Normally punch cards are punched with machines that actually cut the chad right out of the card and push it into a waste bend. You don't get hanging chad with that. You might drop the card deck, lose cards, etc., but as long as you keep them in order, and don't bend, burn, or get them wet this kind will read back properly every time.
That's if you keep the card reader working right - at the college computer center where I worked in 1972, a repairman had to come in and basically rebuild the card reader once a week, or it would start chewing up the cards and spitting the mangled pieces out on the floor. I'm guessing that was a few hundred thousand cards read between repair calls. At 80 bytes per card, it was a fair amount of data in those days, but not much by modern standards. This was an NCR card reader. I think IBM makes much better ones - but you'd still need a lot of punch and reader maintenance and a truckload of cards to back up a 10Gig hard drive. If you really want to use punched media for long term data storage, paper tape might be a better bet. It's more compact, it stays in order by itself, and the machines are simpler and therefore more reliable. And you can use mylar tape instead of paper, if it will last longer.
The other kind of punchcard, used in election systems, is pre-punched to leave each chad hanging by 4 threads of paper. The voters are supposed to push the chad out with a hand-tool. In 1972, the local electric company (or something like that) was using cards like this that the meter readers punched by hand as they read the meters. That computer center had a contract to process this data, but we hated those cards. Even though the users were trained (unlike voters) in how to be sure the chad was punched clean out and not left stuck to the card, you got little bits of paper fiber coming loose and clogging up the machinery. You also got chads that hadn't been punched breaking loose or swinging sometimes, so if you ran the deck through again it would read a few more holes, with maybe one or two of the old holes covered up now.
So there were three issues in Florida. One was that quite simply this was a system with an acknowledged read-error rate around 2% even under the best circumstances. In a recount you'd get a different count every time you ran the cards through again. This had been known for decades, but no one cared until they got an election so close that it mattered.
Second, voters were not trained in using the hand-punch sticks, and the flexible backing that is supposed to support the card while you punch it may have been worn-out or misaligned in some cases so they couldn't get a clean punch on the first try. Someone who understood the system would have checked the backside of the card and pulled off any hanging chad, but with a bunch of octogenarians that have never even programmed their VCR...
Third, Palm Beach in particular had a badly designed ballot. They should have known this, because in 1996 a similar butterfly ballot apparently cost Dole 19,000 votes. It wasn't enough to change the results of that election, and the Dems that run Palm Beach didn't learn anything from it because only Repubs were hurt. (I generally love it when the Demoncrats shoot themselves in the foot, but not when they make a joke out of the most fundamental underpinnings of our republic...)
It might be easier if we switched from 60Hz to something around 20kHz.
Not if you are going to send the power any distance. In addition to skin effect, magnetic hysteresis, etc., the wires would become transmitting antennas and send the power out into the sky.
The most efficient transmitting antenna is 1/4 wavelength. Wavelength = speed of light/frequency. At 60 Hz, the wavelength is 300,000km/sec / 60 = 5,000 km. Better keep wire runs under 1,000 km, or break them up with intervening transformers & capacitors that shift the phase. Not too hard. At 20 khz, wavelength = 15 km; wire lengths must be under 4 km, and better under 1km. You could use 20KHz for power distribution in a ship or airplane if you didn't mind custom-building the power supply in every piece of off-the-shelf electronics you used, but you cannot use it in a citywide power system.
And there's a very good reason not to use frequencies between 60 and 20,000: audio bands use those frequencies, so power distributed on them would interfere with telephone and music electronics. (60 Hz is actually a bit high for audio systems with good bass response; I suspect some of the best systems must have a rather expensive notch filter built in.)
A 'terrorist' having his head forcibly examined by the NatCops is not likely to be in exactly the same mental state as one sauntering through an airport.
BSD is definitely better in this case; plain public domain is best. We paid for it, we should be able to use it freely,
(Of course, there is some government software where this doesn't apply. Missile targeting algorithms. Maybe the IRS's auditing code - or maybe the IRS's code should be completely public, if the law is unclear look at the code...)
Re:Licensed Books are not New
on
Shrinkwrapped Books
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· Score: 4, Informative
IANAL, but one aspect is quite simple. No you cannot attach a shrink-wrapped license to a book that is purchased in the normal way. You bought it, you own it, you can sell it, loan it, read it, or use it for toilet paper. That's called "first sale doctrine", and IIRC the court cases establishing it were in the 1920's. (Note that a shrink-wrap license saying simply that you cannot duplicate the book would be legal, but redundant. Copyright law already says that.)
No one's tried that with apples, but I expect the same rule would apply. The one place shrink-wrap licenses currently might hold up in court is on software. The software vendor's argument is that the user owns the CD and the copy of the software on it, but to use the software you have to make copies (to your hard drive, then from HD to RAM), and this violates the copyright act unless it is done under the license from the vendor. Counterarguments (1) When I read a book, a copy of the text is created in my neurons. Furthermore, I once recited Tolkien's short story "Farmer Giles of Ham" from memory to my little sister, creating a secondary copy in her head. Congress did not intend to outlaw that, nor require that I get a license from the publisher to read the book or tell the story. I don't think they intended to outlaw copies of software created in the course of normal use, either. (2) Many of these licenses now contain unconscionable provisions.
The NDA is something else again. You signed a contract before you could get the book. It may specify that you don't own the book, you just get to look at it for a while. And quite obviously, if NDA's are to have any force at all, they must be able to prevent you from reselling the documents. But as I said, this is a contract agreed to before the documents are sent to you, not a surprise after purchase.
The medical directory _might_ come under the a similar exception as the NDA - assuming it was a sort of membership list for an organization of doctors, you have to join the organization to get it, and one of the bylaws you agreed to when you got your membership was that you don't let outsiders get the membership list...
A shrink wrap license on unsolicited merchandise goes beyond these precedents in some ways. For sure they cannot require you to spend time or money trying to return the item. You can certainly toss it in the dumpster unopened. You can use those AOL CD's as frisbies, coasters, and skeet targets without bothering to read the EULA. However, you connect to AOL and you are using their service, so you'd better check out what you are contracting to do in return.
Beyond that, would first sale apply when there wasn't any sale? I'd figure that, since postal regulations say unsolicited merchandise is your property, you've got the same freedom with that book that you do with a book yuu just bought from Barnes and Noble. The doctor should even be able to auction it on e-bay - but if they sue, his legal fees to establish that right are going to make his malpractice insurance look cheap!
The rest of the world uses 13 digit codes already, so they are just harmonizing with that. And I suppose in a few years, the whole world will run out of 13 digit codes...
lots of bad things happen to florida Like being populated by people stupid enough to build houses on a big sandbar that gets major hurricanes every few years?
2) Write a script to attempt to copy it once a minute. (DO NOT test it unless physically unplugged from the internet.)
3) Hack the MPAA, RIAA, etc., servers and upload the game and the script. (You may have to ask your fellow hackers to please stop DOS'ing them for a while, but as clueless as these people seem to be, breaking in ought to be easy.)
4) Wait for Sony to look at the logs and send out their teams of trained attack lawyers...
Disclaimer: This is a joke. I'm not advocating anyone do anything illegal like breaking into evil organizationss' computers and illegally copying software there-to. Really I'm not. Really...
In other words, there's a difference between "costs $20" and "costs $20 and two minutes of forced commercial viewing". My time is valuable
To a hot-shot lawyer, two minutes might be worth MORE than $20 - and someone said that on the Tarzan DVD, it's not two minutes but ten minutes of ads. (I'm not eager to find out for myself...) Wonder if we could get one of these lawyers to sue - e.g., "On this class action suit last year, I got paid the equivalent of $14,000 an hour, or $233 a minute. Therefore for putting a non-skippable ten minute ad without revealing it on the box, Disney owes me $2,333.
You better use a fixed decimal notation for interest calculations, or you are going to end up with highly pissed off customers. The issue isn't accuracy - double-precision floating point is probably more accurate than the fixed-point decimal calculations most accountants use. But binary floating point results are going to be slightly _different_, and they'll probably even be different from machine to machine. Accountants generally feel that they have to account for even trivially tiny discrepancies - so whenever you throw away the lowest digits at all, it's important to be inaccurate in the exact same way every time.
The substance in the cup constitutes very little of the cost of selling the cup - that is, taking the order, collecting the money, filling the order, getting the stuff to you, cleaning up the table where you drank it, constantly cleaning up the whole darned store to meet the health code... The same thing applies to the burgers, fries, etc. So the restaurants can quite easily offer a lot more food and drink for just a little more money, and it looks like a great deal.
It is a great deal - for your cardiologist.
(I should talk. One of my two-year old grandsons just patted my belly and asked, "baby?"
A sail boat is quite a different environment from a power-driven ship. Jack Ganssle is an engineer and programmer with a serious sailing hobby, and he tells all sorts of stories of saiboat autopilots failing due to saltwater corrosion. I remember but cannot fine one article concerning long a single-handed race, where he had several spare autopilots and all of them failed. Since he was alone, the autopilot was critical. He kept repairing them, but his big question was, how would anyone who wasn't an electronic engineer or tech cope?
And these things are built for saltwater, unlike off-the-shelf computers. OTOH, the autopilot would be on deck next to the tiller, so exposed to saltwater spray pretty much 24x7. The cabin would be a little more protected - there might be condensation dripping from the ceiling, but it shouldn't be salty... Still, if it's mission critical (like how you get your weather reports), it's going to be hard keeping that computer going.
There are oils formulated for cooling electronics which don't have this problem. The oil-cooled system I worked with once used CFC's, was scrapped 11 years ago, and wasn't used around salt water. So you'll have to research substances that are presently available, and ask how they react to salt water. Also, how thoroughly does the system have to be sealed, can it tolerate some bubbles or will it have to be vacuum-pumped before filling (not something you want to mess with unless you are into really extreme power - that system wasted over 10KW every time it fired), etc.
As for cooling the oil, that's pretty simple. If there's a lot of heat, you have a pump circulate the fluid through a radiator. For a normal PC motherboard, convection may provide enough circulation (driven just by the density differences in cold and hot fluid, but the radiator has to be above the motherboard), and the case may provide enough surface area to cool the fluid.
Hot yes. Humid, no. Dry sand won't hurt electronics, if you keep it out of the moving parts. (Did a Commodore have any moving parts? It must have at least had a floppy drive...) Salt water is conductive and corrosive, it kills electronics.
Don't forget, you've got to schedule the napalm strikes to start by making a ring around your neighborhood and then working inward. Don't leave them ants anywhere to run...
However, in my one experience with fire ants (in the base housing at an Air Force Base in New Mexico), we discovered that their nests go deeper than 5 feet. Napalm would only incovenience them a little. I'm not sure a backhoe would go deep enough. A nuke would work, but only if the crater was centered on the nest. What you want to do is to find a poison that the forager ants will carry down to the brain bugs, I mean queen, in their deep underground chambers. Trouble is, fire ants are pretty smart about avoiding poisons, too...
But ants only come into your house for one of two things - food or water. It's possible to ensure they won't find enough food to be worth a long and perilous journey. (But make sure you aren't dealing with one of the species that eats 2x4's!) I don't know how far they'll travel for water, but if you are watering the yard regularly, they won't need to...
to read the floppy disks the digital camera here at work writes... Yes, there are other choices for camera memory, but PCMCIA cards cost a lot more, and then it's harder to transfer the jpegs to the computer.
Re:Take a look at Creative's software interface
on
GUIs for Everyone
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· Score: 2
Writers claim that critics are failed and bitter writers. So maybe this guy is a good critic of user interfaces.;-)
Re:This will last real long.
on
Borrowing ROMs
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· Score: 2
Only they'll probably check them out under a temporary web address & false ID, changing them several times a day...
Mass change of 2% aren't that hard to measure. When the test mass is in a rapidly rotating magnetic field that's probably strong enough to lift a railroad locomotive, it might be a little hard to sort out the weight change from incidental electromagnetic forces. I assume the test mass would be a nonmagnetic, non conductive material (a rock, for example), but there are no materials that don't have a slight interaction with magnetic fields.
In the american legal system, the courts really, really dislike to rule on theoretical cases. It would be very unlikely that any federal court would take a case initiated by Perens of "if I do such and so, is it illegal or constitutionally protected." There are three good reasons for this: 1) Real cases often hinge on the particular facts more than Constitutional interpretation. 2) Taking a non-case makes more work for the judges. 3) There is some history of the Supreme Court stepping beyond the actual facts of a case and trying to express how the principles would apply in other cases. Many of these rulings are now considered aberrant and deplorable (Dredd Scott, e.g.).
And a federal court has already refused to consider one not entirely theoretical case: Dr. Felten, who cancelled a presentation because of a threatening letter from one of the **AA's. By the time he got this into court, the conference was already over, and the **AA was saying they would never have a legitimate researcher prosecuted for presenting his research results - they'd already got what they wanted, but because there was no _current_ case, the court wouldn't look at it.
So, to actually get the DMCA in court, you've got to have a case of someone being prosecuted for an actual violation. If Perens demo & lecture would be a violation, and if the authorities weren't smart enough to ignore it, then this would be the right test case; Perens was merely presenting the results of research into a technical security measure to a conference of researchers. It's a perfect 1st amendment case.
Furthermore, the circumvention Perens proposed is NOT of copy protection, but simply of a dubious technical scheme to restrict the trade of DVD's across borders, which is routinely and legally circumvented in many other nations. Free-trade conservatives ought to dislike region-coding (or at least government action to ban circumventing it) as a restriction on free trade. Liberal judges ought to hate it as another way for big business to screw the consumer.
stuff must behave as advertised, definitely - isn't that common practice these days?
It doesn't seem to be on this side of the pond. For instance, Microsoft's ads attribute great stability and security to their server OS's, but if you sue them for your losses because the OS is unstable and insecure, they will point at the EULA's which basically say they are responsible only for stamping the binary code into the CD... There are laws in most states to the effect that an automobile, for instance, has to do what you'd normally expect an automobile to do in reasonable safety - so, for instance, no amount of fine print in the warranty can prevent Ford & Firestone for liability for blown tires and rollovers, if it's proven that their design or manufacturing was at fault. However, I don't think Ford would get in trouble for advertising suggesting that the Explorer was suitable for things beyond the normal expectations of automobiles (an Antarctic expedition, say), when it wasn't. In fact, there are many ads showing SUV's in rugged outdoor terrain where only Jeeps, Land Rovers, and mules actually go, and I'm not sure the new (Daimler-Chrysler) Jeeps would hold up. No mention of special training in driving that sort of terrain, tools and spare parts, jerrycans of extra gas, or any of the other things you'd better take or you'll be walking back.
In software there is no such common understanding of how well it ought to work, and the US courts take the legalese in the EULA (which is basically written to be not understood, and displayed so as to minimize the chance someone will really read it) as binding, rather than the ads the buyer definitely saw and understood. Damn. Government of the sheeple, by the corrupt, for the corporations.
Alext: Please keep us posted on how this thing with Sony goes. Does this mean the UK has consumer protection laws that actually require the product to do what it's advertised to do?
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Normally punch cards are punched with machines that actually cut the chad right out of the card and push it into a waste bend. You don't get hanging chad with that. You might drop the card deck, lose cards, etc., but as long as you keep them in order, and don't bend, burn, or get them wet this kind will read back properly every time.
That's if you keep the card reader working right - at the college computer center where I worked in 1972, a repairman had to come in and basically rebuild the card reader once a week, or it would start chewing up the cards and spitting the mangled pieces out on the floor. I'm guessing that was a few hundred thousand cards read between repair calls. At 80 bytes per card, it was a fair amount of data in those days, but not much by modern standards. This was an NCR card reader. I think IBM makes much better ones - but you'd still need a lot of punch and reader maintenance and a truckload of cards to back up a 10Gig hard drive. If you really want to use punched media for long term data storage, paper tape might be a better bet. It's more compact, it stays in order by itself, and the machines are simpler and therefore more reliable. And you can use mylar tape instead of paper, if it will last longer.
The other kind of punchcard, used in election systems, is pre-punched to leave each chad hanging by 4 threads of paper. The voters are supposed to push the chad out with a hand-tool. In 1972, the local electric company (or something like that) was using cards like this that the meter readers punched by hand as they read the meters. That computer center had a contract to process this data, but we hated those cards. Even though the users were trained (unlike voters) in how to be sure the chad was punched clean out and not left stuck to the card, you got little bits of paper fiber coming loose and clogging up the machinery. You also got chads that hadn't been punched breaking loose or swinging sometimes, so if you ran the deck through again it would read a few more holes, with maybe one or two of the old holes covered up now.
So there were three issues in Florida. One was that quite simply this was a system with an acknowledged read-error rate around 2% even under the best circumstances. In a recount you'd get a different count every time you ran the cards through again. This had been known for decades, but no one cared until they got an election so close that it mattered.
Second, voters were not trained in using the hand-punch sticks, and the flexible backing that is supposed to support the card while you punch it may have been worn-out or misaligned in some cases so they couldn't get a clean punch on the first try. Someone who understood the system would have checked the backside of the card and pulled off any hanging chad, but with a bunch of octogenarians that have never even programmed their VCR...
Third, Palm Beach in particular had a badly designed ballot. They should have known this, because in 1996 a similar butterfly ballot apparently cost Dole 19,000 votes. It wasn't enough to change the results of that election, and the Dems that run Palm Beach didn't learn anything from it because only Repubs were hurt. (I generally love it when the Demoncrats shoot themselves in the foot, but not when they make a joke out of the most fundamental underpinnings of our republic...)
See Ask Tog's article on this.
It might be easier if we switched from 60Hz to something around 20kHz.
Not if you are going to send the power any distance. In addition to skin effect, magnetic hysteresis, etc., the wires would become transmitting antennas and send the power out into the sky.
The most efficient transmitting antenna is 1/4 wavelength. Wavelength = speed of light/frequency. At 60 Hz, the wavelength is 300,000km/sec / 60 = 5,000 km. Better keep wire runs under 1,000 km, or break them up with intervening transformers & capacitors that shift the phase. Not too hard. At 20 khz, wavelength = 15 km; wire lengths must be under 4 km, and better under 1km. You could use 20KHz for power distribution in a ship or airplane if you didn't mind custom-building the power supply in every piece of off-the-shelf electronics you used, but you cannot use it in a citywide power system.
And there's a very good reason not to use frequencies between 60 and 20,000: audio bands use those frequencies, so power distributed on them would interfere with telephone and music electronics. (60 Hz is actually a bit high for audio systems with good bass response; I suspect some of the best systems must have a rather expensive notch filter built in.)
A 'terrorist' having his head forcibly examined by the NatCops is not likely to be in exactly the same mental state as one sauntering through an airport.
Nor would I be in my usual mental state...
BSD is definitely better in this case; plain public domain is best. We paid for it, we should be able to use it freely,
(Of course, there is some government software where this doesn't apply. Missile targeting algorithms. Maybe the IRS's auditing code - or maybe the IRS's code should be completely public, if the law is unclear look at the code...)
IANAL, but one aspect is quite simple. No you cannot attach a shrink-wrapped license to a book that is purchased in the normal way. You bought it, you own it, you can sell it, loan it, read it, or use it for toilet paper. That's called "first sale doctrine", and IIRC the court cases establishing it were in the 1920's. (Note that a shrink-wrap license saying simply that you cannot duplicate the book would be legal, but redundant. Copyright law already says that.)
No one's tried that with apples, but I expect the same rule would apply. The one place shrink-wrap licenses currently might hold up in court is on software. The software vendor's argument is that the user owns the CD and the copy of the software on it, but to use the software you have to make copies (to your hard drive, then from HD to RAM), and this violates the copyright act unless it is done under the license from the vendor. Counterarguments (1) When I read a book, a copy of the text is created in my neurons. Furthermore, I once recited Tolkien's short story "Farmer Giles of Ham" from memory to my little sister, creating a secondary copy in her head. Congress did not intend to outlaw that, nor require that I get a license from the publisher to read the book or tell the story. I don't think they intended to outlaw copies of software created in the course of normal use, either. (2) Many of these licenses now contain unconscionable provisions.
The NDA is something else again. You signed a contract before you could get the book. It may specify that you don't own the book, you just get to look at it for a while. And quite obviously, if NDA's are to have any force at all, they must be able to prevent you from reselling the documents. But as I said, this is a contract agreed to before the documents are sent to you, not a surprise after purchase.
The medical directory _might_ come under the a similar exception as the NDA - assuming it was a sort of membership list for an organization of doctors, you have to join the organization to get it, and one of the bylaws you agreed to when you got your membership was that you don't let outsiders get the membership list...
A shrink wrap license on unsolicited merchandise goes beyond these precedents in some ways. For sure they cannot require you to spend time or money trying to return the item. You can certainly toss it in the dumpster unopened. You can use those AOL CD's as frisbies, coasters, and skeet targets without bothering to read the EULA. However, you connect to AOL and you are using their service, so you'd better check out what you are contracting to do in return.
Beyond that, would first sale apply when there wasn't any sale? I'd figure that, since postal regulations say unsolicited merchandise is your property, you've got the same freedom with that book that you do with a book yuu just bought from Barnes and Noble. The doctor should even be able to auction it on e-bay - but if they sue, his legal fees to establish that right are going to make his malpractice insurance look cheap!
I think a lot of people are just amazed that M$ has the clout to force another company into things like this.
That's what the antitrust suit should have been all about...
The rest of the world uses 13 digit codes already, so they are just harmonizing with that. And I suppose in a few years, the whole world will run out of 13 digit codes...
lots of bad things happen to florida Like being populated by people stupid enough to build houses on a big sandbar that gets major hurricanes every few years?
1) Buy the Sony game with included spyware.
2) Write a script to attempt to copy it once a minute. (DO NOT test it unless physically unplugged from the internet.)
3) Hack the MPAA, RIAA, etc., servers and upload the game and the script. (You may have to ask your fellow hackers to please stop DOS'ing them for a while, but as clueless as these people seem to be, breaking in ought to be easy.)
4) Wait for Sony to look at the logs and send out their teams of trained attack lawyers...
Disclaimer: This is a joke. I'm not advocating anyone do anything illegal like breaking into evil organizationss' computers and illegally copying software there-to. Really I'm not. Really...
In other words, there's a difference between "costs $20" and "costs $20 and two minutes of forced commercial viewing". My time is valuable
To a hot-shot lawyer, two minutes might be worth MORE than $20 - and someone said that on the Tarzan DVD, it's not two minutes but ten minutes of ads. (I'm not eager to find out for myself...) Wonder if we could get one of these lawyers to sue - e.g., "On this class action suit last year, I got paid the equivalent of $14,000 an hour, or $233 a minute. Therefore for putting a non-skippable ten minute ad without revealing it on the box, Disney owes me $2,333.
You better use a fixed decimal notation for interest calculations, or you are going to end up with highly pissed off customers. The issue isn't accuracy - double-precision floating point is probably more accurate than the fixed-point decimal calculations most accountants use. But binary floating point results are going to be slightly _different_, and they'll probably even be different from machine to machine. Accountants generally feel that they have to account for even trivially tiny discrepancies - so whenever you throw away the lowest digits at all, it's important to be inaccurate in the exact same way every time.
The substance in the cup constitutes very little of the cost of selling the cup - that is, taking the order, collecting the money, filling the order, getting the stuff to you, cleaning up the table where you drank it, constantly cleaning up the whole darned store to meet the health code... The same thing applies to the burgers, fries, etc. So the restaurants can quite easily offer a lot more food and drink for just a little more money, and it looks like a great deal.
It is a great deal - for your cardiologist.
(I should talk. One of my two-year old grandsons just patted my belly and asked, "baby?"
A sail boat is quite a different environment from a power-driven ship. Jack Ganssle is an engineer and programmer with a serious sailing hobby, and he tells all sorts of stories of saiboat autopilots failing due to saltwater corrosion. I remember but cannot fine one article concerning long a single-handed race, where he had several spare autopilots and all of them failed. Since he was alone, the autopilot was critical. He kept repairing them, but his big question was, how would anyone who wasn't an electronic engineer or tech cope?
And these things are built for saltwater, unlike off-the-shelf computers. OTOH, the autopilot would be on deck next to the tiller, so exposed to saltwater spray pretty much 24x7. The cabin would be a little more protected - there might be condensation dripping from the ceiling, but it shouldn't be salty... Still, if it's mission critical (like how you get your weather reports), it's going to be hard keeping that computer going.
There are oils formulated for cooling electronics which don't have this problem. The oil-cooled system I worked with once used CFC's, was scrapped 11 years ago, and wasn't used around salt water. So you'll have to research substances that are presently available, and ask how they react to salt water. Also, how thoroughly does the system have to be sealed, can it tolerate some bubbles or will it have to be vacuum-pumped before filling (not something you want to mess with unless you are into really extreme power - that system wasted over 10KW every time it fired), etc.
As for cooling the oil, that's pretty simple. If there's a lot of heat, you have a pump circulate the fluid through a radiator. For a normal PC motherboard, convection may provide enough circulation (driven just by the density differences in cold and hot fluid, but the radiator has to be above the motherboard), and the case may provide enough surface area to cool the fluid.
Hot yes. Humid, no. Dry sand won't hurt electronics, if you keep it out of the moving parts. (Did a Commodore have any moving parts? It must have at least had a floppy drive...) Salt water is conductive and corrosive, it kills electronics.
Don't forget, you've got to schedule the napalm strikes to start by making a ring around your neighborhood and then working inward. Don't leave them ants anywhere to run...
However, in my one experience with fire ants (in the base housing at an Air Force Base in New Mexico), we discovered that their nests go deeper than 5 feet. Napalm would only incovenience them a little. I'm not sure a backhoe would go deep enough. A nuke would work, but only if the crater was centered on the nest. What you want to do is to find a poison that the forager ants will carry down to the brain bugs, I mean queen, in their deep underground chambers. Trouble is, fire ants are pretty smart about avoiding poisons, too...
But ants only come into your house for one of two things - food or water. It's possible to ensure they won't find enough food to be worth a long and perilous journey. (But make sure you aren't dealing with one of the species that eats 2x4's!) I don't know how far they'll travel for water, but if you are watering the yard regularly, they won't need to...
Exponential" means something - it does not just mean "high acceleration" as the author of that quote seems to think.
But most people don't know what an exponent is. Heck, they've probably never had a _teacher_ that understood exponential growth.
to read the floppy disks the digital camera here at work writes... Yes, there are other choices for camera memory, but PCMCIA cards cost a lot more, and then it's harder to transfer the jpegs to the computer.
Writers claim that critics are failed and bitter writers. So maybe this guy is a good critic of user interfaces. ;-)
Only they'll probably check them out under a temporary web address & false ID, changing them several times a day...
Mass change of 2% aren't that hard to measure. When the test mass is in a rapidly rotating magnetic field that's probably strong enough to lift a railroad locomotive, it might be a little hard to sort out the weight change from incidental electromagnetic forces. I assume the test mass would be a nonmagnetic, non conductive material (a rock, for example), but there are no materials that don't have a slight interaction with magnetic fields.
In the american legal system, the courts really, really dislike to rule on theoretical cases. It would be very unlikely that any federal court would take a case initiated by Perens of "if I do such and so, is it illegal or constitutionally protected." There are three good reasons for this:
1) Real cases often hinge on the particular facts more than Constitutional interpretation.
2) Taking a non-case makes more work for the judges.
3) There is some history of the Supreme Court stepping beyond the actual facts of a case and trying to express how the principles would apply in other cases. Many of these rulings are now considered aberrant and deplorable (Dredd Scott, e.g.).
And a federal court has already refused to consider one not entirely theoretical case: Dr. Felten, who cancelled a presentation because of a threatening letter from one of the **AA's. By the time he got this into court, the conference was already over, and the **AA was saying they would never have a legitimate researcher prosecuted for presenting his research results - they'd already got what they wanted, but because there was no _current_ case, the court wouldn't look at it.
So, to actually get the DMCA in court, you've got to have a case of someone being prosecuted for an actual violation. If Perens demo & lecture would be a violation, and if the authorities weren't smart enough to ignore it, then this would be the right test case; Perens was merely presenting the results of research into a technical security measure to a conference of researchers. It's a perfect 1st amendment case.
Furthermore, the circumvention Perens proposed is NOT of copy protection, but simply of a dubious technical scheme to restrict the trade of DVD's across borders, which is routinely and legally circumvented in many other nations. Free-trade conservatives ought to dislike region-coding (or at least government action to ban circumventing it) as a restriction on free trade. Liberal judges ought to hate it as another way for big business to screw the consumer.
I didn't proofread enough. For "prevent Ford & Firestone for liability", read "excuse Ford & Firestone from liability".
stuff must behave as advertised, definitely - isn't that common practice these days?
It doesn't seem to be on this side of the pond. For instance, Microsoft's ads attribute great stability and security to their server OS's, but if you sue them for your losses because the OS is unstable and insecure, they will point at the EULA's which basically say they are responsible only for stamping the binary code into the CD... There are laws in most states to the effect that an automobile, for instance, has to do what you'd normally expect an automobile to do in reasonable safety - so, for instance, no amount of fine print in the warranty can prevent Ford & Firestone for liability for blown tires and rollovers, if it's proven that their design or manufacturing was at fault. However, I don't think Ford would get in trouble for advertising suggesting that the Explorer was suitable for things beyond the normal expectations of automobiles (an Antarctic expedition, say), when it wasn't. In fact, there are many ads showing SUV's in rugged outdoor terrain where only Jeeps, Land Rovers, and mules actually go, and I'm not sure the new (Daimler-Chrysler) Jeeps would hold up. No mention of special training in driving that sort of terrain, tools and spare parts, jerrycans of extra gas, or any of the other things you'd better take or you'll be walking back.
In software there is no such common understanding of how well it ought to work, and the US courts take the legalese in the EULA (which is basically written to be not understood, and displayed so as to minimize the chance someone will really read it) as binding, rather than the ads the buyer definitely saw and understood. Damn. Government of the sheeple, by the corrupt, for the corporations.
Alext: Please keep us posted on how this thing with Sony goes. Does this mean the UK has consumer protection laws that actually require the product to do what it's advertised to do?