've used my iPhone and JotNot to grab the images I need to deposit them a few times. (In fact, I did one last night...)
Ask yo momma, she's seen my furlong.
In 2010, who *doesn't* use a "hiding" service for a domain? For fifteen years now you'd basically have to throw away any e-mail address on a domain, and get inundated with physical spam on any mailing address used.
Black listing domains because the owner doesn't want to deal with jackass spammers and bulk mailers is just stupid.
Thankfully patent examiners understand there is a difference between obvious after the fact and obvious before the fact.
When no one was doing it, then suddenly everyone wants to be doing it, that's a pretty good example of something that was clearly not obvious before the fact and was after.
That's true of any patent. To anyone mechanically inclined, a huge percentage of mechanical patents (say, as an example, rack-and-pinion steering) are totally obvious once you've been shown there was a problem and have seen someone'e solution. It doesn't mean, a hundred years ago, that rack and pinion steering wasn't patentable -- because the examiners know if it was obvious and there were a hundred inventors looking at the problem, they'd be sitting on a hundred patent filings.
Multi-touch is an obvious solution to how you provide more complex gestural indications to a touch device ... now. But five years ago when there were gobs of touch applications in industry, and gobs of touchpads on laptops there were gobs of people looking at how to provide better gestures, and not one of them came up with that *even though the hardware supported it in many cases*.
That tells you something about the patentability of multi-touch. Apple released it and suddenly everyone was wanting to duplicate it on phones, touchpads and touchscreen computers.
Patents are made to cover exactly that situation -- where someone finds a solution to a problem that no one else has *especially* where its obvious after the fact (since the obviousness makes it easy to copy).
To be in violation, they don't need to. And, although it gets lost in the noise every time I mention it on here, if you aren't a patent attorney or don't live and breathe patents, odds are you (and I mean the generic you, not you specifically) don't know how to interpret patents.
Ninety nine out of a hundred posts I see on /. about patents are from people who read the patent in question and actually don't understand how to read a patent and are drawing incorrect conclusions about what is claimed and isn't. (People seem to have a real issue understanding the difference between the disclosure, and the difference between dependent and independent claims.)
I haven't read the patent either, but I'd be willing to bet either the patent has claims that cover broader concepts as well as implementation specifics, or they've got a belief that a specific implementation can't be done in any other way and want to have the details of how it was implemented specified in court.
Also, the diagrams are most likely referenced in the disclosure not in the claims, so they're likely exemplary.
Strange that the experts disagree with you.
Or perhaps not so strange?
The answer you're going to get on here is going to be different between people thinking about the question you asked, and the question you should've asked.
The merits of the theory that the radiation is harmful may be debated, but there's a better reason not to buy it that there really is no debate on:
When you need to sell it, the next buyer will be asking the same question.
It doesn't matter if its safe or not, its going to make it hard to sell it the next time, unless you are enough experienced in the market to know how much its going to drop the value on a resale and ensure you buy at that much below market now.
Its like buying a house near powerlines. It may be perfectly safe, but selling the house later is going to be a pain in the ass.
Um, 100 million people without power for a few months is a much bigger deal than a few tens of thousands who chose to live below sea level, or chose to stop insuring their house when they no longer owed any payments on it.
The key problem about the flare is the rate of production of transformers -- it would be literally months before much of the northern part of the US and Canada got power back.
If that happens during the winter, you're talking a LOT of people freezing to death.
Yes, by all means we should pay many times the cost of cancelling it it to continue it, and then pay ten times the cost for every launch from that point forward.
A big problem in this country, no matter what side of the political coin you are on, is people like yourself that either deliberately, or because of a lack of understanding, spout bullshit not because there's a real issue, but purely because its against someone you don't like. Your position is not supportable, and yet you'll post it because it gives you a chance to tell everyone how much you don't like Obama.
There are lots of actions Obama has taken that have perfectly valid positions on either side of the coin, but this really isn't one. Politicians, lobbyists and people employed by the project were and are the only ones who *ever* supported it.
That should tell you something.
Tivo hasn't required a phone line for Tivo since the Series 2 came out... what, six or seven years ago?
With the Series 1, you had to hack it to go phone-free, but I have not had a phone line hooked to a Tivo in probably pushing eight years.
Careful, the Slashbots don't like mirrors held up to them.
You may get modded as a troll or flaimbait or something in retribution.
The UAC, in Vista, nagged constantly early on because of poorly written software. The UAC prompting means a program at launch either via code or manifest, or certain other compatibility-conditions (like being an installer) needs access to the user's administrative token, rather than the default neutered token. Typically that means its doing something it shouldn't have been doing, such as writing files into the installation directory rather than the user's profile (and thus needing administrative rights) or, for example, writing runtime settings into the local machine's registry rather than the user's registry.
The UAC prompts became far less common as time went on because publishers fixed their software that was doing things that even in XP they shouldn't have been doing (and getting more secure in the process).
They're reduced in Windows 7 primarily because a request for privilege escalation that is a direct result of a user action (based on a bunch of criteria, including a valid digital signature on the application, and I believe on the MSI that installed it) gets escalated automatically.
You *really* should almost never see a UAC prompt. Now, if you're a developer and are doing things that need to be escalated all the time, then no shit you're going to see it a lot. But a normal end user should virtually never see one on up-to-date versions of software on Vista or Windows 7. If you are, you should contact whoever publishes the software in question and tell them to fix it.
sudo and the UAC are vastly different beasts.
You may want to read up on winlogon, credential providers and user tokens, particularly relative to the UAC.
The Vista and Windows 7 security model is vastly more sophisticated than out-of-the-box Linux implementations, and the UAC is related to that. Unlike su/sudo, the user does *not* transition to the administrative user, they switch between their administrative token, and the default neutered token, but in both cases other security policies can still be applied, but most importantly (especially where network security is concerned) *they still are themselves*. The network provider may or may not allow transparent use of the token across the network using the administrative token, depending on policies, but it *can*.
The knee-jerk anti-Microsoft crowd on here tends to discount the sophistication of the Windows security model, but the reality is that its two decades more modern and more capable, particularly in networked environments, than the typical Linux system.
That crowd could learn something by learning, in more detail, about the things they (incorrectly) discredit.
Some people might consider that a good thing ...
Frightening, huh? CTO and, in fact, he has no idea what he's talking about.
Rather than blindly following presumed authority, perhaps you should make use of some critical thinking skills and a couple Google searches. You'll (apparently) be surprised what you learn.
I disagree. When my Mom asks me if I saw "that iPad thing" and the first thing she says is "it doesn't have a webcam!" then they've missed some boat, and its not a hard-core tinker-nerd boat.
I think they missed the boat for the meat of the market they were aiming for, and the webcam is a big part of that. Lack of a USB port, even if its limited to use to get photos onto it from a digital camera, is another.
Its like when GEnie shut down the Air Warrior servers!
(did I just date myself?)
Seriously, though. Halo2 is fun, but its 2010. Play Halo3. All of the rest of us know its identical to Halo2 only with better graphics. You'll barely even notice the change if you're on an equally old TV.
And it sure sounded to me like they aren't happy they're making the move and, unlike most companies that do it, are planning on interacting with the affected people *somehow*.
I know people on Slashdot hate Microsoft for just about everything, but once you pull your head out of that hole, I don't see how this is worth grabbing the pitchforks for. If you aren't one of the people impacted, why do you care so much, and if you are *they said they're going to work with you about it*. So why are you bent out of shape *before they have*?
HTML5 is nice, but if you think it can do 1% of the things Silverlight can do, you're not an engineer or have never actually looked at Silverlight.
Making false statements about financials in a public company leads people to spend a fair bit of uncomfortable time in prison.
If Larry Ellison is making those statements, you can be 100% sure they can be backed up with hard financial data.
Supressing the value of the dollar also vastly helps everyone who is upside down on their houses ...