This uses tor as the proxy, which bounces your (encrypted) traffic through a bunch of other computers, before getting to the site you want, making it practically impossible to track where the original request came from. It adds a ton of latency to the transaction, so while it is okay for lean pages like google, it is slower than 33.6 modem for pages with a bunch of linked content (images, iframes).
Throughout the course of history, there are examples of ideas whose time had come. Calculus is one of those, the radio is another. To the outsider they are incredibly complex and original, to the insider they are the natural progression of the art. Their worthiness seems larger due to the fact that they are culminating accomplishments in the field, but in reality the puzzle was already mostly completed by other people. History likes heros so we build up the big name scientists, and play down the others, when in fact accomplishment in science is a combination of being intelligent, hardworking, and being in the right place at the right time.
Furthermore, I think you are getting caught up on the terminology here. The purpose of patents are to encourage the advancement of science. Seeing as how calculus was created, by not only one but two mathematicians, without the existence of patents, then it is obvious that patents were not needed to promote it's development.
I refuse to write any date in mm/dd/yy or dd/mm/yy format, because I can never remember which way people are going to interpret it. For technical work I use ISO format (2006-08-02), which is sortable and unambiguous to anyone who has encountered it. For non-technical use, like anything I have to sign, I use "Drafting" or "Military" format (2 Aug 2006) which is completely unambiguous. I have never once had a single person complain, and it saves me all sorts of headache.
I don't see how this is the "biggest security flaw ever discovered. Any system will have some method of flashing new code if you have access to the hardware, and while this makes it a little easier, it is not as big of a deal as they make it out to be. After you verify that the system has the correct (independently audited) code loaded into it, you put a tamper-proof sticker on the case, and call it good.
This is nowhere near as bad as the bugs that allowed exploits though the normal user interface, or the fact that the way the votes are stored allows easy tampering by election officials, or the fact that there is no way to recount or verify that the recorded votes are correct.
This is something that can be improved upon, but it isn't a fatal flaw and certainly not one of the main reasons that Diebold machines should be banned.
I agree that this would need a constitutional ammendment to be practical. I also agree that we shouldn't go to a strictly popular vote for the presidential election. But the current system has some real problems that could be solved without eliminating the type of balance that currently exists.
The way that elections play out today, a huge amount of focus is put on states that happen to have about the same number of Democrats as Republicans, while states that are strongly Republican or Democrat are largely ignored. Of all the reasons to give one state more influence than another that is the most rediculous.
If you were to give 1 vote to each state, and then have say 50 votes which were determined by national popular election, that would give even more voting power to the small states than they have now, while deflating the importance of the swing states.
Note - I am replying to a whole bunch of posts in general in this one not just yours - I don't want you to get the impression that I am putting words in your mouth.
Many of the original intentions of the founders no longer apply to the extent that they once did.
Yes, the founders originally intended to create a system that balanced direct democracy and rule by the Gentry class. Back then, the only people with any education to speak of were the wealthy. The only ones with opportunities to apprentice into government were the wealthy. Therefore they were the only ones fit to govern. That is no longer the case - we have universal (if mediocre) primary education, and anyone who shows merit and initiative can get an excellent university education, regardless of their class. While most politicians continue to come from political families, many others have risen from low beginnings, and have served the country well. The balances meant to keep the gentry in power are no longer necessary or beneficial.
Yes, the founders intended for the states to have more influence on the selection of national leaders, but they also intended for the scope of the national government to only deal with large inter-state issues that the individual states could not. Things like interstate and international trade, treaties, and national defense. The federal government has greatly exceeded those original aims, and now passes laws, collects taxes, and runs social programs that directly affects the individuals in our country, rather than indirectly though the states. Therefore, the citizens should have direct representation in the federal government, rather than indirectly through the states.
Yes, the founders originally created a system where representation was dolled out according geo-political boundaries, both in national government, within the individual states. But at the time, opinions and interests were very much clustered geographically. The difficulty of travel, the tightly knit communities, and the fact that the economies of each location was determined largely by it's natural resources, led to this. Again, this is something that no longer applies to the extent that it did when our country was founded. Now opinions on national issues vary as much between members of a community as they do between communities, and only the most popular opinions from each location get any representation in congress. Geographic representation used to promote a wide spectrum of views in congress, now it marginalizes them.
I agree that it is still useful for the states to have some degree of representation. My opinion is that for presidential elections the states should each have two votes corresponding to the two Senators, while the votes corresponding to Representatives should be determined by the popular vote. This would keep the current feature of smaller states having more influence than they otherwise would, while getting rid of the winner-takes-all garbage that turns elections into a political game and joke, rather than an accurate reflection of the will of the people.
I would even go so far to entertain the idea of electing the lower house itself according to some system of proportional representation, rather than districting. Why does my small arbitrarily (or gerrymandered) district need its own representative in Congress of United States of America? Really, now - are the views of its 0.25% of the population that much more different from the rest of the state to merit its own representation in the federal government? And yet a political party which holds over 10% of the registered votes - that represents views held by at least 10% of the population - by cannot get a single seat out of the 435 in the House.
Enacting proportional representation in the House, while maintaining state election(of populus or legislature) in the Senate, would preserve a balance between state (locally clustered) interests, and popular (distributed) interests. It would also break up the current two party syst
algae biomass is probably considerably more cost-effective.
Definately not. Algae biomass has some great things going for it, the biggest of which is that it can scale to produce large quantities of biodiesel using a small amount of land. Compare this to traditional biomass sources, which would need all the aritable land on the earth to match our current gasoline and diesel consumption. However, it is not even close to being economical. When the DOE ended it's algae program in the late 90's, the optimistic estimates were that costs could be brought down to something like 10x the cost of gasoline. I would love to see something change that and I wish the researchers all the best luck but I am not holding my breath.
The tar file format, like most unix things has undergone several revisions and branches. In POSIX.1, a new format, called the Pax Interchange Format, was created as a backwards compatible extention of the tar format, that allowed for storing of arbitrary metadata. How this metadata is used is naturally left up to the system's implementation of tar and pax. I don't know how widely these extentions are used. I know that in Mac OS 10.4, metadata including resource forks are supported, but I think they implemented them using thier normal flat-file hacks (._myfile holds metadata for myfile), and not the pax extentions. This man file has a little more information.
That's true, but not really relevant. The OP's point wasn't that MSN sucked, but that the google accessibility search put msn.com (not search.msn.com) at the top of the list, when it didn't belong there. From that example, it seems like the google accessibility search is capable of determining if a site is accessible in general (which msn.com is), and if it meets the search terms. But it does not appear capable of determining if the particular information searched for is accessible, or if a site is easy for to use for a given purpose.
On the other hand if you query for "web search" then search.yahoo.com and search.msn.com are the top two entries, which makes more sense.
Yes you can. Go to your profile, click Preferences, Homepage, then scroll down to the 'Customize Stories on the Homepage'. Backslash is there along with all the other sections. Click the far left option to disable it completely.
There are some things that I prefer renting over buying, and movies are one of those things. With the exception of a few "classics", movies don't have enough replay value for me to justify paying more to buy them. Heck, if DVD's were as cheap as rental I wouldn't buy them because they would just be one more thing cluttering up the house.
However, the concept of rental clashes with the nature of the online and digital world. Everything that exists can be copied in exact form. You can't return data - you have a copy, not the original. The way I see it there are two options, the concept of rental can be preserved artificially with the introduction of DRM, or it can be abandoned in favor of purchases.
As a consumer I don't have a problem with the general idea of DRM on a rental - my fair use rights aren't being violated, because I don't have the right to backup, timeshift, or format shift rentals to begin with (unlike media I own, for which any DRM is intolerable). Where the problem occurs is the proprietary nature of DRM. At best, the rental DRM would be an "Open Standard" meaning anyone who pays RAND* patent fees and signs an NDA will be allowed to implement a device, and be given keys (specific to them) to decode the data. Then I could buy online rental devices or software from any number of manufactures, and it would be guaranteed to work with any number of online rental stores. This is similar to the legal workings of DVDs, Blueray, WMV. At the worst you have proprietary technologies, where each company has it's own format and player, like with Apple or DVIX (the first one). In both cases there will never be an open source player - the best we could hope for is something like the new Real Player that has an open source core with proprietary plug-ins. Even that is unlikely, as the movie industry is demanding end-to-end security (HDMI, Trusted Computing) which an open source operating system would not provide.
In the other option, the internet utopia dream was that the price of media would drop to the point of making rental unnecessary and removing the allure of piracy from the general public. The media industries are strongly opposed to this model of the future, and the only way it will ever happen is if independent media producers embrace it with success, and eventually put the current media companies out of business. This is also unlikely given the weight that the media companies have in government. Therfore, media purchases will also be hindered with DRM for the conceivable future, and will continue to be priced at traditional rates.
So given DRM on rental verses DRM on purchase, I definitely prefer the previous, but there is another potential risk with DRM rental and it is a biggy. The media companies have shown themselves very fond of the idea of DRM rental, as seen with Napster. They like the model where people don't own copies of media, but instead just subscribe to services that provide them. If too many people embrace these services, we could end up in a situation where everything is locked up. We continue to hear stories about how the original archive copies of important cultural media is being lost due to the extreme length of copyright, and the mismanagement of the copyright holders (Dr Who, classic films). But in most of those cases, at least lower quality copies exist in the form of consumer media. However, if we can no longer record broadcast media, and there are no purchased copies of media, the copyright holders will be the only ones capable of preserving the records of our popular culture. Time and time again they show themselves inept at doing so.
Anyway, I plan on sticking to buying CD's and renting locally for as long as those options exist, and continue to support those independent producers who treat their customers with respect. I'll keep trying to inform my representatives about the issues. But I'm not optimistic. We'll see what happens.
* For the uninitiated: RAND = Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory NDA = Non-Disclosure Agreement
It would take longer and cost more money to restart production on the shuttle than it will for the CEV to be completed. It took over five years for endevour to be built, and they already had stuctural spares. It is the worst possible decision that NASA could make both politically and pragmatically.
Shivetya is right. The reason for the ultraconservative behavior with regards to NASA is because they can't afford another failure until the CEV is ready to fly. It would very likely result in the termination of the shuttle program altogether. Now many people here would applaud that, thinking that it would free up money for the CEV, but it wouldn't.
One of the major costs of any rocket program is the maintainance, launch, and support crews. There is no CEV related work for them to do right now as it is still on the drawing board, and you can't just fire all those people, and then expect to hire them back once there is work again. They will have moved onto other jobs, and the people you hire as thier replacements wouldn't have the working knowledge of the system that they current staff does - remember that the new launcher will be heavily based on shuttle technology.
So NASA has to keep flying the shuttle, in order to justify these jobs, and they can't be to risky about it, lest they lose another. I have the luxury of saying that we should just accept the risks, and finish the ISS with the shuttle as quickly as possible, but NASA doesn't. So we will continue to see slow sheepish behavior until the replacement is ready, and NASA is poised to do things that the public finds worthy of risk.
The parent's post had nothing to do with single core chips. What he was getting at is that intel is likely to release a quad-core chip to fill the role that the dual Xeons have filled. Therefore, as far as the apple linup goes, dual 2-core processors will be a very short lived technology depending on how long they wait to release thier pro line.
Patenting something does not prevent anyone from reverse engineering it, and in fact they wouldnt need to because the mechanism would be documented in the patent.
Well no, because you can't patent a protocol. Instead they could patent a core method upon which the protocol is based, and that method would be made public - in non-specific legalese, that would in itself be practically useless for the purpose of implementing the protocol. The details of the protocol itself would still need to be reverse engineered.
You are absolutely right about reverse engineering not being illegal. In fact even with the DMCA reverse engineering is still entirely legal. The catch with both the DCMA and patents is what you can do with the protocol once it has been reverse-engineered. In the case of patents, the basic priciples have been disclosed, and you are allowed to distribute any additional information that you learn about the implementation, but you are not allowed to implement the protocol without a patent license.
In the case of the DCMA, you may be* prohibited from disiminating information that you have reverse-engineered, if can be used to circumvent a copyright protection device. I don't think that would apply in this case - what copyrighted work is being protected? The only possibility are the conversations themselves, but this does not allow you to listen in on anothers conversation, it simply allows you to initiate new coversations. Assuming that you are using secure cryptography, revealing the mechanism of the encryption does not weaken the security of the system, only revealing the keys, which in this case are generated per connection, like SSL.
So unless Skype's security is crap, which I don't believe to be true, the DMCA would not restrict you from publishing the details of the protocol, or third party implementations of it. On the other hand patents could. Therefore, the submitter was correct in bringing them up as a potential barrier, even if his wording was not.
* The law contradicts itself, and while there have been some precident setting cases, the interpretation is still very much up in the air.
Does it have to be cancerous? How about a nice, non-cancerous lump on my neck? I mean you wouldn't want the host to expire prematurely - then what would become of the precious, err, data?
Then again, what with the cancerous cells all replicating out of control, you wouldn't to do manual backups, would you now. That is certainly something to concider.
This new format for backslash is an interesting idea. I haven't decided if I like it or not yet. If the editors are reading, I do have one suggestion though. Could you file all the backslash articles in the backslash section? One of the excellent features that you guys have added recently is the per-user settings on what stories get displayed on the front page, and whether they are in full or abbreviated form. However, it is only usefull if the stories are properly catagorized. While backslash stories will always fit into another catagory, I personally would prefer that they be marked as backslash, and filterable as such.
It is not that ripping your music to mp3 format is illegal, it is that there is no legal way to implement an mp3 encoder as free software. The mp3 format uses several patents, and you have to pay a patent licence to if you want to encode mp3's for any reason other than educational purposes. That is why LAME is named LAME (LAME Ain't an Mp3 Encoder) - it is "reference software" created for educational use only. If you use it for any other reason than that, including personal use, you are breaking the law.
Will you personally be sued? Unlikely. And for a long time the patent holders looked the other way. However, around 2000 the patent holders started sending out cease and desist orders to various open source projects that included MP3 encoders. Because of this most of the linux distributions have stopped including MP3 support in their base package, and it now has to be installed seperately.
Because the exact same complaint applies to proprietary software. It is not true that anyone can introduce code into an OSS project. While everyone can make their own private modifications to the source, that is entirely different from getting your code accepted into the official repository. Every reputable project out there restricts commit permission to developers who have proven themselves usefull. All other patches have to go through one of the main developers first. Now these "trusted" developers certainly could insert malicious code, and given the division of labor it may very well go unnoticed by other developers (ESR's million eyeball theory is bunk).
However, this is no different from a propietary product. These are often developed by large teams, working under unacceptable deadlines. Therefore, code reviews don't always happen, or are not a vigorous as they could be. Those conditions could also lead to disgruntled employees, some of which won't have the highest moral resolve. Some companies don't have the highest moral resolve, and will knowingly put malicious code into their product. It is just as possible for malicious code to get into proprietary software as open source software.
So what it boils down to is that OSS is no different than proprietary software in this regard. If you trust Windows, you should also trust Linux. If you trust Photoshop, you should trust Gimp. If don't trust Joe Sourceforge, then you also shouldn't trust Joe Shareware. Sometimes knowing that a product is widely used and reputable is good enough. Sometimes it isn't, and in that case you either need to write it yourself or, like you said, audit the code.
Oops, that should have been Layers->Colors->Threshold.
Also I realized that the cartoon filter may be troublesome if one of the indexed colors in your picture is black. Here is an alternate procedure:
* Filter : Blur : Selective Gaussian Blur, with radius of 5-10 and Max Delta of around 16-128 (depending on how textured image is) * Image : Mode : Index, with Generate Optimum Palette of 5 - 20 colors * Image : Mode : RGB * Filters : Edge-Detect : Sobel (vertical and horizontal) * Layers : Colors : Invert * Layers : Colors : Threshold, move black slider all the way to the right.
I'll add to the parent by pointing out that if you go into Filter->Blur->Selective Gaussian Blur, with radius of 5-10 and Max Delta of around 92-128, before converting to index mode then you will end up with bigger-rounder shapes, like what you normally see in a color-by number. Afterwords, the easiest way to get rid of the color and be left with only the black outline is to go into Image->Colors->Threshold, and slide the left slider almost all the way to the left.
Those aren't the only numbers in the study. They also measured reaction time, and found that it was decreased for both drunk drivers and cell phone users, but more for the cell phone users. They never said the numbers imply that driving with.08 has they same likelyhood of getting into an accident as sober - indeed they found that it does impair your driving ability, just not enough to cause an accident in the situation they tested against. The sample size was sufficent for the results that they claimed, just not for the ones that you are claiming.
I am not a lawyer and so I don't know what the legal requirements for death threats or hate speech are, but if jokes were always taken at face value, there would be literally hundreds of thousands of people on the internet who would be guilty of that crime.
Then again he wasn't found guilty of any crime, just that the school was within it's bounds for the suspension. Considering that the effects of his activities at home did spill into the classroom and were thus the realm of school authority, some punishment was in order. However, one semester suspension for a joke is too harsh in my opinion.
The teacher seriously needs to learn to chill out. Kids have been drawing gory pictures of teachers for years, and unless there was other behavior that suggested that this was anymore than an immature childish joke, he over-reacted.
I also don't like the fact that the judge considered the reaction of the teacher in determining whether the event was a joke or not. I can see in cases like harassment, if the defendant considers something harassment, then it is regardless of how accused sees it - if the behavior continues after accused has been informed as such. But the idea that you can't joke about murder at all, lest someone take you seriously is pushing things to far.
You are missinterpreting the numbers. They are not stating that you have a 3 in 40 chance of getting into an accident if you are talking on a cell phone. They are stating that 3 in 40 did get into an accident in the situation provided by the simulator.
That's right 0 drunk drivers had an accident in the study. That means that the study proves drunk driving is perfectly safe right?
No, it means that drunk people (for low values of drunk), are more safe than people talking on a cell phone in the same driving situation.
Accidents are the usually the result of the combination of several things - someone runs a red light, causing the intersecting car to slam on his brakes, the person behind him who was tailgating and talking on the cellphone can't react in time and rear-ends him. If they were to expose the subjects of the test to driving situations whose distribution was representitive of how often the actually occur in the real world, this study would have taken decades. Instead, they exposed the drivers to the types of situations where a quick reponse rate was important.
The purpose of the study was not to find absolute numbers on how often someone on a cellphone will get into an accident, but relative numbers on how often they get into an accident compared to other situations. It would be BS to quote the numbers as such, but the study doesn't do so.
Slashdot Mirror
This uses tor as the proxy, which bounces your (encrypted) traffic through a bunch of other computers, before getting to the site you want, making it practically impossible to track where the original request came from. It adds a ton of latency to the transaction, so while it is okay for lean pages like google, it is slower than 33.6 modem for pages with a bunch of linked content (images, iframes).
I came here to say the exact same thing as hey!.
Throughout the course of history, there are examples of ideas whose time had come. Calculus is one of those, the radio is another. To the outsider they are incredibly complex and original, to the insider they are the natural progression of the art. Their worthiness seems larger due to the fact that they are culminating accomplishments in the field, but in reality the puzzle was already mostly completed by other people. History likes heros so we build up the big name scientists, and play down the others, when in fact accomplishment in science is a combination of being intelligent, hardworking, and being in the right place at the right time.
Furthermore, I think you are getting caught up on the terminology here. The purpose of patents are to encourage the advancement of science. Seeing as how calculus was created, by not only one but two mathematicians, without the existence of patents, then it is obvious that patents were not needed to promote it's development.
I refuse to write any date in mm/dd/yy or dd/mm/yy format, because I can never remember which way people are going to interpret it. For technical work I use ISO format (2006-08-02), which is sortable and unambiguous to anyone who has encountered it. For non-technical use, like anything I have to sign, I use "Drafting" or "Military" format (2 Aug 2006) which is completely unambiguous. I have never once had a single person complain, and it saves me all sorts of headache.
I don't see how this is the "biggest security flaw ever discovered. Any system will have some method of flashing new code if you have access to the hardware, and while this makes it a little easier, it is not as big of a deal as they make it out to be. After you verify that the system has the correct (independently audited) code loaded into it, you put a tamper-proof sticker on the case, and call it good.
This is nowhere near as bad as the bugs that allowed exploits though the normal user interface, or the fact that the way the votes are stored allows easy tampering by election officials, or the fact that there is no way to recount or verify that the recorded votes are correct.
This is something that can be improved upon, but it isn't a fatal flaw and certainly not one of the main reasons that Diebold machines should be banned.
I agree that this would need a constitutional ammendment to be practical. I also agree that we shouldn't go to a strictly popular vote for the presidential election. But the current system has some real problems that could be solved without eliminating the type of balance that currently exists.
The way that elections play out today, a huge amount of focus is put on states that happen to have about the same number of Democrats as Republicans, while states that are strongly Republican or Democrat are largely ignored. Of all the reasons to give one state more influence than another that is the most rediculous.
If you were to give 1 vote to each state, and then have say 50 votes which were determined by national popular election, that would give even more voting power to the small states than they have now, while deflating the importance of the swing states.
Note - I am replying to a whole bunch of posts in general in this one not just yours - I don't want you to get the impression that I am putting words in your mouth.
Many of the original intentions of the founders no longer apply to the extent that they once did.
Yes, the founders originally intended to create a system that balanced direct democracy and rule by the Gentry class. Back then, the only people with any education to speak of were the wealthy. The only ones with opportunities to apprentice into government were the wealthy. Therefore they were the only ones fit to govern. That is no longer the case - we have universal (if mediocre) primary education, and anyone who shows merit and initiative can get an excellent university education, regardless of their class. While most politicians continue to come from political families, many others have risen from low beginnings, and have served the country well. The balances meant to keep the gentry in power are no longer necessary or beneficial.
Yes, the founders intended for the states to have more influence on the selection of national leaders, but they also intended for the scope of the national government to only deal with large inter-state issues that the individual states could not. Things like interstate and international trade, treaties, and national defense. The federal government has greatly exceeded those original aims, and now passes laws, collects taxes, and runs social programs that directly affects the individuals in our country, rather than indirectly though the states. Therefore, the citizens should have direct representation in the federal government, rather than indirectly through the states.
Yes, the founders originally created a system where representation was dolled out according geo-political boundaries, both in national government, within the individual states. But at the time, opinions and interests were very much clustered geographically. The difficulty of travel, the tightly knit communities, and the fact that the economies of each location was determined largely by it's natural resources, led to this. Again, this is something that no longer applies to the extent that it did when our country was founded. Now opinions on national issues vary as much between members of a community as they do between communities, and only the most popular opinions from each location get any representation in congress. Geographic representation used to promote a wide spectrum of views in congress, now it marginalizes them.
I agree that it is still useful for the states to have some degree of representation. My opinion is that for presidential elections the states should each have two votes corresponding to the two Senators, while the votes corresponding to Representatives should be determined by the popular vote. This would keep the current feature of smaller states having more influence than they otherwise would, while getting rid of the winner-takes-all garbage that turns elections into a political game and joke, rather than an accurate reflection of the will of the people.
I would even go so far to entertain the idea of electing the lower house itself according to some system of proportional representation, rather than districting. Why does my small arbitrarily (or gerrymandered) district need its own representative in Congress of United States of America? Really, now - are the views of its 0.25% of the population that much more different from the rest of the state to merit its own representation in the federal government? And yet a political party which holds over 10% of the registered votes - that represents views held by at least 10% of the population - by cannot get a single seat out of the 435 in the House.
Enacting proportional representation in the House, while maintaining state election(of populus or legislature) in the Senate, would preserve a balance between state (locally clustered) interests, and popular (distributed) interests. It would also break up the current two party syst
algae biomass is probably considerably more cost-effective.
Definately not. Algae biomass has some great things going for it, the biggest of which is that it can scale to produce large quantities of biodiesel using a small amount of land. Compare this to traditional biomass sources, which would need all the aritable land on the earth to match our current gasoline and diesel consumption. However, it is not even close to being economical. When the DOE ended it's algae program in the late 90's, the optimistic estimates were that costs could be brought down to something like 10x the cost of gasoline. I would love to see something change that and I wish the researchers all the best luck but I am not holding my breath.
The tar file format, like most unix things has undergone several revisions and branches. In POSIX.1, a new format, called the Pax Interchange Format, was created as a backwards compatible extention of the tar format, that allowed for storing of arbitrary metadata. How this metadata is used is naturally left up to the system's implementation of tar and pax. I don't know how widely these extentions are used. I know that in Mac OS 10.4, metadata including resource forks are supported, but I think they implemented them using thier normal flat-file hacks (._myfile holds metadata for myfile), and not the pax extentions. This man file has a little more information.
That's true, but not really relevant. The OP's point wasn't that MSN sucked, but that the google accessibility search put msn.com (not search.msn.com) at the top of the list, when it didn't belong there. From that example, it seems like the google accessibility search is capable of determining if a site is accessible in general (which msn.com is), and if it meets the search terms. But it does not appear capable of determining if the particular information searched for is accessible, or if a site is easy for to use for a given purpose.
On the other hand if you query for "web search" then search.yahoo.com and search.msn.com are the top two entries, which makes more sense.
Yes you can. Go to your profile, click Preferences, Homepage, then scroll down to the 'Customize Stories on the Homepage'. Backslash is there along with all the other sections. Click the far left option to disable it completely.
Well here on the Planet Earth, a mile high would be a molten airship.
Why anyone would build an airship to operate at less than 3960 miles is beyond me.
There are some things that I prefer renting over buying, and movies are one of those things. With the exception of a few "classics", movies don't have enough replay value for me to justify paying more to buy them. Heck, if DVD's were as cheap as rental I wouldn't buy them because they would just be one more thing cluttering up the house.
However, the concept of rental clashes with the nature of the online and digital world. Everything that exists can be copied in exact form. You can't return data - you have a copy, not the original. The way I see it there are two options, the concept of rental can be preserved artificially with the introduction of DRM, or it can be abandoned in favor of purchases.
As a consumer I don't have a problem with the general idea of DRM on a rental - my fair use rights aren't being violated, because I don't have the right to backup, timeshift, or format shift rentals to begin with (unlike media I own, for which any DRM is intolerable). Where the problem occurs is the proprietary nature of DRM. At best, the rental DRM would be an "Open Standard" meaning anyone who pays RAND* patent fees and signs an NDA will be allowed to implement a device, and be given keys (specific to them) to decode the data. Then I could buy online rental devices or software from any number of manufactures, and it would be guaranteed to work with any number of online rental stores. This is similar to the legal workings of DVDs, Blueray, WMV. At the worst you have proprietary technologies, where each company has it's own format and player, like with Apple or DVIX (the first one). In both cases there will never be an open source player - the best we could hope for is something like the new Real Player that has an open source core with proprietary plug-ins. Even that is unlikely, as the movie industry is demanding end-to-end security (HDMI, Trusted Computing) which an open source operating system would not provide.
In the other option, the internet utopia dream was that the price of media would drop to the point of making rental unnecessary and removing the allure of piracy from the general public. The media industries are strongly opposed to this model of the future, and the only way it will ever happen is if independent media producers embrace it with success, and eventually put the current media companies out of business. This is also unlikely given the weight that the media companies have in government. Therfore, media purchases will also be hindered with DRM for the conceivable future, and will continue to be priced at traditional rates.
So given DRM on rental verses DRM on purchase, I definitely prefer the previous, but there is another potential risk with DRM rental and it is a biggy. The media companies have shown themselves very fond of the idea of DRM rental, as seen with Napster. They like the model where people don't own copies of media, but instead just subscribe to services that provide them. If too many people embrace these services, we could end up in a situation where everything is locked up. We continue to hear stories about how the original archive copies of important cultural media is being lost due to the extreme length of copyright, and the mismanagement of the copyright holders (Dr Who, classic films). But in most of those cases, at least lower quality copies exist in the form of consumer media. However, if we can no longer record broadcast media, and there are no purchased copies of media, the copyright holders will be the only ones capable of preserving the records of our popular culture. Time and time again they show themselves inept at doing so.
Anyway, I plan on sticking to buying CD's and renting locally for as long as those options exist, and continue to support those independent producers who treat their customers with respect. I'll keep trying to inform my representatives about the issues. But I'm not optimistic. We'll see what happens.
* For the uninitiated:
RAND = Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory
NDA = Non-Disclosure Agreement
It would take longer and cost more money to restart production on the shuttle than it will for the CEV to be completed. It took over five years for endevour to be built, and they already had stuctural spares. It is the worst possible decision that NASA could make both politically and pragmatically.
Shivetya is right. The reason for the ultraconservative behavior with regards to NASA is because they can't afford another failure until the CEV is ready to fly. It would very likely result in the termination of the shuttle program altogether. Now many people here would applaud that, thinking that it would free up money for the CEV, but it wouldn't.
One of the major costs of any rocket program is the maintainance, launch, and support crews. There is no CEV related work for them to do right now as it is still on the drawing board, and you can't just fire all those people, and then expect to hire them back once there is work again. They will have moved onto other jobs, and the people you hire as thier replacements wouldn't have the working knowledge of the system that they current staff does - remember that the new launcher will be heavily based on shuttle technology.
So NASA has to keep flying the shuttle, in order to justify these jobs, and they can't be to risky about it, lest they lose another. I have the luxury of saying that we should just accept the risks, and finish the ISS with the shuttle as quickly as possible, but NASA doesn't. So we will continue to see slow sheepish behavior until the replacement is ready, and NASA is poised to do things that the public finds worthy of risk.
Thanks for that explaination, too bad you haven't been modded up.
The parent's post had nothing to do with single core chips. What he was getting at is that intel is likely to release a quad-core chip to fill the role that the dual Xeons have filled. Therefore, as far as the apple linup goes, dual 2-core processors will be a very short lived technology depending on how long they wait to release thier pro line.
You are absolutely right about reverse engineering not being illegal. In fact even with the DMCA reverse engineering is still entirely legal. The catch with both the DCMA and patents is what you can do with the protocol once it has been reverse-engineered. In the case of patents, the basic priciples have been disclosed, and you are allowed to distribute any additional information that you learn about the implementation, but you are not allowed to implement the protocol without a patent license.
In the case of the DCMA, you may be* prohibited from disiminating information that you have reverse-engineered, if can be used to circumvent a copyright protection device. I don't think that would apply in this case - what copyrighted work is being protected? The only possibility are the conversations themselves, but this does not allow you to listen in on anothers conversation, it simply allows you to initiate new coversations. Assuming that you are using secure cryptography, revealing the mechanism of the encryption does not weaken the security of the system, only revealing the keys, which in this case are generated per connection, like SSL.
So unless Skype's security is crap, which I don't believe to be true, the DMCA would not restrict you from publishing the details of the protocol, or third party implementations of it. On the other hand patents could. Therefore, the submitter was correct in bringing them up as a potential barrier, even if his wording was not.
* The law contradicts itself, and while there have been some precident setting cases, the interpretation is still very much up in the air.
Does it have to be cancerous? How about a nice, non-cancerous lump on my neck? I mean you wouldn't want the host to expire prematurely - then what would become of the precious, err, data?
Then again, what with the cancerous cells all replicating out of control, you wouldn't to do manual backups, would you now. That is certainly something to concider.
This new format for backslash is an interesting idea. I haven't decided if I like it or not yet. If the editors are reading, I do have one suggestion though. Could you file all the backslash articles in the backslash section? One of the excellent features that you guys have added recently is the per-user settings on what stories get displayed on the front page, and whether they are in full or abbreviated form. However, it is only usefull if the stories are properly catagorized. While backslash stories will always fit into another catagory, I personally would prefer that they be marked as backslash, and filterable as such.
It is not that ripping your music to mp3 format is illegal, it is that there is no legal way to implement an mp3 encoder as free software. The mp3 format uses several patents, and you have to pay a patent licence to if you want to encode mp3's for any reason other than educational purposes. That is why LAME is named LAME (LAME Ain't an Mp3 Encoder) - it is "reference software" created for educational use only. If you use it for any other reason than that, including personal use, you are breaking the law.
Will you personally be sued? Unlikely. And for a long time the patent holders looked the other way. However, around 2000 the patent holders started sending out cease and desist orders to various open source projects that included MP3 encoders. Because of this most of the linux distributions have stopped including MP3 support in their base package, and it now has to be installed seperately.
Because the exact same complaint applies to proprietary software. It is not true that anyone can introduce code into an OSS project. While everyone can make their own private modifications to the source, that is entirely different from getting your code accepted into the official repository. Every reputable project out there restricts commit permission to developers who have proven themselves usefull. All other patches have to go through one of the main developers first. Now these "trusted" developers certainly could insert malicious code, and given the division of labor it may very well go unnoticed by other developers (ESR's million eyeball theory is bunk).
However, this is no different from a propietary product. These are often developed by large teams, working under unacceptable deadlines. Therefore, code reviews don't always happen, or are not a vigorous as they could be. Those conditions could also lead to disgruntled employees, some of which won't have the highest moral resolve. Some companies don't have the highest moral resolve, and will knowingly put malicious code into their product. It is just as possible for malicious code to get into proprietary software as open source software.
So what it boils down to is that OSS is no different than proprietary software in this regard. If you trust Windows, you should also trust Linux. If you trust Photoshop, you should trust Gimp. If don't trust Joe Sourceforge, then you also shouldn't trust Joe Shareware. Sometimes knowing that a product is widely used and reputable is good enough. Sometimes it isn't, and in that case you either need to write it yourself or, like you said, audit the code.
Oops, that should have been Layers->Colors->Threshold.
Also I realized that the cartoon filter may be troublesome if one of the indexed colors in your picture is black. Here is an alternate procedure:
* Filter : Blur : Selective Gaussian Blur, with radius of 5-10 and Max Delta of around 16-128 (depending on how textured image is)
* Image : Mode : Index, with Generate Optimum Palette of 5 - 20 colors
* Image : Mode : RGB
* Filters : Edge-Detect : Sobel (vertical and horizontal)
* Layers : Colors : Invert
* Layers : Colors : Threshold, move black slider all the way to the right.
I'll add to the parent by pointing out that if you go into Filter->Blur->Selective Gaussian Blur, with radius of 5-10 and Max Delta of around 92-128, before converting to index mode then you will end up with bigger-rounder shapes, like what you normally see in a color-by number. Afterwords, the easiest way to get rid of the color and be left with only the black outline is to go into Image->Colors->Threshold, and slide the left slider almost all the way to the left.
Those aren't the only numbers in the study. They also measured reaction time, and found that it was decreased for both drunk drivers and cell phone users, but more for the cell phone users. They never said the numbers imply that driving with .08 has they same likelyhood of getting into an accident as sober - indeed they found that it does impair your driving ability, just not enough to cause an accident in the situation they tested against. The sample size was sufficent for the results that they claimed, just not for the ones that you are claiming.
I am not a lawyer and so I don't know what the legal requirements for death threats or hate speech are, but if jokes were always taken at face value, there would be literally hundreds of thousands of people on the internet who would be guilty of that crime.
Then again he wasn't found guilty of any crime, just that the school was within it's bounds for the suspension. Considering that the effects of his activities at home did spill into the classroom and were thus the realm of school authority, some punishment was in order. However, one semester suspension for a joke is too harsh in my opinion.
The teacher seriously needs to learn to chill out. Kids have been drawing gory pictures of teachers for years, and unless there was other behavior that suggested that this was anymore than an immature childish joke, he over-reacted.
I also don't like the fact that the judge considered the reaction of the teacher in determining whether the event was a joke or not. I can see in cases like harassment, if the defendant considers something harassment, then it is regardless of how accused sees it - if the behavior continues after accused has been informed as such. But the idea that you can't joke about murder at all, lest someone take you seriously is pushing things to far.
You are missinterpreting the numbers. They are not stating that you have a 3 in 40 chance of getting into an accident if you are talking on a cell phone. They are stating that 3 in 40 did get into an accident in the situation provided by the simulator.
No, it means that drunk people (for low values of drunk), are more safe than people talking on a cell phone in the same driving situation.
Accidents are the usually the result of the combination of several things - someone runs a red light, causing the intersecting car to slam on his brakes, the person behind him who was tailgating and talking on the cellphone can't react in time and rear-ends him. If they were to expose the subjects of the test to driving situations whose distribution was representitive of how often the actually occur in the real world, this study would have taken decades. Instead, they exposed the drivers to the types of situations where a quick reponse rate was important.
The purpose of the study was not to find absolute numbers on how often someone on a cellphone will get into an accident, but relative numbers on how often they get into an accident compared to other situations. It would be BS to quote the numbers as such, but the study doesn't do so.