Weird Al's pancreas has an attractive force whose magnitude does not fall off with the square of the distance as other mere morals, but is rather simply inversionally proportional to the distance. It is suspected that this increased sensitivity to the pancreata of others is the source of his innate parodic connection to the musician around him. I have already requested funding to study this amazing phenomonem, and how it relates to his superhuman comedic powers, but the scientific establishment is not ready to accept such brilliant and unorthodox ideas, and have fought me at every step. This, however, will not stop me and someday my master plan to build an army of pancreaticly superior beings will be complete.
What and limit my potential memory-leak growth to 4 GB? You might prefer to stay in the stone age, but my firefox extensions will be able to leak 16 exabytes:)
Then at the next school assembly ask the perpetrator to come forward.
That is a horrible idea. No one will step forward, and you will just publicise the fact that this occured to anyone who didn't already know about it, many of whom will think it is hilarious. This will only encourage the person who did it. The only possible good that could come from it is if the announcement causes the perpetrator to brag about it and the word gets around to the administration. Even then, it isn't a good idea to punish a student based soley on a rumor.
Sure, get the site taken down, and punish the perpetrator. But if you don't know who did it, the last thing that you want to do is stand in front of a group of rebelious teens and make idle threats.
Although you might ask what good those are as well. And I think you'll have a harder time convincing your boss to pay you to attend a "Programming Conference" in Second Life even if it is less expensive than a Las Vegas junket:)
We can barely predict the weather from day to day let alone week to week. We can't accurately predict the number of hurricanes, typhoons, or the like. Yet at the same time you want me to believe that enough is known to tell me that we are all going to die in 10 years?
I know that the idea that inability to predict tomorrows weather implies inability to predict long term climate, seems intuitive but it is incorrect. There are many examples of similar situations. We cannot predict (or even measure) with exact accuracy the position and movements of individual particles, and yet we can predict the motions of the macroscopic objects formed from them. Historically long-term stock is less erratic than short-term fluctuations. We were able to accurately predict the over-all flow of a river long before we could accurately model the eddy currents within it. Our ability or inability to predict the details of the weather have very little relationship with our ability or inability to predict the overall climate.
Just admit you know about as much about the climate as the other side. Fact is, we are still discovering the variables. In no shape or form can you have the definitive anwser without all the variables.
There are two common flaws when dealing with certainty. One is the tendency to assert that you know something with complete certainty when you don't - to paint everything as black and white. The other is the tendency to jump to the conclusion that if there is any uncertainty in an idea then it is no better than a wild-ass guess - to paint everything as a single shade of muddy grey. In reality you have to learn to gauge the relative amount of certainty that exists in various theories and ideas. This isn't easy, but it is necessary.
No we don't have a definitive answer, and we never will. If you are expecting one, then you will be very disappointed with science, and with life in general, because there is no such thing. However, we have an answer-in-progress, in which we have a reasonable amount of confidence. Contrary to the media's depiction of global warming, and science in general, where each new discovery completely invalidates the previous consensus, the reality is that as we continue to learn more, and incorporate new variables, what we learn is supporting and refining what we already know. Which isn't to say sometimes things aren't proven wrong, but as a whole our current best guess is not jumping all over the map, but is converging to an answer as time goes on.
Debating the details that are still fairly uncertain is a very reasonable thing to do. However, dismissing the entire field altogether, or equivocating it with the "other sides" unfounded guesses and propaganda is folly.
Then why are you not opening the apps in separate windows? IIRC, that will put them in your dock.
Well not really - the OS X doc only has one icon per application regardless of how many windows it has open. You can right click and get the list of windows, but who ever does that, when you have expose? I do agree that if you want to treat these things like applications, then keeping them in tabs rather than windows is silly.
I run into a simular gotchas regarding web apps. For example, I'll think all my Safari windows are closed, so I click on the Safari icon expecting to get a new window, but don't and can't figure out why until I remember that little music player "application" is really a safari window. Likewise, I have quit out of safari only to realize latter that I closed a web-app that I didn't mean to. It funny, that a lot of people think these apps are more user friendly, because they are just a webpage, and every one knows how to use a webpage. Whereas with me, since they are acting more and more like an application then a webpage, I think of them as such, which leads to small mistakes when they don't act entirely like an application.
I agree with you that web apps do have the potential to surplant desktop apps among the computer illiterate, but I'm not convinced that software subscriptions will fly even with them.
These people may not know anything about computers, but they do know what money is. It is everything I can do to convince computer illiterate people to pay for an antivirus subscription. And you can bet that other companies like Google or Yahoo, which have as much name recognition as Microsoft, will be competing in this space, and their versions will be advertisement supported. The computer illiterate will flock to those, not the sites with subscriptions.
Which isn't to say that the ad-supported sites can't be cash cows, or that Microsoft won't take that approach, but IMHO the idea of renting software is dead in the water.
This has nothing to do with "actual" teleportation. All it is transferring the quantum state of one atom (spin etc) to that of another. So you aren't moving particles, you aren't transferring information about the relative arrangement of particles, or even what types of particles you are made of. If there were already two exact physical copies of your body you *might* be able to use an advanced version of this to sync up the quantum state of each corresponding atom, but even that is unlikely.
Hehe. I'm still trying to figure out how something with thousands of billions of atoms can be described as atomic. Or where they are finding macroscopic atoms. Must have teleported it in from another dimension.
The population might be, but we are talking about population growth. That would only be true if the birthrate of the population was equal to the deathrate.
And if you want to get picky, you might as well claim that the population of all countries, save those northern africa, are the result of immigration. Or if you don't consider people who were in an area when it was incorporated into the country as immigrants, then there are a large number of european colonists in north america which are no more immigrants to the United States as the Native Americans:)
As the other posters said, the purpose of the laser is to accelerate electrons. The way it works is that Hydrogen is ionized, breaking apart into protons and electrons, and heated to form a plasma. A laser is shot through this plasma, and the electrons are "pushed" down the chamber. Assuming I understanding this correctly, if the photons were reflected back through the chamber, the electrons would be pushed the opposite direction, undoing the work of the first traversal.
Now it's my turn to ask a question to the physicists:) The article stated that the reason that this worked well was because the plasma acted simular to cladding on a fiber, keeping the light focused in the center of the chamber. Does this mean that it might be possible to create curved chambers? It also mentioned that their next goal was to increase the length of the device by chaining one after another. If successfull, might it be possible to create a wavefield ring, where the particle could be accelerated for as long as they like before being spewed out?
WINE is a program that re-implements the windows system libraries, allowing you to run unmodified windows programs, without owning a copy of windows. It is not a hardware emulator, and therefore only works on the platform that the original program was compiled for. And they can't recompile the source to WoW, or MS Office, or any of the other apps, because they don't have the source to those apps. There are people that have gotten WINE to work inside an emulator, but at that point you are better off just running windows itself inside an emulator (like Virtual PC).
The same reason that the vast majority of people currently buy their music on CD when they could just steal it from a store, or copy it from a friend, or download it online. The same reason that thousands of people buy music from independent artists online, when they could just download it.
If you're trying to assert that most people would pirate music rather than paying for it, unless they physically prevented from doing so by their own property, then you are wrong. Contrary to the RIAA's twisted statistics, piracy is not decreasing sales. At the peak of napster's popularity sales at the register were rising, not falling. The falling numbers the RIAA liked to quote were wholesale numbers. This can be traced to the stores streamlining their inventory and stocking systems as a result of the internet. At that time, music stores near colleges did have falling sales, but so did book stores near colleges, and both correlate strongly to increases in internet sales of the same item. Subsequently, the decrease in sales that have been seen, are largely in the "oldies" adult market - and yet if you look at the statistics for what types of music is being pirated, it is clear piracy is not to blame for that. The threat of piracy is overblown, and unsubstantiated.
So no, most people are not selfish assholes, just you. But hey, congratulations! It is the minority of people like you that have given the RIAA leverage to strip away the fair-use right of the rest of the people in this country, and bias the laws in favor of further consolidation of the market. You sure stuck it to The Man.
My experiance with setting up hardware using the Mandrake control panel a couple years ago, was that when it worked it was easy as cake, but if it didn't you were worse off then having nothing. For example, I was attempting to setup a hauppauge TV tuner card, which I knew was supported in linux. The rest of the install so far had been a snap and it recognized all my hardware with no problems. So I run the TV tuner card setup from the control panel, it pops up a dialog box saying it is setting up my card then the dialog box closes. No success or error indication, just closes. I try to use the tuner and get nothing. So I open up the TV tuner script to see what was going on. All it did was issue a bunch of shell commands, without checking the return value, without verifying that anything worked, or providing any feedback to the user - just shoot out a bunch of command and hope it works. Because I had no idea how far it got in the script before failing I had no idea what state my system or config files were in. I looked at other configuration scripts and found some (although not all) of them to be just as bad.
I was not impressed. Configuration utilites should always verify that the changes they make work, and if not revert the system to the state it was in before they were run. They should always inform the user of the success/failure of the operation, and preferably provide enough information to let the user know how to procede - Run such and such program to test your new hardware, this is not a supported card, unexpected error, etc. Hopefully, this has been improved upon since I last used Mandriva.
I think that's an interesting question that should be asked in court.
The Supreme Court will not rule on theoretical situations, only cases concerning events that actually occurred. There are a couple of reasons for this, a big one being that it is seen as a better use of time to focus on laws that are actually affecting citizens and society, than on a bunch of what-ifs. Another reason is that the court's view on how narrow or wide judgments should be has varied over time.
Remember, the Supreme Court does not over-turn laws in the way you might think they do - they merely interpret the laws, which in the case of conflicting laws means determining which law "trumps" the other, in the scenario ruled upon. This is an important distinction. As an imaginary example, consider a state passing a law that says it is illegal to kill dogs. Then someone is attacked by a dog and kills it. Suppose that the Supreme Court took the stance that there is a constitutional right to self-defense, and naturally the constitution is higher on the pecking order than a state law. As in any case, the law would still stand, but in situations where self-defense is in play, other courts would now follow the precedent of the Supreme Court and find people not guilty. In all other situations, the law would remain in effect.
You can see then, that the justification that the Supreme Court gives for its rulings are just as important as the ruling itself, as they determine what aspects of the situation ruled upon are important in the ruling, and thus what situations the precedent will apply to in the future.
Some courts have been in favor of making very wide rulings that cause sweeping change to the way our laws are viewed. John Roberts, the current Supreme Court Justice, however, believes in narrow rulings. He has been quoted as saying "If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, in my view it is necessary not to decide more". By focusing tightly on the details of a particular case, and not the wider social phenomena, you usually end up with less controversial rulings, but also tend to support the status quo.
All of which is a long way of saying that you won't get the answers you want, unless you can find someone with such patent who tries to enforce it.
You are right in correcting the parent - this is not an orbital technology, never will be, and was never intended to be. But the rest of you comment is completely uncalled for.
We have been launching small rockets off airplanes for decades now.
Great where can I get a ride on one - oh, only if I am one of a handful of jet pilots in the Air force or government space program.
There is no reason to take this step.
Sure there is - because it can and will be completed within the next decade, unlike the private man-to-orbit projects under way. It will also likely be much more affordable than the orbital trips, even when they do come to fruition. Bungee jumping will never scale to orbital velocities, but that does not make it worthless.
All it is a scam to milk $250,000 people off those that can afford it...
Yeah, and damn that rafting company who scammed me out of $50 by providing a desired service in exchange for a mutually agreed upon sum. Dirty Capitalists.
...and he used the X-prize as a form of advertising for it.
That was the whole point of the X-prize. It was never intended to go towards orbit, and the hope was that it would lead to a commercial venture. The people who provided the money for the X-prize don't feel cheated, and are very happy about Branson's deal with Rutan to develop it into profitable business.
Oh, and you people bitching about the environmental impact need to get some perspective. There are thousands of flights across the world every day, and millions of vehicles being driven and thousands of coal plants spewing CO2 and soot. And you are worried about the pollution that one sub-orbital launch a week is going to do.
Seriously, I am used to people on slashdot being critical jerks, but this thread is ridiculous. Rutan is an excellent high-performance plane designer, and rather than sitting around bitching about how he wished there were private alternatives to get into space, he took what knew and did something about it. In just a few more years he will be providing an opportunity to people that has never existed before, and which no one will match for many more years to come. You may not think it is worth the price, but thousands of other people do, and are more than willing to pay the $250,000 to get a glimpse of space. Sure I would prefer to see an orbital trip. But I will always be far more excited to see concrete progress in the present, no matter how small, than I will be to dream about vaporware.
Microsoft Office is widely available, but that does not mean it is legal to isolate some of the compiled code and include it in your application, because the EULA does not allow it.
Linux and the networking applications that run on it are widely and freely available, but that does not mean it is legal for Linksys to include it in their products without following the licenses on that software.
Microsoft is also contacting other Web sites that have posted the FairUse4WM tool, asking them to remove the software, on the grounds that it contains copyrighted company code.
This is a copyright issue plain and simple. It doesn't matter if the code is widely used and distributed, Microsoft maintains copyright on it. What matters is if he really did include Microsoft's code in FairUse4WM, and whether the route Microsoft has for pursing this in the courts is legitimate.
I agree that a standardized 12VDC connector on all electronic devices would be nice, like every other poster here has pointed out, but I don't think that is what google is talking about. You can already get power supplies that take 12VDC in, or even dual 48VDC (telecom standard), and I would be surprised if google isn't using something like that already.
What they are recommending is that the power supply only have 12V out, and all other DC-DC conversions take place on the mother board. Unfortunately, the article didn't go into any detail as to how this would save power, and I don't see how it would make much difference. To me it just seems like you are moving components off the PS and onto the motherboard. Perhaps there is an EE around who could explain it to me.
While the GPL Preamble that you quoted does not give you permission to copy the license, that does not preclude the FSF from giving people permision to do so elsewhere. In fact they do allow you to modify the GPL under certain terms as explained in the GPL FAQ.
The short version is that you are not allowed to change the license as it is applied to that piece of software, nor are you allowed to create a modified version and pass it off as the GPL. But you can license your software under whatever terms you wish, and the FSF will not prevent you from using parts of the GPL in your license provided that you do not call it GPL.
That was my first thought as well after reading the EFF article - just because the feature was absent from a PR document, does not mean that it will be absent from the device.
But this engadget interview with J Allard confirms it. They ask him about PlaysForSure three times, and each time he gives an explaination about why Zune will not support it.
Another interesting question that this brings up is if they will be licensing their Zune DRM to other players. If not, who wants to start placing bets on how long before the EU slams them with another antitrust lawsuit?
DVD is 720x480 for both fullscreen and widescreen. The iTunes movies are 640x480 for fullscreen, and for widescreen the number of vertical pixels is decreased to keep the same pixel shape (around 640x270 depending on the aspect ratio of the movie). The end result is that widescreen movies have half as many pixels as DVD.
You may or may not notice the difference on an interlaced fullscreen display, but you will definatly notice the difference on a progressive-scan widescreen display.
Also they didn't test to see if it was filtering out the alcohol. I wouldn't think so, but you would want to check.
I don't think you would need to. When you have 100 proof alchohol it is 50% alchohol by volume. It isn't like putting salt into water where it saturates at a fraction of the volume of the water. So you couldn't be filtering this out (where is the filter going to hide that much volume), although you could be loosing some to evaporation during the filtering process. It would be interesting to measure the exact amount, but as there wasn't an obvious change in volume, it definately wasn't much.
I also suspect, though I can't prove it, that there is also a high correlation showing that the less educated a voter, the more likely they vote for Democrats.
I don't know that that is the case. While the Democrats used to have very strong support with working class people (low income correlates with lower education), this has been decreasing, and is only kinda strong support now. Moderately educated college students are more likely to vote Democrat than Republican, however this is balenced out by the fact that the group of most highly educated people are as well. After the last presidential election, the Democrats liked to point out that the states with the most educated people also had the strongest Democratic support, the opposite of your claim, although this doesn't necissarilly prove that the educated ones were the ones voting Democrat.
And of course the numbers could come out different depending on if you use mean or median education level, etc. In the end I'd guess that the average education levels of voters is more or less the same for Democrats and Republicans.
Slashdot Mirror
Weird Al's pancreas has an attractive force whose magnitude does not fall off with the square of the distance as other mere morals, but is rather simply inversionally proportional to the distance. It is suspected that this increased sensitivity to the pancreata of others is the source of his innate parodic connection to the musician around him. I have already requested funding to study this amazing phenomonem, and how it relates to his superhuman comedic powers, but the scientific establishment is not ready to accept such brilliant and unorthodox ideas, and have fought me at every step. This, however, will not stop me and someday my master plan to build an army of pancreaticly superior beings will be complete.
What and limit my potential memory-leak growth to 4 GB? You might prefer to stay in the stone age, but my firefox extensions will be able to leak 16 exabytes :)
Sure, get the site taken down, and punish the perpetrator. But if you don't know who did it, the last thing that you want to do is stand in front of a group of rebelious teens and make idle threats.
Although you might ask what good those are as well. :)
And I think you'll have a harder time convincing your boss to pay you to attend a "Programming Conference" in Second Life even if it is less expensive than a Las Vegas junket
There are two common flaws when dealing with certainty. One is the tendency to assert that you know something with complete certainty when you don't - to paint everything as black and white. The other is the tendency to jump to the conclusion that if there is any uncertainty in an idea then it is no better than a wild-ass guess - to paint everything as a single shade of muddy grey. In reality you have to learn to gauge the relative amount of certainty that exists in various theories and ideas. This isn't easy, but it is necessary.
No we don't have a definitive answer, and we never will. If you are expecting one, then you will be very disappointed with science, and with life in general, because there is no such thing. However, we have an answer-in-progress, in which we have a reasonable amount of confidence. Contrary to the media's depiction of global warming, and science in general, where each new discovery completely invalidates the previous consensus, the reality is that as we continue to learn more, and incorporate new variables, what we learn is supporting and refining what we already know. Which isn't to say sometimes things aren't proven wrong, but as a whole our current best guess is not jumping all over the map, but is converging to an answer as time goes on.
Debating the details that are still fairly uncertain is a very reasonable thing to do. However, dismissing the entire field altogether, or equivocating it with the "other sides" unfounded guesses and propaganda is folly.
I run into a simular gotchas regarding web apps. For example, I'll think all my Safari windows are closed, so I click on the Safari icon expecting to get a new window, but don't and can't figure out why until I remember that little music player "application" is really a safari window. Likewise, I have quit out of safari only to realize latter that I closed a web-app that I didn't mean to. It funny, that a lot of people think these apps are more user friendly, because they are just a webpage, and every one knows how to use a webpage. Whereas with me, since they are acting more and more like an application then a webpage, I think of them as such, which leads to small mistakes when they don't act entirely like an application.
I agree with you that web apps do have the potential to surplant desktop apps among the computer illiterate, but I'm not convinced that software subscriptions will fly even with them.
These people may not know anything about computers, but they do know what money is. It is everything I can do to convince computer illiterate people to pay for an antivirus subscription. And you can bet that other companies like Google or Yahoo, which have as much name recognition as Microsoft, will be competing in this space, and their versions will be advertisement supported. The computer illiterate will flock to those, not the sites with subscriptions.
Which isn't to say that the ad-supported sites can't be cash cows, or that Microsoft won't take that approach, but IMHO the idea of renting software is dead in the water.
This has nothing to do with "actual" teleportation.
All it is transferring the quantum state of one atom (spin etc) to that of another. So you aren't moving particles, you aren't transferring information about the relative arrangement of particles, or even what types of particles you are made of. If there were already two exact physical copies of your body you *might* be able to use an advanced version of this to sync up the quantum state of each corresponding atom, but even that is unlikely.
Hehe. I'm still trying to figure out how something with thousands of billions of atoms can be described as atomic. Or where they are finding macroscopic atoms. Must have teleported it in from another dimension.
You have 30 days to comply. enters cd key
You have 29 days to comply.
Awe, crap.
The population might be, but we are talking about population growth. That would only be true if the birthrate of the population was equal to the deathrate.
:)
And if you want to get picky, you might as well claim that the population of all countries, save those northern africa, are the result of immigration. Or if you don't consider people who were in an area when it was incorporated into the country as immigrants, then there are a large number of european colonists in north america which are no more immigrants to the United States as the Native Americans
Hah, you have been outknitpicked!
It is a Giant Gas planet after all.
As the other posters said, the purpose of the laser is to accelerate electrons. The way it works is that Hydrogen is ionized, breaking apart into protons and electrons, and heated to form a plasma. A laser is shot through this plasma, and the electrons are "pushed" down the chamber. Assuming I understanding this correctly, if the photons were reflected back through the chamber, the electrons would be pushed the opposite direction, undoing the work of the first traversal.
Now it's my turn to ask a question to the physicists:) The article stated that the reason that this worked well was because the plasma acted simular to cladding on a fiber, keeping the light focused in the center of the chamber. Does this mean that it might be possible to create curved chambers? It also mentioned that their next goal was to increase the length of the device by chaining one after another. If successfull, might it be possible to create a wavefield ring, where the particle could be accelerated for as long as they like before being spewed out?
WINE is a program that re-implements the windows system libraries, allowing you to run unmodified windows programs, without owning a copy of windows. It is not a hardware emulator, and therefore only works on the platform that the original program was compiled for. And they can't recompile the source to WoW, or MS Office, or any of the other apps, because they don't have the source to those apps. There are people that have gotten WINE to work inside an emulator, but at that point you are better off just running windows itself inside an emulator (like Virtual PC).
The same reason that the vast majority of people currently buy their music on CD when they could just steal it from a store, or copy it from a friend, or download it online. The same reason that thousands of people buy music from independent artists online, when they could just download it.
If you're trying to assert that most people would pirate music rather than paying for it, unless they physically prevented from doing so by their own property, then you are wrong. Contrary to the RIAA's twisted statistics, piracy is not decreasing sales. At the peak of napster's popularity sales at the register were rising, not falling. The falling numbers the RIAA liked to quote were wholesale numbers. This can be traced to the stores streamlining their inventory and stocking systems as a result of the internet. At that time, music stores near colleges did have falling sales, but so did book stores near colleges, and both correlate strongly to increases in internet sales of the same item. Subsequently, the decrease in sales that have been seen, are largely in the "oldies" adult market - and yet if you look at the statistics for what types of music is being pirated, it is clear piracy is not to blame for that. The threat of piracy is overblown, and unsubstantiated.
So no, most people are not selfish assholes, just you. But hey, congratulations! It is the minority of people like you that have given the RIAA leverage to strip away the fair-use right of the rest of the people in this country, and bias the laws in favor of further consolidation of the market. You sure stuck it to The Man.
My experiance with setting up hardware using the Mandrake control panel a couple years ago, was that when it worked it was easy as cake, but if it didn't you were worse off then having nothing. For example, I was attempting to setup a hauppauge TV tuner card, which I knew was supported in linux. The rest of the install so far had been a snap and it recognized all my hardware with no problems. So I run the TV tuner card setup from the control panel, it pops up a dialog box saying it is setting up my card then the dialog box closes. No success or error indication, just closes. I try to use the tuner and get nothing. So I open up the TV tuner script to see what was going on. All it did was issue a bunch of shell commands, without checking the return value, without verifying that anything worked, or providing any feedback to the user - just shoot out a bunch of command and hope it works. Because I had no idea how far it got in the script before failing I had no idea what state my system or config files were in. I looked at other configuration scripts and found some (although not all) of them to be just as bad.
I was not impressed. Configuration utilites should always verify that the changes they make work, and if not revert the system to the state it was in before they were run. They should always inform the user of the success/failure of the operation, and preferably provide enough information to let the user know how to procede - Run such and such program to test your new hardware, this is not a supported card, unexpected error, etc. Hopefully, this has been improved upon since I last used Mandriva.
Remember, the Supreme Court does not over-turn laws in the way you might think they do - they merely interpret the laws, which in the case of conflicting laws means determining which law "trumps" the other, in the scenario ruled upon. This is an important distinction. As an imaginary example, consider a state passing a law that says it is illegal to kill dogs. Then someone is attacked by a dog and kills it. Suppose that the Supreme Court took the stance that there is a constitutional right to self-defense, and naturally the constitution is higher on the pecking order than a state law. As in any case, the law would still stand, but in situations where self-defense is in play, other courts would now follow the precedent of the Supreme Court and find people not guilty. In all other situations, the law would remain in effect.
You can see then, that the justification that the Supreme Court gives for its rulings are just as important as the ruling itself, as they determine what aspects of the situation ruled upon are important in the ruling, and thus what situations the precedent will apply to in the future.
Some courts have been in favor of making very wide rulings that cause sweeping change to the way our laws are viewed. John Roberts, the current Supreme Court Justice, however, believes in narrow rulings. He has been quoted as saying "If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, in my view it is necessary not to decide more". By focusing tightly on the details of a particular case, and not the wider social phenomena, you usually end up with less controversial rulings, but also tend to support the status quo.
All of which is a long way of saying that you won't get the answers you want, unless you can find someone with such patent who tries to enforce it.
Great where can I get a ride on one - oh, only if I am one of a handful of jet pilots in the Air force or government space program.
Sure there is - because it can and will be completed within the next decade, unlike the private man-to-orbit projects under way. It will also likely be much more affordable than the orbital trips, even when they do come to fruition. Bungee jumping will never scale to orbital velocities, but that does not make it worthless.
Yeah, and damn that rafting company who scammed me out of $50 by providing a desired service in exchange for a mutually agreed upon sum. Dirty Capitalists.
That was the whole point of the X-prize. It was never intended to go towards orbit, and the hope was that it would lead to a commercial venture. The people who provided the money for the X-prize don't feel cheated, and are very happy about Branson's deal with Rutan to develop it into profitable business.
Oh, and you people bitching about the environmental impact need to get some perspective. There are thousands of flights across the world every day, and millions of vehicles being driven and thousands of coal plants spewing CO2 and soot. And you are worried about the pollution that one sub-orbital launch a week is going to do.
Seriously, I am used to people on slashdot being critical jerks, but this thread is ridiculous. Rutan is an excellent high-performance plane designer, and rather than sitting around bitching about how he wished there were private alternatives to get into space, he took what knew and did something about it. In just a few more years he will be providing an opportunity to people that has never existed before, and which no one will match for many more years to come. You may not think it is worth the price, but thousands of other people do, and are more than willing to pay the $250,000 to get a glimpse of space. Sure I would prefer to see an orbital trip. But I will always be far more excited to see concrete progress in the present, no matter how small, than I will be to dream about vaporware.
Linux and the networking applications that run on it are widely and freely available, but that does not mean it is legal for Linksys to include it in their products without following the licenses on that software.
This is a copyright issue plain and simple. It doesn't matter if the code is widely used and distributed, Microsoft maintains copyright on it. What matters is if he really did include Microsoft's code in FairUse4WM, and whether the route Microsoft has for pursing this in the courts is legitimate.
I agree that a standardized 12VDC connector on all electronic devices would be nice, like every other poster here has pointed out, but I don't think that is what google is talking about. You can already get power supplies that take 12VDC in, or even dual 48VDC (telecom standard), and I would be surprised if google isn't using something like that already.
What they are recommending is that the power supply only have 12V out, and all other DC-DC conversions take place on the mother board. Unfortunately, the article didn't go into any detail as to how this would save power, and I don't see how it would make much difference. To me it just seems like you are moving components off the PS and onto the motherboard. Perhaps there is an EE around who could explain it to me.
While the GPL Preamble that you quoted does not give you permission to copy the license, that does not preclude the FSF from giving people permision to do so elsewhere. In fact they do allow you to modify the GPL under certain terms as explained in the GPL FAQ.
The short version is that you are not allowed to change the license as it is applied to that piece of software, nor are you allowed to create a modified version and pass it off as the GPL. But you can license your software under whatever terms you wish, and the FSF will not prevent you from using parts of the GPL in your license provided that you do not call it GPL.
That was my first thought as well after reading the EFF article - just because the feature was absent from a PR document, does not mean that it will be absent from the device.
But this engadget interview with J Allard confirms it. They ask him about PlaysForSure three times, and each time he gives an explaination about why Zune will not support it.
Another interesting question that this brings up is if they will be licensing their Zune DRM to other players. If not, who wants to start placing bets on how long before the EU slams them with another antitrust lawsuit?
You may or may not notice the difference on an interlaced fullscreen display, but you will definatly notice the difference on a progressive-scan widescreen display.
I don't think you would need to. When you have 100 proof alchohol it is 50% alchohol by volume. It isn't like putting salt into water where it saturates at a fraction of the volume of the water. So you couldn't be filtering this out (where is the filter going to hide that much volume), although you could be loosing some to evaporation during the filtering process. It would be interesting to measure the exact amount, but as there wasn't an obvious change in volume, it definately wasn't much.
And of course the numbers could come out different depending on if you use mean or median education level, etc. In the end I'd guess that the average education levels of voters is more or less the same for Democrats and Republicans.