That's all find and dandy, except the 10% that do live more than 200 Km from the US border have broadband.
This 90% thing is both true and totally misleading. Ontario has 40% of the population of Canada, and roughly 101% of them live within 200 Km of the US border. A very large proportion of Quebec lives within 200 Km of the US border, and they have another 25% of the population.
But, go west, and the only significant population near the US border are the cities of Winnipeg and Vancouver. Calgary and Edmonton, roughly a million each, are far from the US border. And get this: somehow, somebody figured out how to get broadband to them, and every other rural resident in the province of Alberta, sell it for less than the average American ISP wants, and they make money doing it.
Saskatchewan has 1 million people, is roughly the area of Texas, and 40% of them live in rural areas. 90% live more than 200 km from the US border, 99% are more or less evenly distributed over about 80,000 square miles. They all have broadband.
Of those that are within 200 km, none are in a community of 10,000 or more. They all have broadband.
Every community in that province of 10,000 or more has broadband. Rural users who live typically a mile from their nearest neighbor (in farm country, it's illegal to own less than 1/4 section, or 160 acres. That's 1 mile by 1/4 mile or alternately, it could be 1/2 mile square. The average farm is more than 8 sections, making your closest neighbor at least 4 miles away. The largest operators farm more than 20 sections. They have broadband.
You can look at http://www.lightpollution.it/worldatlas/pages/fig2 .htmamapofthenightsky, and if you knew where I lived, you would see... nothing. I'm in the "black" (not grey) part of that map. Not a single light, unless my yard light shows up on your preferred version of that satellite photo. My nearest neighbor is 27 miles East. There's another bunch of 'em 21 miles to the West, and my closest neighbor to the North is 6 miles away. There isn't anyone South of me for more than 30 miles. I'm actually living in that 41% you mentioned, I'm part of that zero point three percent, and I'm posting on broadband.
You would also see the 11 million people of Ontario and the 8 million people of Quebec in the yellow/red/white area. Just like the entire Eastern United States. You know, where the population density is so low they can't get broadband.
Every urban resident in Saskatchewan (its that basically black/gray spot north of Montana) has a choice of at least two, and if you include wireless (microwave) broadband, three providers. Every rural resident has a choice of at least two, and if they are covered by WiMax, three wireless or satellite providers. Maybe it's just me, but If I were interested in expanding the reach of broadband in the US, I would explore some local level competition, as it seems like most people on Slashdot who post on this and other topics complain they have a choice of one provider.
In the meantime, I'm willing to admit that population density probably plays a role in broadband penetration. I know it was the most popular excuse the last time I posted on this on Slashdot. In 2001.
Perhaps this population density thing will work itself out by the time I post on this subject again. In 2011.
Although I understand what you are trying to convey, I think it's important to realize that, if we use the terms correctly, what you are actually saying is that "piracy does have something to do with losses".
If you look at the definition of "piracy" by national rights organizations worldwide you find that it most certainly does refer only to counterfeit disks made for sale. It does not cover private copying for non-commercial use at all.
For example, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPA), which is the umbrella rights organization that all the national ones belong to (including the RIAA, in this example) and whose role it is to represent these various national organizations (in fact they act quite similarly to how the RIAA represents its member record companies) you find a quite different definition of piracy, and it's been so for a very long time. They still, to this day, define it the same way.
"Piracy" the term has been pirated by the RIAA and the MPAA in the US to mean something it doesn't, and you have used it in your argument in the same way it's been misused by the RIAA and the MPAA. (No surprise there: the whole idea was to get everyone to misuse it that way, by repeatedly misusing the term in their proclamations in the media at every opportunity).
I do agree with your basic premise: that private copying is something of a crusade they've taken up, while essentially ignoring, publicly, that true piracy (for profit) is the more damaging problem.
But, I hate to see right-thinking people parroting the wrong-thinking person's message. To an extent, it means the wrong guys are succeeding. It's not piracy if it's not unauthorized commercial duplication.
On my desktop, it's ready to rock (take my input and do what I tell it to) in 1 minute 58 seconds. On my laptop, it's 44 seconds. I hear the hard drive spin up at 10 seconds for the desktop and 3 seconds for the laptop. On both computers, I log in with a "real" username and enter a "real" password, and I made no special attempt to do that any quicker or slower than I normally would, and that is included in the startup times cited.
On the desktop, I have the following run on startup, usually via scripts that either I or an application developer created that run on startup. A Daemon that watches for and traps any application that tries to phone home. A font manager (I have more than 2,000 fonts on the system). The NDIS. A user notification daemon for the NDIS. That damn iTunes helper. The AntiVirus daemon. SMART monitor. A configurable driver for non supported USB devices (joysticks, gamepads, etc). Some other stuff that I want to run every time (special sound card driver, etc) A script that starts my mail application, fetches new mail, loads the browser, and loads Google News on a new browser window, and places that window on top of all other windows and makes it the active application, waiting for me to do something with the keyboard or mouse.
That takes just a hair under 2 minutes on a computer that rolled off the assembly line in the summer of 2001. I use it for "everything"; multitrack recording, some video work, web developing, graphics work, playing CDs, mail, surfing the net, and everything else.
The laptop is a little less encumbered; I do no graphics on it, for example, so it has just the regular font load, nor do I do any audio or video work on it. It does mail, the 'net, lots of text-based stuff, and whatever projects I might be working on at the time when I'm out and about. Both run OS X v10.4.8.
On the laptop, startup from a fresh install of Windows XP (it's been updated to Microsoft's current recommended state, the usual precautionary software is installed, like AV, Microsoft Defender, etc but no actual Windows user apps are on it yet) takes 1 minute 2 seconds, and that's with automatic login (which I will be changing, but apparently that must be the default on installation).
So, I guess I would have to say that OSX does a much better job managing the startup. Especially since, once the XP desktop is up and I can get the cursor and keyboard to do what I say, it nags me 3 or 4 more times, making me click on stuff to go away. In fact, the 1 minute 2 seconds is a restart from a warm state; the first time I tried to time it, AVG began downloading an update, so the timing test had to be aborted (I let it update, then restarted with the stopwatch at the ready).
I would have booted Linux on the desktop and checked that, but it's in the middle of some reworking right now and wouldn't be truly reflective of what it's capable of doing (normally, I would have a working YellowDog Linux there). I did boot Knoppix on the laptop, but it took a while because XP refused to let any other OS have at it on the first 3 tries with the normal procedure of using the "C" key (two restarts and one cold start).
So, I was forced to Option-Boot and select the Knoppix CD manually. From boot to full KDE desktop complete with Konqueror loaded and the Knoppix site up, was 2 minutes 40 seconds. That includes the time for the MacBook to poll the busses and search for bootable Operating Systems (1 OSX, 1 XP, and Knoppix 5-someting LiveCD) and for me to select one. It probably would be just under 2 minutes without that overhead (ie if I had preselected the CD as the boot device in the Startup Disk control panel).
Just some real-world not-so-scientific tests to put some perspective into the discussion. It does seem that XP has some problems with boot times, though, especially since you can hear that the HD has spun up in, like, 3 seconds from hitting the power key. There's a 7200 rpm Seagate drive in the notebook as well, so you have to think that HD issues aren't the only thing going on with that.
I read the article but my very first question wasn't answered. So: Anybody have any back-of-the-envelope or better calculations as to how fast this wave must be moving? The Sun's a pretty big bit of real estate, and this looks like it was much, much faster than an earthbound/waterborne Tsunami.
The incandescent (1) light bulb was invented, apparently independently, all over the world at roughly the same time. Edison partnered with the holder of the UK patent (2), for example. Nor did Edison "invent" the light bulb; he bought the US patent from the inventors, two men from Toronto, Canada (3). Edison's company did, however, improve on all the light bulb prototypes, including the versions that existed in all the patent applications granted at the time, by making a filament that worked long enough to be useful (before Edison's improvements, a few hours), as well as other improvements that made manufacturing practical and prices low enough for the concept to begin being used in industry. Thomas Edison is given credit by popular and textbook history for much that he did not actually do. For example, most of the improvements were actually invented and patented by Edison's staff rather than the man himself (5). The only thing I find somewhat unfortunate is for some reason, all the great things Edison did are somehow not enough in the eyes of those who decided to make him a hero, and thus the embellishments. Personally, I find that he accomplished a great deal.
In the end, Edison was the one who either accumulated all the relevant patents or entered in joint ventures (eg with Swan) that enabled the light bulb to actually come to market. Personally, I see this as more important than whom the actual inventor(s) might be. Too bad history books need to tell these stories in two-sentence summaries and educators need to lecture in "sound bites".
(1) "incandescent" is an important part of the story; other forms of artificial light, including electric light (eg: arc lighting) (4) were well known and in some cases reasonably common for much of the 18th century. By reasonably common I mean that those who could afford them sometimes did; eg City of London and Gas Lighting. Significant patents were granted in Russia and I would not be surprised to learn of many more patents being granted elsewhere in Europe, possibly Australia and New Zeland, and who knows where else.
(2) John Swan, 1878, as others have mentioned.
(3) James Woodward, US Patent filed 1874, granted 1876. Woodward partnered with a Hotel owner, Matthew Evans, basically a source of funding, and the patent was granted to both of them. Between 1875, when Edison bought a half-share from Woodward (one quarter share of the patent) and 1885 Woodward, Evans, and all those whom they had partnered with, again as a source of funding, all sold their shares of the patent to Edison. This patent was invalidated in 1883 by the USPTO, citing Swan's prior art, despite Swan's actual patent coming after the Woodward & Swan patent. Oh, the joys of IP and Lawyers.
(4) Invented by Humphrey Davey, UK, 1809. Other electric lighting: Platinum filament within evacuated tube ( a vacuum is critical to the incandescent light's operation); 1820, Warren De La Rue. 1835, James Bowman Lindsay demonstrated, but never patented, an incandescent electric light. 1850, Edward Shepard, incandescent lamp with charcoal filament; pointing the way to carbonized filaments. 1854, in what some call the first "true light bulb", referring to the bulb instead of other constructions, a German inventor named Henricq Globel (nice name; should we be calling them GlowBells?) with carbonized bamboo filament inside a glass bulb. The Englshman Swan's light bulb had a filament that burned for 13 hours; Edison then made a 40 hour filament in 1879. The main improvement here was an improved vacuum; totally evacuating the air from the bulb. By 1880, Edison bulbs, going back to the carbonized bamboo filament of Globel, were lasting 1200 hours.
(5) Most of the Edison patents were granted to a black employee of Edison's, Mr. Lewis Latimer. (Naturally, just like today, when you perform "work for hire" the patents are the property of the employer). Latimer's patents include the various versions of Edison's carbon filaments, the screw socket, and much of Edison's manufacturing equipment such as the glass blowers, ovens, and chemical processes. Latimer also oversaw most of the early incandescent installations such as the public lighting systems in New York, Philadalphia, Montreal, London, etc.
"... Anyway, during the 2 minutes I could stand watching it, they showed ad after ad DURING THE SHOW for other shows...."
Well, you're going to love the next part. Those are not considered ads by regulators (i.e. the FCC) or the stations themselves. They are simply the station telling you about it's own programming. Even if they were ads, in the US there are no limits by the FCC on how many minutes of advertising is permitted per hour; restrictions on children's programming (12 minutes weekdays, 10.5 weekend minutes per hour) were lifted as part of the Children's Television Act [1990].
Most countries outside the US do have specific TV ad limits (eg. very briefly: Canada 12 minutes/hr, Australia 16m prime/15m standard maximum per hour; UK 12 minutes per hour; there typically are other rules/restrictions/exemptions). For the most part, the "ads about other shows" are legally defined as not advertising in those countries that do have statutory ad limits, so they can be used to extend the number of non-programming minutes per hour.
"... Why in the hell would anyone want to watch anything at all on that channel?..."
Haven't watched it in years. Although it was the "you could play this at a church picnic" censorship of the massive movie library that got to me, their ads and general program interruptions always remind me why if I happen to accidentally find myself there. And, the censorship is not there, despite the public face, to make it family friendly. It's there to squeeze more available time for ads and self-promotion, while still showing the whole film in an hour or perhaps hour-fifteen long slot. I say "accidentally" because I block WTBS in my favorites lists, so I normally never see them even when idly surfing for nothing in particular.
I read the posts, and didn't see it mentioned yet, so an FYI for interested parties and conspiracy theorists everywhere:
Hagens Berman LLP was Microsoft's counsel during the DOJ Antitrust Case. They also represented Microsoft in other cases, such as the Florida Antitrust Case. They are suing Apple over the "iPod hearing damage" issue as well. The firm is now called Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, but that just represents the new partners.
They are also hiring junior lawyers who worked on Microsoft's behalf on Antitrust actions, such as Associate Jeffrey A Lang. Mr Berman is something of an AntiTrust specialist, and the main office and office of the founding partners is in Seattle, so it's hardly a surprise Microsoft used them. But, I'm sure Mr Berman's firm is, umm, grateful, for Redmond's hefty payments for legal fees, and let's not forget that even though there was a settlement, these things are not really over until they're over, and that hasn't happened just yet. In other words, It's difficult to believe he's not still getting fees from Microsoft.
"... More recently, Microsoft recognized Mr. Berman's experience and expertise when the company retained him to be part of the core national team representing the company in antitrust class actions arising from Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact in the Department of Justice antitrust case against the company...." From: Steve W Berman Biography at his firm's site
The suit under discussion: "Tomczak v. Apple Computer, Inc., Case No. 5:05-cv-04244-RS," filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, under Judge Richard Seeborg. Representing the Plaintiff/s are: Steve W. Berman of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, LLP, 1301 Fifth Ave., Suite 2900 Seattle, WA 98101, Phone: 206-623-7292, Fax: 206-623-0594, E-mail: steve@hbsslaw.com and Elaine T. Byszewski or Lee M. Gordon of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, LLP, 700 South Flower St., Suite 2940, Los Angeles, CA 90017-4101, Phone: 213-330-7150, Fax: 213-330-7152, E-mail: elaine@hagens-berman.com or lee@hbsslaw.com.
You also won't be surprised to learn that Berman is suing Apple on behalf of Nano owners in the UK and Mexico; also filed in USDC for Northern District of California.
As for those who doubt the likelihood of a blog being the reason Jason Tomczak was first contacted by a representative of Mr Berman's firm, The Apple Observer, a Mac-centric news site, interviews Patrick Warner, an attorney with David P. Meyer & Associates; the firm was hired by Berman's to assist in the Nano suit. In the article, under "A closer look at the filing", they note that "... Last week's filing included quotes from many online message boards, blogs and other sources where the problem was discussed, including Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg...."
"... Those people you're mentioning who "get can things done," -- isn't it to their interest, and everybody's interest, that they are implementing the very best ideas available?..."
They do implement the very best ideas available at the time they're considering new ideas.
Once you begin to actually implement an idea (we could call this "getting things done") you are now unavailable to consider new ideas (we could call this "I'm too busy getting this done").
Whether the reason is "busy implementing" or "not really that interested in doing it" (from the parent "... I have lots of great ideas, but no matter how many I give out, or see on the web, few, if any, ever get done. Why? Because I'm lazy...."), the net result is the same; only a few great ideas get done, and choosing an idea to do is limited by the brilliance of the ideas presented up to the moment of implementation, and stops at that point.
Superior ideas that follow must be ignored, until the earlier one is "done". Assuming the one you did and the brilliant idea that followed address roughly the same thing, the earlier "done" one will prevail and new ideas in other areas will be sought for further development. Thus, we end up with a solid implementation of a mediocre idea, and people on/. and elsewhere lament the mediocrity of what we do have to work with. Which, of course, is inevitable.
Q: "... In light of other studies linking antioxidants in coffee to a reduction in heart disease, who is right?..."
A: Since it's the presence of a gene that matters which is right, Check family history: Look for heart disease or diabetes (essentially, the same thing as far as your likelihood of heart disease goes). If found, avoid coffee. Check family history again, look for average age at death. If less than 60 for males, assume heart attack, avoid coffee. For females, ignore childbearing age, look for deaths aged 40~60. If found, assume heart disease, avoid coffee.
If most of your ancestors and siblings seem to live past 70, assume decent heart, drink coffee. If most live past 80, you may safely ignore cause of death, even if from heart attack, because they didn't "really" die of a heart attack, they died because they were healthy and got old, like all healthy people do and everyone dies of something. Drink coffee.
"... How do you deal with all of the baseless claims, that your superiors may read in the mainstream media?..."
Well, a good manager might use what he reads in a magazine as a talking point; he read something that made sense to him as it was presented and wants your input.
Despite the language, which you may read as "foregone conclusion based on FUD", really means more along the lines of "people say this, I hear things. I think we need to stay on top of our industry and I have concerns about our future business, because that's my job. So, tell me again: why do we do [insert practice/policy/tools here], and isn't it time to take a look at [insert alternate practice/policy/tools here]? "
And he wants you to tell him, because he hired you to tell him stuff about your area of expertise, because that's your job. So, tell him.
Or, he may be a PointyHair, who dances with devils and wants everyone else to join in, and you need to look for a new job.
Hopefully, you already know the answer to that one.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting a Slashdot Question isn't a good start. But, don't panic. He's just asking questions; what happens depends on you and your answers, not what some clueless writer was able to sell for $ 150.
Try to break in, then. Seriously, how would you do it? There's no command line to pipe commands or run scripts. OS9 uses a syntax for pathnames that differs from other OS's. You need to know that syntax, and you need to know you need to use it (ie know it's a System7~OS9 box in the first place).
The default install is "everything off". Services must be enabled.
If you have physical access to the box, you can turn on services, install enabling software, etc. It's rather easy to do, in that case. But not otherwise; configured properly there's not much you can do. It's even difficult to know you're talking to an OS9 server in the first place. Linux and Windows hacks do nothing at all, and that includes anything that would let you know it's not one of those OS's in a properly locked down state.
People have offered cash prizes and published the exact (static) address to Mac servers EG: http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=02166/, and kept their money. (If you read the linked article, the machine ran System 7.6.1; Open Transport is now at v2.6.1; the SYN and PoD exploits were closed in v1.2.0; released with OS8). There were other " hack-me contests" as well, and I know of none that had a single winner.
Certainly modern hackers know a bit more than they did when OS9 was current, but still, it's quite robust against remote exploit attempts. I personally know of no examples, but certainly that by itself doesn't mean it never happened.
With OSX Apple took a deliberate step towards what has the potential to be a less secure OS, and even though I think it was a step in the right direction, it's not universally better in all respects than what it replaced.
I think you would find all three levels of "smug" amongst Mac users, amongst Linux users, and even amongst Windows users, seeing as how we have plenty of issues in the wild that target Microsoft desktops and laptops. OSX is not particularly "good" against malware; it's more like Windows is particularly "bad", and 99% of the Bad Windows is due entirely to Bill's Favorite OS being configured as vulnerable in a default install. This is a problem in the attitude and practice of the OS vendor, not the OS itself.
Were Windows to be more like UNIX, Linux, or OSX in only that one area, we'd all be more secure, and we could all be worrying about more serious vulnerabilities that go beyond attachments, nasty pictures and Active-X agents of doom.
Now, "too smug" about security, I'm not so sure. It definitely depends on who you talk to (and you obviously haven't been talking to any Mac users I've tutored on the subject; they know security is ongoing and requires vigilance on any platform).
Apple themselves are, and always have been, very reluctant to suggest Macs are immune to malware, and even with Windows nearing 100K in virus/worm/trojan instances, they are remarkably silent about what many feel is a significant competitive advantage. OS9 was (and still is) a much more secure OS than OSX; it may well be amongst the most secure ever widely deployed by anyone. Yet, that would be news to a majority of users on any platform, including OS9 users themselves.
Are men "too smug" about Breast Cancer? Certainly they don't "worry" about it, but they too can be victims (not sure about the actual instances, but perhaps 1-10 ratio would be in the ballpark. You could look it up if it's important to you). Yet, it's not on top of their radar, and I don't think you should be insisting that's somehow wrong. There are other things to worry about, plain and simple.
How many copies of Mac AntiVirus software gets sold? By the parent post, it should be none, since the smug would obviously prefer to spend their money on further whitening of their annoyingly bright smiles. Yet, it's widely deployed on home computers (not just corporate boxes) running OSX. I don't know about you, but putting out $50 for what the smug would find to be useless software doesn't jive with the assertion. I also find it hard to believe that Windows users would voluntarily deploy any software at all that cost them money to protect Linux, UNIX or Mac users were the shoe on the other foot.
I wonder if all this smugness is related to former Windows users or to people actually comparing the two platforms while shopping and who chose a different path than they otherwise would have a few years ago? If Linux boxes were available to average consumers (a real problem, still not addressed) would Linux geeks be outnumbered by clueless Linux Lusers, smug about security?
RE: Pretty darn close by Google: I used the rate from the International Monetary Fund, which is what banks and brokers will use to create their wholesale and retail rates (which always involve a commission; those guys don't do anything for free). it was current at the time I posted (less the 15 minute delay mere mortals have to put up with).
RE: If 0.841 yen = 1 cent, that means 1 yen = 1/0.841 cent or ~1.19 cent Just seeing if you were awake. Thanks for proving you were. The IMF rates have changed, of course, but they're still pretty close to what they were yesterday. $US 1.00 = 120.5 Y $US 0.01 = 1.205 Y 1.00 Y = $ US 0.0082987552 100 Y = $ US 0.82987552
"... accidentally sold 610,000 shares, valued at $3.1 billion... for 1 yen each...." No, they didn't.
"... A 27 billion yen loss..." Huh? Nobody lost, or "won", anything. There were no trades at that price.
"... FYI 1 yen is about.83 cents...." This one, despite other posts to the contrary, is about right (today's rate is 0.00841 to the USD, or 0.841 yen = 1 cent). Considering the math proficiencey demonstrated so far, I'd give him a "close is good enough" checkmark on this question, to avoid the embarassing, and apparently inevitable, goose egg on his math final.
"... today you could theoretically have bought 610,000 shares for $.0083...." No you couldn't. And even if you could, you couldn't.
The company doesn't have 600 thousand shares outstanding to sell, for one thing; share owners must agree to sell at that price for another. Pity the poor bastard who made a sell order "at market", though;-). Market rules prohibited the trade from being completed, for another. And that's about $0.0083 per share, it would have cost you about $US 5130.10 plus brokerage fees at today's exchange rate.
The short answer here, for those of you whose heads are exploding from the bad, bad Math and English Composition at work here, is some trader placed an order for one share, valued at around $5K, and made a mistake somehow.
Instead of an offer of one share for that price, the order was entered as 610,000 shares for the price of one share. As it turns out, some shares were sold at a discount of 9% (ie $US 4,750 per share; ie some owners were willing to make a sell order "at market" ) because the market rules allowed that much of a price drop before trading restrictions or outright halts kicked in (the news stories don't say what the mechanism for price monitoring is or does, but obviously, it works).
I'm familiar with research going on at a Canadian University for more than a decade that involves the rebuilding of spinal nerve cells with the use of an injectable drug. I first learned about it around 3 years ago. Rats whose spines were severed completely were able to recover completely, moving about like normal, healthy rats within weeks.
Recently a research partnership was created with a US University with a primate lab, and those tests are ongoing as we speak. I'm sure the parties involved would prefer it if they got to make any announcements, so feel free to treat this post as pure, unsubstantiated rumor.
The drug presently must be administered within a few hours of injury to be effective. However, because of that, it's expected that there will be human trials with first responders within a very short time, provided the monkey trials have no surprises.
If I wasn't familiar with this research and it's results, I probably would have been more skeptical about this story from the UK, since nerve tissue damage has been, till now, notoriously difficult to repair.
Can't say about other colleges, but at the time I was in college, at either Universitiy that offered degrees Journalism in Canada, students must take 2 years of undergraduate work, and must take briefer versions of what students with majors in the subject take, similar to what, say, other students might take outside their Majors. They won't even let you in to the College of Journalism and Communications (you're a Pre-Journalism student).
Specific classes in subjects: PoliSci, History, Art, English, Engineering, Commerce, a second Language, and Agriculture [one University had Ag as mandatory, the other had Comp Sci] are mandatory. For electives as a Pre-Journalism student, you can take any class from any college and provided you either have prerequisites, have permission from the prof, or it's a 100-level class, they must admit you, even if that means some other student in that college has to wait a semester. At the University I went to, that meant choosing from: Agriculture; Arts & Science; Commerce; Dentistry; Education; Engineering; Kinesiology; Law; Medicine; Physical Therapy; Nursing; Pharmacy & Nutrition; and Veterinary Medicine; with affiliated colleges (on campus, credits transfer automatically) of Theology (Catholic, Lutheran, Pentecostal), Metis Studies; and Biotechnology.
The emphasis is gathering as much general knowledge as possible. If you do that, and pass with Honors on every class (no exceptions; you have to beg to retake if you get a non-Honors grade) then it's two years of learning how to write badly, produce TV and radio shows, etc. However, you still have to pass all those classes with Honors, or else fish around for some other degree your prerequisites might make you eligible for.
I do that now, with our TVoverBroadband system (SaskTel, Canada). I just phoned this morning to cut off the sports package, since we wanted to watch the Sixers game last night. I had ordered it up when I got off work and saw from the listings that the Sixers were on; it costs 30 cents to have the whole package for 24 hours or less. (Although we only really wanted the game on NBA TV, 30 cents is the minimum; it costs the same to have one channel or one package).
Same thing with NFL football: we add the US Network West feeds if the west channels (we get ours out of Seattle) have a decent game on, otherwise we settle for the Eastern US Network Feed which is part of basic (we get those out of Boston).
You can also order single channels, not only with our provider but with all the cable and satellite providers in Canada. They don't allow the pay-per-whatever period that our teleco offers, though; with satellite and cable they want to charge you for the month, so a certain minimum is in place to insure you don't do what I do (and what you did with the big dish). In any case, listen up folks, I'm about to tell you What Happens Next when the FTC smiles upon you, and gives you what you want:
The cost to subscribe to a single channel for one month is way more than what back-of-the-envelope math suggests it should be. For example, with the sat provider I had last, a single channel was $3 and a package of 5 or sometimes more was $6. So, it's 2 channels for the price of 5+, 3 channels for 150% of the cost of 5, and 4 channels for double the cost of the package. A package, we must remind ourselves, that you are partly opting out of.
I'm not saying the providers in the US will adopt that very strategy (although they just might as well), but I do warn you: The revenue stream relies on charging the mostest cash. If people adopt a widespread habit of dropping a few channels here and there, it will end up costing you the same as now, one way or another. I don't know whether they will raise basic, will sneak popular channels out of basic and onto premium, or will perform some other sleigh-of-hand pricing voodoo, but it will happen.
The only people who should be worried about this are, ironically, the people who might like fringe channels but not TV in general; in my mind the most likely to adopt a pick-and-choose custom strategy. Because the package helps prop less popular channels up (they get a share of the package cost), they will die a painful death if people could, without economic penalty, drop them. If there is an economic penalty, like here, people just put up with them, with only the most stubborn willing to pay extra in an attempt to starve them out. If they do go broke, they will, of course, be replaced by other, presumably more popular channels.
" Let nothing, and I mean nothing, slow the steady, purposeful march of the Lowest Common Denominator. " A quote I just made up, which I'm pretending came from a fictitious TV executive.
"... For suitably large values of 'essentially the same'. Kerosene is lighter, and paint thinner is lighter still. Jet fuel is refined to a much tighter set of specs, and fuel oil to a lesser (and heavier) spec. IOW, pretty much every petroleum derived liquid is 'essentially' the same, so long as you ignore the differences. (And the differences are significant - else there wouldn't be differences.) For that matter gasoline is 'essentially' the same as diesel, but then so is pariffin and motor oil...."
Okay, I'll bite. Since you quoted it, I'm assuming you realize l specifically said Diesel is "essentially the same" as Kerosene, Fuel Oil, Jet Fuel, and what sells here at the Paint Store under the Exxon brand name Varsol but consists entirely of standard grade Kerosene.
I did not say it was essentially the same as Pariffin, motor oil, or gasoline. And there's a reason why, because you can substitute any of the items I specifically mentioned one for the other without issues, but you can't substitute gasoline for diesel without damaging someone or something.
It's a wonder you didn't conclude I implied we can run our tractors on chipped empty bleach bottles, since plastic is also derived from petrolieum.
For the record, just to make you happy: Plastic, gasoline, sealing wax and 10W-30 is not essentially the same as Diesel fuel.
Certainly they do so from time-to-time, generally in an emergency situation, or whenever no other real choice exists. Sometimes the engine even survives without damage.
How about "all the time". How about the specific fuels I mentioned are listed in the manual of jet airplane engines as being suitable emergency replacements with no implications regarding warranty, time between overhaul, or damage. You don't even have to tell anyone you used them.
However, Pratt & Whitney does say that if you substitute gasoline for JET-A, the time between overhaul for a PT6A goes from 3,000 hours to 4 hours. That's spending five figures to correct the engine damage with gasoline versus going for a normal amount of time with Kerosene, with zero engine damage beyond normal wear. Because they are "essentially the same" , like I said they were, and Gasoline is not, like you implied I said when I most certainly did not.
"... You can not burn oxygen. Burning is a process of rapid oxidation...."
Or, burning is an exothermic chemical reaction limited by the availability of oxygen. Or "A self-perpetuating exothermic reaction that... increases the temperature of the reactants above the initial air temperature until an explosion, flame, or sustained glow occurs." There's dozens of definitions, actually. It seems something as simple as fire is fairly complicated to define comprehensively. These guys spend more than a few paragraphs trying: http://saber.towson.edu/~schmitt/pyro/chapter1.htm l#Nex/
But, I'm willing to amend it, to: Strictly speaking, Oxygen doesn't burn, even though you cannot burn anything without oxygen; and if you do have oxygen, once all the oxygen is gone the fire must always go out.
A so-called "Diesel" engine works by compressing something until it heats up enough to ignite a bit of oxygen mixed in with it. You can use almost anything in a diesel engine as fuel, provided you adjust the compression appropriately. We use diesel because it's relatively cheap, for a hydrocarbon, and part of "relatively cheap" is "easily available near the highway".
Diesel is essentially the same as the kerosene in your camp light, the fuel oil in your home heating unit, the jet fuel in the airplane you last rode in, and the solvent you might have cleaned your paint brushes in. And any one of them would light up just fine in a diesel or jet engine without modification, and it's hardly news that people do, from time to time, use alternate fuels in those engines when necessity arises.
One fuel people sometimes use in Diesel engines is vegetable oil. It works fine, and essentially that's what BioDiesel is. It's neither particularly rare, difficult, or even new to use it provided you can find it. Farmers, mostly, have been users in the past, and it was not unheard of in the 1930's for the tractor to be running on corn oil or whatever the farmer had lots of and couldn't sell, or at least couldn't sell at a price that allowed him to buy an equivalent amount of diesel fuel from hydrocarbons.
The question for BioDiesel is basically: do we have enough extra corn, cottonseed, canola, peanut, coconut, or [enter locally grown oilseed] to run our trucks and jet engines while still feeding ourselves, and de we eat enough fried chicken and french fries to use the waste oil to run all our trucks, buses, and airplanes. I tend to believe not, but I'm open to contrary evidence.
f you are swayed by celebrities, I can tell you that there is a restaurant that gives it's used french-fry oil to Darryl Hannah, who uses it in her diesel engined vehicle. Kind of a wild child, that one, but hippies do some things right, occasionally.
"... If you want to reduce operating costs, increase fuel efficiency and reduce pollution then BURN BIO-DIESEL!!..."
Keep in mind that no matter what "fuel" we use in an internal combustion engine, what we really are burning is oxygen. Whether it's hydrocarbons, alcohol, or vegetable oil (BioDiesel), the fact remains that the only substance that is critically necessary is oxygen. Without it, there is no smoke, let alone spark or flame. The fuel is relevant only as a detail of design; it does no work itself; oxygen does it all.
It's the application of miniscule amounts of hydrogen, and it's effect on the combustion of oxygen, that's important here. Whether your engine uses BioDiesel or not is irrelevant as far as how and why it works is concerned. Use BioDiesel with Hydrogen, same result: leaner mixtures = less fuel burn for equivalent work compared to BioDiesel alone.
Did, umm, you read the Wired article? Did you check out any links? They're selling them at retail for tractor-trailer rigs now. In fact, I found from the firm's website, that there's an installer in my city, a company I'm quite familiar with; one that has worked on some of my vehicles before, and did excellent work to boot.
Don't know about you, but to me, that sounds like "commercially available".
"... As part of the decision, the Board of Education also went so far as to redefine science itself, saying that it is 'no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena'.... "
obligatory fiction warning
As a result of the decision, University and College admissions boards around the US announced in separate press releases that all graduates of Kansas High Schools will have to take remedial science classes to be considered eligible for admission.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all find and dandy, except the 10% that do live more than 200 Km from the US border have broadband.
2 .htmamapofthenightsky, and if you knew where I lived, you would see ... nothing. I'm in the "black" (not grey) part of that map. Not a single light, unless my yard light shows up on your preferred version of that satellite photo. My nearest neighbor is 27 miles East. There's another bunch of 'em 21 miles to the West, and my closest neighbor to the North is 6 miles away. There isn't anyone South of me for more than 30 miles. I'm actually living in that 41% you mentioned, I'm part of that zero point three percent, and I'm posting on broadband.
This 90% thing is both true and totally misleading. Ontario has 40% of the population of Canada, and roughly 101% of them live within 200 Km of the US border. A very large proportion of Quebec lives within 200 Km of the US border, and they have another 25% of the population.
But, go west, and the only significant population near the US border are the cities of Winnipeg and Vancouver. Calgary and Edmonton, roughly a million each, are far from the US border. And get this: somehow, somebody figured out how to get broadband to them, and every other rural resident in the province of Alberta, sell it for less than the average American ISP wants, and they make money doing it.
Saskatchewan has 1 million people, is roughly the area of Texas, and 40% of them live in rural areas. 90% live more than 200 km from the US border, 99% are more or less evenly distributed over about 80,000 square miles. They all have broadband.
Of those that are within 200 km, none are in a community of 10,000 or more. They all have broadband.
Every community in that province of 10,000 or more has broadband. Rural users who live typically a mile from their nearest neighbor (in farm country, it's illegal to own less than 1/4 section, or 160 acres. That's 1 mile by 1/4 mile or alternately, it could be 1/2 mile square. The average farm is more than 8 sections, making your closest neighbor at least 4 miles away. The largest operators farm more than 20 sections. They have broadband.
You can look at http://www.lightpollution.it/worldatlas/pages/fig
You would also see the 11 million people of Ontario and the 8 million people of Quebec in the yellow/red/white area. Just like the entire Eastern United States. You know, where the population density is so low they can't get broadband.
Every urban resident in Saskatchewan (its that basically black/gray spot north of Montana) has a choice of at least two, and if you include wireless (microwave) broadband, three providers. Every rural resident has a choice of at least two, and if they are covered by WiMax, three wireless or satellite providers. Maybe it's just me, but If I were interested in expanding the reach of broadband in the US, I would explore some local level competition, as it seems like most people on Slashdot who post on this and other topics complain they have a choice of one provider.
In the meantime, I'm willing to admit that population density probably plays a role in broadband penetration. I know it was the most popular excuse the last time I posted on this on Slashdot. In 2001.
Perhaps this population density thing will work itself out by the time I post on this subject again. In 2011.
Although I understand what you are trying to convey, I think it's important to realize that, if we use the terms correctly, what you are actually saying is that "piracy does have something to do with losses".
If you look at the definition of "piracy" by national rights organizations worldwide you find that it most certainly does refer only to counterfeit disks made for sale. It does not cover private copying for non-commercial use at all.
For example, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPA), which is the umbrella rights organization that all the national ones belong to (including the RIAA, in this example) and whose role it is to represent these various national organizations (in fact they act quite similarly to how the RIAA represents its member record companies) you find a quite different definition of piracy, and it's been so for a very long time. They still, to this day, define it the same way.
"Piracy" the term has been pirated by the RIAA and the MPAA in the US to mean something it doesn't, and you have used it in your argument in the same way it's been misused by the RIAA and the MPAA. (No surprise there: the whole idea was to get everyone to misuse it that way, by repeatedly misusing the term in their proclamations in the media at every opportunity).
I do agree with your basic premise: that private copying is something of a crusade they've taken up, while essentially ignoring, publicly, that true piracy (for profit) is the more damaging problem.
But, I hate to see right-thinking people parroting the wrong-thinking person's message. To an extent, it means the wrong guys are succeeding. It's not piracy if it's not unauthorized commercial duplication.
On my desktop, it's ready to rock (take my input and do what I tell it to) in 1 minute 58 seconds. On my laptop, it's 44 seconds. I hear the hard drive spin up at 10 seconds for the desktop and 3 seconds for the laptop. On both computers, I log in with a "real" username and enter a "real" password, and I made no special attempt to do that any quicker or slower than I normally would, and that is included in the startup times cited.
On the desktop, I have the following run on startup, usually via scripts that either I or an application developer created that run on startup.
A Daemon that watches for and traps any application that tries to phone home.
A font manager (I have more than 2,000 fonts on the system).
The NDIS.
A user notification daemon for the NDIS.
That damn iTunes helper.
The AntiVirus daemon.
SMART monitor.
A configurable driver for non supported USB devices (joysticks, gamepads, etc).
Some other stuff that I want to run every time (special sound card driver, etc)
A script that starts my mail application, fetches new mail, loads the browser, and loads Google News on a new browser window, and places that window on top of all other windows and makes it the active application, waiting for me to do something with the keyboard or mouse.
That takes just a hair under 2 minutes on a computer that rolled off the assembly line in the summer of 2001. I use it for "everything"; multitrack recording, some video work, web developing, graphics work, playing CDs, mail, surfing the net, and everything else.
The laptop is a little less encumbered; I do no graphics on it, for example, so it has just the regular font load, nor do I do any audio or video work on it. It does mail, the 'net, lots of text-based stuff, and whatever projects I might be working on at the time when I'm out and about. Both run OS X v10.4.8.
On the laptop, startup from a fresh install of Windows XP (it's been updated to Microsoft's current recommended state, the usual precautionary software is installed, like AV, Microsoft Defender, etc but no actual Windows user apps are on it yet) takes 1 minute 2 seconds, and that's with automatic login (which I will be changing, but apparently that must be the default on installation).
So, I guess I would have to say that OSX does a much better job managing the startup. Especially since, once the XP desktop is up and I can get the cursor and keyboard to do what I say, it nags me 3 or 4 more times, making me click on stuff to go away. In fact, the 1 minute 2 seconds is a restart from a warm state; the first time I tried to time it, AVG began downloading an update, so the timing test had to be aborted (I let it update, then restarted with the stopwatch at the ready).
I would have booted Linux on the desktop and checked that, but it's in the middle of some reworking right now and wouldn't be truly reflective of what it's capable of doing (normally, I would have a working YellowDog Linux there). I did boot Knoppix on the laptop, but it took a while because XP refused to let any other OS have at it on the first 3 tries with the normal procedure of using the "C" key (two restarts and one cold start).
So, I was forced to Option-Boot and select the Knoppix CD manually. From boot to full KDE desktop complete with Konqueror loaded and the Knoppix site up, was 2 minutes 40 seconds. That includes the time for the MacBook to poll the busses and search for bootable Operating Systems (1 OSX, 1 XP, and Knoppix 5-someting LiveCD) and for me to select one. It probably would be just under 2 minutes without that overhead (ie if I had preselected the CD as the boot device in the Startup Disk control panel).
Just some real-world not-so-scientific tests to put some perspective into the discussion. It does seem that XP has some problems with boot times, though, especially since you can hear that the HD has spun up in, like, 3 seconds from hitting the power key. There's a 7200 rpm Seagate drive in the notebook as well, so you have to think that HD issues aren't the only thing going on with that.
OK, I'll bite.
I read the article but my very first question wasn't answered. So:
Anybody have any back-of-the-envelope or better calculations as to how fast this wave must be moving? The Sun's a pretty big bit of real estate, and this looks like it was much, much faster than an earthbound/waterborne Tsunami.
Especially groundbreaking since it's about a charge without a particle.
No, wait a minute; that's my cable bill.
Nevermind.
The incandescent (1) light bulb was invented, apparently independently, all over the world at roughly the same time. Edison partnered with the holder of the UK patent (2), for example. Nor did Edison "invent" the light bulb; he bought the US patent from the inventors, two men from Toronto, Canada (3). Edison's company did, however, improve on all the light bulb prototypes, including the versions that existed in all the patent applications granted at the time, by making a filament that worked long enough to be useful (before Edison's improvements, a few hours), as well as other improvements that made manufacturing practical and prices low enough for the concept to begin being used in industry. Thomas Edison is given credit by popular and textbook history for much that he did not actually do. For example, most of the improvements were actually invented and patented by Edison's staff rather than the man himself (5). The only thing I find somewhat unfortunate is for some reason, all the great things Edison did are somehow not enough in the eyes of those who decided to make him a hero, and thus the embellishments. Personally, I find that he accomplished a great deal.
In the end, Edison was the one who either accumulated all the relevant patents or entered in joint ventures (eg with Swan) that enabled the light bulb to actually come to market. Personally, I see this as more important than whom the actual inventor(s) might be. Too bad history books need to tell these stories in two-sentence summaries and educators need to lecture in "sound bites".
(1) "incandescent" is an important part of the story; other forms of artificial light, including electric light (eg: arc lighting) (4) were well known and in some cases reasonably common for much of the 18th century. By reasonably common I mean that those who could afford them sometimes did; eg City of London and Gas Lighting. Significant patents were granted in Russia and I would not be surprised to learn of many more patents being granted elsewhere in Europe, possibly Australia and New Zeland, and who knows where else.
(2) John Swan, 1878, as others have mentioned.
(3) James Woodward, US Patent filed 1874, granted 1876. Woodward partnered with a Hotel owner, Matthew Evans, basically a source of funding, and the patent was granted to both of them. Between 1875, when Edison bought a half-share from Woodward (one quarter share of the patent) and 1885 Woodward, Evans, and all those whom they had partnered with, again as a source of funding, all sold their shares of the patent to Edison. This patent was invalidated in 1883 by the USPTO, citing Swan's prior art, despite Swan's actual patent coming after the Woodward & Swan patent. Oh, the joys of IP and Lawyers.
(4) Invented by Humphrey Davey, UK, 1809. Other electric lighting: Platinum filament within evacuated tube ( a vacuum is critical to the incandescent light's operation); 1820, Warren De La Rue. 1835, James Bowman Lindsay demonstrated, but never patented, an incandescent electric light. 1850, Edward Shepard, incandescent lamp with charcoal filament; pointing the way to carbonized filaments. 1854, in what some call the first "true light bulb", referring to the bulb instead of other constructions, a German inventor named Henricq Globel (nice name; should we be calling them GlowBells?) with carbonized bamboo filament inside a glass bulb. The Englshman Swan's light bulb had a filament that burned for 13 hours; Edison then made a 40 hour filament in 1879. The main improvement here was an improved vacuum; totally evacuating the air from the bulb. By 1880, Edison bulbs, going back to the carbonized bamboo filament of Globel, were lasting 1200 hours.
(5) Most of the Edison patents were granted to a black employee of Edison's, Mr. Lewis Latimer. (Naturally, just like today, when you perform "work for hire" the patents are the property of the employer). Latimer's patents include the various versions of Edison's carbon filaments, the screw socket, and much of Edison's manufacturing equipment such as the glass blowers, ovens, and chemical processes. Latimer also oversaw most of the early incandescent installations such as the public lighting systems in New York, Philadalphia, Montreal, London, etc.
" ... Anyway, during the 2 minutes I could stand watching it, they showed ad after ad DURING THE SHOW for other shows. ..."
... Why in the hell would anyone want to watch anything at all on that channel? ..."
Well, you're going to love the next part. Those are not considered ads by regulators (i.e. the FCC) or the stations themselves. They are simply the station telling you about it's own programming. Even if they were ads, in the US there are no limits by the FCC on how many minutes of advertising is permitted per hour; restrictions on children's programming (12 minutes weekdays, 10.5 weekend minutes per hour) were lifted as part of the Children's Television Act [1990].
Most countries outside the US do have specific TV ad limits (eg. very briefly: Canada 12 minutes/hr, Australia 16m prime/15m standard maximum per hour; UK 12 minutes per hour; there typically are other rules/restrictions/exemptions). For the most part, the "ads about other shows" are legally defined as not advertising in those countries that do have statutory ad limits, so they can be used to extend the number of non-programming minutes per hour.
"
Haven't watched it in years. Although it was the "you could play this at a church picnic" censorship of the massive movie library that got to me, their ads and general program interruptions always remind me why if I happen to accidentally find myself there. And, the censorship is not there, despite the public face, to make it family friendly. It's there to squeeze more available time for ads and self-promotion, while still showing the whole film in an hour or perhaps hour-fifteen long slot. I say "accidentally" because I block WTBS in my favorites lists, so I normally never see them even when idly surfing for nothing in particular.
I read the posts, and didn't see it mentioned yet, so an FYI for interested parties and conspiracy theorists everywhere:
... ..." From: Steve W Berman Biography at his firm's site
... Last week's filing included quotes from many online message boards, blogs and other sources where the problem was discussed, including Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg. ..."
Hagens Berman LLP was Microsoft's counsel during the DOJ Antitrust Case. They also represented Microsoft in other cases, such as the Florida Antitrust Case. They are suing Apple over the "iPod hearing damage" issue as well. The firm is now called Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, but that just represents the new partners.
They are also hiring junior lawyers who worked on Microsoft's behalf on Antitrust actions, such as Associate Jeffrey A Lang. Mr Berman is something of an AntiTrust specialist, and the main office and office of the founding partners is in Seattle, so it's hardly a surprise Microsoft used them. But, I'm sure Mr Berman's firm is, umm, grateful, for Redmond's hefty payments for legal fees, and let's not forget that even though there was a settlement, these things are not really over until they're over, and that hasn't happened just yet. In other words, It's difficult to believe he's not still getting fees from Microsoft.
"
More recently, Microsoft recognized Mr. Berman's experience and expertise when the company retained him to be part of the core national team representing the company in antitrust class actions arising from Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact in the Department of Justice antitrust case against the company.
The suit under discussion:
"Tomczak v. Apple Computer, Inc., Case No. 5:05-cv-04244-RS," filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, under Judge Richard Seeborg.
Representing the Plaintiff/s are: Steve W. Berman of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, LLP, 1301 Fifth Ave., Suite 2900 Seattle, WA 98101, Phone: 206-623-7292, Fax: 206-623-0594, E-mail: steve@hbsslaw.com and Elaine T. Byszewski or Lee M. Gordon of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, LLP, 700 South Flower St., Suite 2940, Los Angeles, CA 90017-4101, Phone: 213-330-7150, Fax: 213-330-7152, E-mail: elaine@hagens-berman.com or lee@hbsslaw.com.
You also won't be surprised to learn that Berman is suing Apple on behalf of Nano owners in the UK and Mexico; also filed in USDC for Northern District of California.
As for those who doubt the likelihood of a blog being the reason Jason Tomczak was first contacted by a representative of Mr Berman's firm, The Apple Observer, a Mac-centric news site, interviews Patrick Warner, an attorney with David P. Meyer & Associates; the firm was hired by Berman's to assist in the Nano suit. In the article, under "A closer look at the filing", they note that "
" ... Those people you're mentioning who "get can things done," -- isn't it to their interest, and everybody's interest, that they are implementing the very best ideas available? ..."
..."), the net result is the same; only a few great ideas get done, and choosing an idea to do is limited by the brilliance of the ideas presented up to the moment of implementation, and stops at that point.
/. and elsewhere lament the mediocrity of what we do have to work with. Which, of course, is inevitable.
They do implement the very best ideas available at the time they're considering new ideas.
Once you begin to actually implement an idea (we could call this "getting things done") you are now unavailable to consider new ideas (we could call this "I'm too busy getting this done").
Whether the reason is "busy implementing" or "not really that interested in doing it" (from the parent "... I have lots of great ideas, but no matter how many I give out, or see on the web, few, if any, ever get done. Why? Because I'm lazy.
Superior ideas that follow must be ignored, until the earlier one is "done". Assuming the one you did and the brilliant idea that followed address roughly the same thing, the earlier "done" one will prevail and new ideas in other areas will be sought for further development. Thus, we end up with a solid implementation of a mediocre idea, and people on
Q: " ... In light of other studies linking antioxidants in coffee to a reduction in heart disease, who is right? ..."
A: Since it's the presence of a gene that matters which is right, Check family history:
Look for heart disease or diabetes (essentially, the same thing as far as your likelihood of heart disease goes). If found, avoid coffee.
Check family history again, look for average age at death. If less than 60 for males, assume heart attack, avoid coffee.
For females, ignore childbearing age, look for deaths aged 40~60. If found, assume heart disease, avoid coffee.
If most of your ancestors and siblings seem to live past 70, assume decent heart, drink coffee.
If most live past 80, you may safely ignore cause of death, even if from heart attack, because they didn't "really" die of a heart attack, they died because they were healthy and got old, like all healthy people do and everyone dies of something. Drink coffee.
" ... How do you deal with all of the baseless claims, that your superiors may read in the mainstream media? ..."
Well, a good manager might use what he reads in a magazine as a talking point; he read something that made sense to him as it was presented and wants your input.
Despite the language, which you may read as "foregone conclusion based on FUD", really means more along the lines of "people say this, I hear things. I think we need to stay on top of our industry and I have concerns about our future business, because that's my job. So, tell me again: why do we do [insert practice/policy/tools here], and isn't it time to take a look at [insert alternate practice/policy/tools here]? "
And he wants you to tell him, because he hired you to tell him stuff about your area of expertise, because that's your job. So, tell him.
Or, he may be a PointyHair, who dances with devils and wants everyone else to join in, and you need to look for a new job.
Hopefully, you already know the answer to that one.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting a Slashdot Question isn't a good start. But, don't panic. He's just asking questions; what happens depends on you and your answers, not what some clueless writer was able to sell for $ 150.
Try to break in, then.
Seriously, how would you do it? There's no command line to pipe commands or run scripts. OS9 uses a syntax for pathnames that differs from other OS's. You need to know that syntax, and you need to know you need to use it (ie know it's a System7~OS9 box in the first place).
The default install is "everything off". Services must be enabled.
If you have physical access to the box, you can turn on services, install enabling software, etc. It's rather easy to do, in that case. But not otherwise; configured properly there's not much you can do. It's even difficult to know you're talking to an OS9 server in the first place. Linux and Windows hacks do nothing at all, and that includes anything that would let you know it's not one of those OS's in a properly locked down state.
People have offered cash prizes and published the exact (static) address to Mac servers EG: http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=02166/, and kept their money. (If you read the linked article, the machine ran System 7.6.1; Open Transport is now at v2.6.1; the SYN and PoD exploits were closed in v1.2.0; released with OS8). There were other " hack-me contests" as well, and I know of none that had a single winner.
Certainly modern hackers know a bit more than they did when OS9 was current, but still, it's quite robust against remote exploit attempts. I personally know of no examples, but certainly that by itself doesn't mean it never happened.
With OSX Apple took a deliberate step towards what has the potential to be a less secure OS, and even though I think it was a step in the right direction, it's not universally better in all respects than what it replaced.
I think you would find all three levels of "smug" amongst Mac users, amongst Linux users, and even amongst Windows users, seeing as how we have plenty of issues in the wild that target Microsoft desktops and laptops. OSX is not particularly "good" against malware; it's more like Windows is particularly "bad", and 99% of the Bad Windows is due entirely to Bill's Favorite OS being configured as vulnerable in a default install. This is a problem in the attitude and practice of the OS vendor, not the OS itself.
Were Windows to be more like UNIX, Linux, or OSX in only that one area, we'd all be more secure, and we could all be worrying about more serious vulnerabilities that go beyond attachments, nasty pictures and Active-X agents of doom.
Now, "too smug" about security, I'm not so sure. It definitely depends on who you talk to (and you obviously haven't been talking to any Mac users I've tutored on the subject; they know security is ongoing and requires vigilance on any platform).
Apple themselves are, and always have been, very reluctant to suggest Macs are immune to malware, and even with Windows nearing 100K in virus/worm/trojan instances, they are remarkably silent about what many feel is a significant competitive advantage. OS9 was (and still is) a much more secure OS than OSX; it may well be amongst the most secure ever widely deployed by anyone. Yet, that would be news to a majority of users on any platform, including OS9 users themselves.
Are men "too smug" about Breast Cancer? Certainly they don't "worry" about it, but they too can be victims (not sure about the actual instances, but perhaps 1-10 ratio would be in the ballpark. You could look it up if it's important to you). Yet, it's not on top of their radar, and I don't think you should be insisting that's somehow wrong. There are other things to worry about, plain and simple.
How many copies of Mac AntiVirus software gets sold? By the parent post, it should be none, since the smug would obviously prefer to spend their money on further whitening of their annoyingly bright smiles. Yet, it's widely deployed on home computers (not just corporate boxes) running OSX. I don't know about you, but putting out $50 for what the smug would find to be useless software doesn't jive with the assertion. I also find it hard to believe that Windows users would voluntarily deploy any software at all that cost them money to protect Linux, UNIX or Mac users were the shoe on the other foot.
I wonder if all this smugness is related to former Windows users or to people actually comparing the two platforms while shopping and who chose a different path than they otherwise would have a few years ago? If Linux boxes were available to average consumers (a real problem, still not addressed) would Linux geeks be outnumbered by clueless Linux Lusers, smug about security?
RE: Pretty darn close by Google:
I used the rate from the International Monetary Fund, which is what banks and brokers will use to create their wholesale and retail rates (which always involve a commission; those guys don't do anything for free). it was current at the time I posted (less the 15 minute delay mere mortals have to put up with).
RE: If 0.841 yen = 1 cent, that means 1 yen = 1/0.841 cent or ~1.19 cent
Just seeing if you were awake. Thanks for proving you were.
The IMF rates have changed, of course, but they're still pretty close to what they were yesterday.
$US 1.00 = 120.5 Y
$US 0.01 = 1.205 Y
1.00 Y = $ US 0.0082987552
100 Y = $ US 0.82987552
" ... accidentally sold 610,000 shares, valued at $3.1 billion ... for 1 yen each. ..."
... A 27 billion yen loss ..."
... FYI 1 yen is about .83 cents. ..."
... today you could theoretically have bought 610,000 shares for $.0083. ..."
;-).
No, they didn't.
"
Huh? Nobody lost, or "won", anything. There were no trades at that price.
"
This one, despite other posts to the contrary, is about right (today's rate is 0.00841 to the USD, or 0.841 yen = 1 cent). Considering the math proficiencey demonstrated so far, I'd give him a "close is good enough" checkmark on this question, to avoid the embarassing, and apparently inevitable, goose egg on his math final.
"
No you couldn't. And even if you could, you couldn't.
The company doesn't have 600 thousand shares outstanding to sell, for one thing; share owners must agree to sell at that price for another.
Pity the poor bastard who made a sell order "at market", though
Market rules prohibited the trade from being completed, for another. And that's about $0.0083 per share, it would have cost you about $US 5130.10 plus brokerage fees at today's exchange rate.
The short answer here, for those of you whose heads are exploding from the bad, bad Math and English Composition at work here, is some trader placed an order for one share, valued at around $5K, and made a mistake somehow.
Instead of an offer of one share for that price, the order was entered as 610,000 shares for the price of one share. As it turns out, some shares were sold at a discount of 9% (ie $US 4,750 per share; ie some owners were willing to make a sell order "at market" ) because the market rules allowed that much of a price drop before trading restrictions or outright halts kicked in (the news stories don't say what the mechanism for price monitoring is or does, but obviously, it works).
I'm familiar with research going on at a Canadian University for more than a decade that involves the rebuilding of spinal nerve cells with the use of an injectable drug. I first learned about it around 3 years ago. Rats whose spines were severed completely were able to recover completely, moving about like normal, healthy rats within weeks.
Recently a research partnership was created with a US University with a primate lab, and those tests are ongoing as we speak. I'm sure the parties involved would prefer it if they got to make any announcements, so feel free to treat this post as pure, unsubstantiated rumor.
The drug presently must be administered within a few hours of injury to be effective. However, because of that, it's expected that there will be human trials with first responders within a very short time, provided the monkey trials have no surprises.
If I wasn't familiar with this research and it's results, I probably would have been more skeptical about this story from the UK, since nerve tissue damage has been, till now, notoriously difficult to repair.
Can't say about other colleges, but at the time I was in college, at either Universitiy that offered degrees Journalism in Canada, students must take 2 years of undergraduate work, and must take briefer versions of what students with majors in the subject take, similar to what, say, other students might take outside their Majors. They won't even let you in to the College of Journalism and Communications (you're a Pre-Journalism student).
Specific classes in subjects: PoliSci, History, Art, English, Engineering, Commerce, a second Language, and Agriculture [one University had Ag as mandatory, the other had Comp Sci] are mandatory. For electives as a Pre-Journalism student, you can take any class from any college and provided you either have prerequisites, have permission from the prof, or it's a 100-level class, they must admit you, even if that means some other student in that college has to wait a semester. At the University I went to, that meant choosing from:
Agriculture; Arts & Science; Commerce; Dentistry; Education; Engineering; Kinesiology; Law; Medicine; Physical Therapy; Nursing; Pharmacy & Nutrition; and Veterinary Medicine; with affiliated colleges (on campus, credits transfer automatically) of Theology (Catholic, Lutheran, Pentecostal), Metis Studies; and Biotechnology.
The emphasis is gathering as much general knowledge as possible. If you do that, and pass with Honors on every class (no exceptions; you have to beg to retake if you get a non-Honors grade) then it's two years of learning how to write badly, produce TV and radio shows, etc. However, you still have to pass all those classes with Honors, or else fish around for some other degree your prerequisites might make you eligible for.
I do that now, with our TVoverBroadband system (SaskTel, Canada). I just phoned this morning to cut off the sports package, since we wanted to watch the Sixers game last night. I had ordered it up when I got off work and saw from the listings that the Sixers were on; it costs 30 cents to have the whole package for 24 hours or less. (Although we only really wanted the game on NBA TV, 30 cents is the minimum; it costs the same to have one channel or one package).
Same thing with NFL football: we add the US Network West feeds if the west channels (we get ours out of Seattle) have a decent game on, otherwise we settle for the Eastern US Network Feed which is part of basic (we get those out of Boston).
You can also order single channels, not only with our provider but with all the cable and satellite providers in Canada. They don't allow the pay-per-whatever period that our teleco offers, though; with satellite and cable they want to charge you for the month, so a certain minimum is in place to insure you don't do what I do (and what you did with the big dish). In any case, listen up folks, I'm about to tell you What Happens Next when the FTC smiles upon you, and gives you what you want:
The cost to subscribe to a single channel for one month is way more than what back-of-the-envelope math suggests it should be. For example, with the sat provider I had last, a single channel was $3 and a package of 5 or sometimes more was $6. So, it's 2 channels for the price of 5+, 3 channels for 150% of the cost of 5, and 4 channels for double the cost of the package. A package, we must remind ourselves, that you are partly opting out of.
I'm not saying the providers in the US will adopt that very strategy (although they just might as well), but I do warn you:
The revenue stream relies on charging the mostest cash. If people adopt a widespread habit of dropping a few channels here and there, it will end up costing you the same as now, one way or another. I don't know whether they will raise basic, will sneak popular channels out of basic and onto premium, or will perform some other sleigh-of-hand pricing voodoo, but it will happen.
The only people who should be worried about this are, ironically, the people who might like fringe channels but not TV in general; in my mind the most likely to adopt a pick-and-choose custom strategy. Because the package helps prop less popular channels up (they get a share of the package cost), they will die a painful death if people could, without economic penalty, drop them. If there is an economic penalty, like here, people just put up with them, with only the most stubborn willing to pay extra in an attempt to starve them out. If they do go broke, they will, of course, be replaced by other, presumably more popular channels.
" Let nothing, and I mean nothing, slow the steady, purposeful march of the Lowest Common Denominator. " A quote I just made up, which I'm pretending came from a fictitious TV executive.
" ... For suitably large values of 'essentially the same'. Kerosene is lighter, and paint thinner is lighter still. Jet fuel is refined to a much tighter set of specs, and fuel oil to a lesser (and heavier) spec. ..."
IOW, pretty much every petroleum derived liquid is 'essentially' the same, so long as you ignore the differences. (And the differences are significant - else there wouldn't be differences.) For that matter gasoline is 'essentially' the same as diesel, but then so is pariffin and motor oil.
Okay, I'll bite. Since you quoted it, I'm assuming you realize l specifically said Diesel is "essentially the same" as Kerosene, Fuel Oil, Jet Fuel, and what sells here at the Paint Store under the Exxon brand name Varsol but consists entirely of standard grade Kerosene.
I did not say it was essentially the same as Pariffin, motor oil, or gasoline. And there's a reason why, because you can substitute any of the items I specifically mentioned one for the other without issues, but you can't substitute gasoline for diesel without damaging someone or something.
It's a wonder you didn't conclude I implied we can run our tractors on chipped empty bleach bottles, since plastic is also derived from petrolieum.
For the record, just to make you happy:
Plastic, gasoline, sealing wax and 10W-30 is not essentially the same as Diesel fuel.
Certainly they do so from time-to-time, generally in an emergency situation, or whenever no other real choice exists. Sometimes the engine even survives without damage.
How about "all the time". How about the specific fuels I mentioned are listed in the manual of jet airplane engines as being suitable emergency replacements with no implications regarding warranty, time between overhaul, or damage. You don't even have to tell anyone you used them.
However, Pratt & Whitney does say that if you substitute gasoline for JET-A, the time between overhaul for a PT6A goes from 3,000 hours to 4 hours. That's spending five figures to correct the engine damage with gasoline versus going for a normal amount of time with Kerosene, with zero engine damage beyond normal wear. Because they are "essentially the same" , like I said they were, and Gasoline is not, like you implied I said when I most certainly did not.
" ... You can not burn oxygen. Burning is a process of rapid oxidation. ..."
... increases the temperature of the reactants above the initial air temperature until an explosion, flame, or sustained glow occurs." There's dozens of definitions, actually. It seems something as simple as fire is fairly complicated to define comprehensively. These guys spend more than a few paragraphs trying:m l#Nex/
Or, burning is an exothermic chemical reaction limited by the availability of oxygen.
Or "A self-perpetuating exothermic reaction that
http://saber.towson.edu/~schmitt/pyro/chapter1.ht
But, I'm willing to amend it, to:
Strictly speaking, Oxygen doesn't burn, even though you cannot burn anything without oxygen; and if you do have oxygen, once all the oxygen is gone the fire must always go out.
A so-called "Diesel" engine works by compressing something until it heats up enough to ignite a bit of oxygen mixed in with it. You can use almost anything in a diesel engine as fuel, provided you adjust the compression appropriately. We use diesel because it's relatively cheap, for a hydrocarbon, and part of "relatively cheap" is "easily available near the highway".
Diesel is essentially the same as the kerosene in your camp light, the fuel oil in your home heating unit, the jet fuel in the airplane you last rode in, and the solvent you might have cleaned your paint brushes in. And any one of them would light up just fine in a diesel or jet engine without modification, and it's hardly news that people do, from time to time, use alternate fuels in those engines when necessity arises.
One fuel people sometimes use in Diesel engines is vegetable oil. It works fine, and essentially that's what BioDiesel is. It's neither particularly rare, difficult, or even new to use it provided you can find it. Farmers, mostly, have been users in the past, and it was not unheard of in the 1930's for the tractor to be running on corn oil or whatever the farmer had lots of and couldn't sell, or at least couldn't sell at a price that allowed him to buy an equivalent amount of diesel fuel from hydrocarbons.
The question for BioDiesel is basically: do we have enough extra corn, cottonseed, canola, peanut, coconut, or [enter locally grown oilseed] to run our trucks and jet engines while still feeding ourselves, and de we eat enough fried chicken and french fries to use the waste oil to run all our trucks, buses, and airplanes. I tend to believe not, but I'm open to contrary evidence.
f you are swayed by celebrities, I can tell you that there is a restaurant that gives it's used french-fry oil to Darryl Hannah, who uses it in her diesel engined vehicle. Kind of a wild child, that one, but hippies do some things right, occasionally.
" ... If you want to reduce operating costs, increase fuel efficiency and reduce pollution then BURN BIO-DIESEL!! ..."
Keep in mind that no matter what "fuel" we use in an internal combustion engine, what we really are burning is oxygen. Whether it's hydrocarbons, alcohol, or vegetable oil (BioDiesel), the fact remains that the only substance that is critically necessary is oxygen. Without it, there is no smoke, let alone spark or flame. The fuel is relevant only as a detail of design; it does no work itself; oxygen does it all.
It's the application of miniscule amounts of hydrogen, and it's effect on the combustion of oxygen, that's important here. Whether your engine uses BioDiesel or not is irrelevant as far as how and why it works is concerned. Use BioDiesel with Hydrogen, same result: leaner mixtures = less fuel burn for equivalent work compared to BioDiesel alone.
Did, umm, you read the Wired article? Did you check out any links? They're selling them at retail for tractor-trailer rigs now. In fact, I found from the firm's website, that there's an installer in my city, a company I'm quite familiar with; one that has worked on some of my vehicles before, and did excellent work to boot.
Don't know about you, but to me, that sounds like "commercially available".
You.
" ... As part of the decision, the Board of Education also went so far as to redefine science itself, saying that it is 'no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena'. ... "
obligatory fiction warning
As a result of the decision, University and College admissions boards around the US announced in separate press releases that all graduates of Kansas High Schools will have to take remedial science classes to be considered eligible for admission.