There's no reason why this money would be earmarked for any particular purpose. Just like any other fine imposed by the government. It becomes the government's money, just like the $250 speeding ticket I paid earlier this year.
Realistically, most of it will probably end up in the lawyers' pockets anyway -- I don't imagine that court costs in Europe are any less outlandish than here in the US.:-)
No, actually he's right and you're mistaken. It's clear both from TFA and from the posted summary that (a) the DEFENSE is saying that obvious patents should be thrown out, and (b) some big IT firms including Cisco are supporting the DEFENSE in this case.
This isn't really all that surprising, if you think about it. I mean, products like Cisco routers or Microsoft Windows do have a huge number of really obvious features -- And I'm sure the savings would be considerable if they didn't have to hire an army of lawyers to check if every single feature was unpatented (thus freeing up said lawyers to pursue anti-piracy litigation against their users...)
Well, suppose you didn't just want to backup 400GB of data every day, but that you actually generated that much NEW data every day, and that you wanted to keep ALL of it. For a LOT longer than five days -- like maybe a year. Or ten. Maybe you're running a mission-critical database of financial transactions for a bank or brokerage, and you need to be able to retrieve transaction details for audit reasons.
In general, tape will be cheaper than HDDs iff you need to store enough data that the price of the tape DRIVE becomes inconsequential, so the relevant comparison is just the tape media versus HDD media.
It used to be true that even small or medium-sized companies needed tape backup -- but today it's only really necessary for banks and phone companies and other really big things. I work in the data networking industry, and I have seen LOTS of decent-sized customers who are still paying for the milion-dollar loans they took out to pay for their room-sized 2 TB robot-driven tape archive system.
People mention the "jamming issues" -- here's the scoop... GPS transmits signals intended for both cilivian and military use, in distinct frequency ranges. The military one is encrypted and can (theoretically) thus only be used by the US military and its friends. In a war zone, the US military can "jam" the civilian bands while leaving the military signal intact, which from a military perspective is a Good Thing.
The originally proposed Galileo design was such that the frequency range used by Galileo's equivalent to the US civilian signal overlapped the GPS military one. Thus, if the US wanted to jam or block Galileo's civilian signal, it would also have to jam the GPS military one -- which (to the US military) is a Bad Thing.
I don't know if/how this situation was resolved. Anyone?
I suspect that, if you were to visit China, you WOULD be able to use Skype to your heart's content -- because you'd be getting online from a nice western-style hotel, approved for foreigners' use.
I did some work in Tianjin about two years ago, and amused myself by trying to test the "Great Firewall of China" that I'd been hearing so much about. Try as I might, I found NOTHING that I could not access -- American newspapers, ebay, slashdot, anti-chinese blogs, stuff about the Dalai Lama, Taiwanese pro-independence articles, the gnutella network, really naughty pr0n -- you name it, I got there.
I'm guessing that western hotels (this was a Holiday Inn) get special treatment by the China Internet Police -- or did I just get lucky? Or will they be waiting for me next time I apply for a Chinese Visa?:-)
Thank you, parent poster! I've been trying for years to make that point clear to people who don't get the significance.
Communism is an ECONOMIC ideal, much like Capitalism is. It has nothing whatsoever to do with democracy or the lack thereof. It is perfectly possible for a nation to democratically elect to be Communist, just as it's possible for a fascist dictator to believe in free market economics. They're two sides of the same coin.
Economically, China is a lot close to capitalism than to communism.
Politically, China is a single-party semi-fascist autocracy. That the party is called "communist" is largely irrelevant.
We in the US tend to use the word "communist" to describe both China's economic and political systems. Really, this is wrong on both counts -- since the word doesn't apply to politics in the first place, and the Chinese economy isn't communistic in the second.
Re:I still use my old P2-350 + 64Mb + 6Gb PC
on
Less Might Be More
·
· Score: 1
A P2-3560? Pshaw!
My current firewall, NAT proxy, and print server is an old 486DX2/66 with 16M RAM and a 40M HDD. That's right -- 40M, not 40G!. It's running an older Linux release (from way back when real geeks used the Yggdrasil distros), so it's probably insecure as all hell, but it's just too cool to change.
Yeah, I know -- I could get a $39 router at Fry's to do the same things, but it just wouldn't have the same Cool Factor.:-)
You're right, that first post was essentially unreadable, but the guy did apologize for that and tried to clarify. I don't know why you were modded as flamebait, but modders are people too. Maybe they just reacted to the tone of your message compared to the tone of the original (which was incoherent by helpful-sounding).
Be that as it may, I think what he's trying to say is that, as long as your screen refresh rate is faster than your framerate, the framerate won't be the cause of any flickering that you may notice.
That's not quite the same as saying that you won't notice any difference between 30fps and 60fps. After all there are any number of video problems (jerky movement, motion blurring, etc.) that will be exacerbated by low framerates.
Right. If Bill Gates woke up tomorrow and decided he wanted to retire in a mansion on Mars, and was willing to commit his $50B to this goal, I bet there would be a LOT more serious interest in space travel.
Privately owned launch alternatives like Sea Launch are going to help a bit, but we still need someone with a lot of money who wants to do more than launch TV satellites.
But then again, your spaceship probably wouldn't have any $5,000 toilet seats, right?!:-)
NASA tech is overrated! They STILL haven't found anything better to do with those huge empty space shuttle external fuel tanks than just let them burn up after each use. How 'bout a little boost to get 'em into orbit, then doing something with 'em?
I mean, there's got to be SOMEthing useful we could in space with a handful of big, sturdy, airtight containers. Live in them, store stuff in them, build something in them, whatever -- but using them as giant disposable lighters just can NOT be the most cost-efficient thing...
It depends on the kind of environment you're in. Looking at traffic dumps is often the fastest and easiest way to identify things like misbehaving drivers, faulty network hardware, and things like that.
If you're reasonably sure that your network is functioning properly, and all you're worried about is what your users are doing to it, you probably don't really need to look at packet dumps too often. But if the network infrastructure itself is suspect, looking at the actual traffic is *very* helpful.
I work for a network equipment manufacturer, and I simply could not function in the field without traffic sniffers. I mosly use Sniffer Pro because I spend a lot of time in ATM networks, and there's just no free replacement for the ATMBook hardware. Ethereal is great for Ethernet LANs though!
Honestly, I think the benefits of either a moon base or a station at one of the L-points are about the same. Both are better than what we have today, but none are as good as Mars.
But neither is likely to happen as long as our space program is tied exclusively to NASA -- sorry, but it's true. NASA did great things in the past, and they have lots of really smart people, but the whole organization has devolved into nothing but a political tool. The "space race" days of the 60s and 70s are gone -- in today's political climate, no non-military government spending project will ever be able to survive for the kind of time (multiple administration changes!) it would take to build something like this.
What we need is for more really rich peope (you listening, Bill? Ross? Ted?) to take an interest in this. I mean, c'mon -- you KNOW that, if Bill Gates woke up tomorrow and decided that his new goal in life was to own the Lunar Hilton, it'd be in place within 20 years at most, and probably a lot less!
And just for the record, I'm not saying that it's ethically or legally OK for people, whether they're 15 or 75, to knowingly distribute copyrighted material, regardless of whether all their friends are doing it or not.
I'm just suggesting that maybe, just MAYBE, there are better things for the RIAA to be doing than suing people like this and pretending that it's going to help turn around the moribund economy of their floundering industry.
I think their logic is something like this: "Let's see... we're losing $1B a month. If a million people each download a hundred songs a month, and if each song costs us $10 in lost sales, then all we have to do is stop all those people to instantly become profitable again. Someone call some lawyers!"
Of course, it's probably futile to expect metacorps like the RIAA to actually behave rationally about things like this, but this is just ridiculous.
For one thing, they won't be able to stop (or even slow down) the p2p sharers out there, no matter how much they try. The only way to really do that would be to permanently cripple the Net by doing things like, say, cutting off all international access points. Don't they realize that people in Outer Mongolia and Gabon and places like that also use these programs?
And their entire logic seems based on the tried-but-false idea that their industry loses money every time some kid downloads a song. False!!! They only lose money if that kid, had he not downloaded the song, would otherwise have purchased the CD. Does anyone really think that a 12-year old with a library of, say, 10K mp3 tracks would actually have purchased a thousand CDs if he couldn't have donwloaded them? Absurd!
Amen to that! If you think about it, it's pretty astonishingly silly that every newspaper and magazine in the country perpetuates blatant superstition by publishing those daily horoscopes, even if many of them do call it "entertainment" or somesuch.
I really do think that literature is important as well, but not to nearly the same degree. If anything, I think geography is something that ought to receive much more attention, both in and out of the schools. A newspaper editor could easily find space for the "interesting place of the day", right next to the "science fact of the day". Wouldn't take more than a couple of paragraphs -- we could use the column space that the horoscope is currently occupying!
This is one of my biggest pet peeves, so I could go on for quite a while, but I'll spare everyone from reading what would really just be a long, boring rant about how ignorant people are becoming, and on this board I would just be preaching to the choir, so to speak.
Really, the thing that's amazing about this is that there are human beings who are able to keep up with machines like Deep Blue. I know Kasparov was all P.O.'d that he lost, but I think it's just mind-boggling that he was able to play a machine like that and win even a single game!
Think about it -- even dumb, off-the-shelf PC chess programs can handily beat the 99.99% of humans whose chess rating is, say, below 2200 or so. Then comes a custom-made supercomputer, tailored to Kasparov's particular playing style, with a memorized library of *all* his past games, and he *still* can compete with it on an equal footing. That's freakin' amazing!
OK, it seems as if most of us agree that the gaming industry's semi-obnoxious focus on sex and violence is just targetted marketing at work. After all, the biggest market for computer and/or console games is boys/men in, roughly, the teen through early twenties age groups. And males in that age group, as every Hollywood producer knows, *like* sex and violence. Simple enough, really.
But, consider: People grow up. In a few years, lots of the people who are buying today's games will be getting boring real-world jobs, settling down with their wives, and raising kids. Are all of those people just going to stop playing games at that time? Of course not. But their tastes will have changed somewhat, and the gaming industry will have to come to grips with a huge chunk of their market no longer consisting exclusively of technologically sophisticated but culturally underdeveloped adolescents.
I can't wait!
Saying "god did it" is a pretty poor way to explain away the complexity of the world. In order for god to have created a complex object, such as the infant universe, god would have to be pretty darn complex himself -- so all you've really done is replace one unexplainable complexity with another one that you like better.
If "god did it" is the best explanation for complex things, and if god is also a complex thing/being, what's the best explanation for god?
If you can accept "god was just always there, and nothing was before god," why can't you accept "the universe came from nothing, and nothing was before the universe?" Either way your cosmology has to deal with at least one unexplainable and complex thing/being/force...
Slashdot Mirror
There's no reason why this money would be earmarked for any particular purpose. Just like any other fine imposed by the government. It becomes the government's money, just like the $250 speeding ticket I paid earlier this year.
:-)
Realistically, most of it will probably end up in the lawyers' pockets anyway -- I don't imagine that court costs in Europe are any less outlandish than here in the US.
No, actually he's right and you're mistaken. It's clear both from TFA and from the posted summary that (a) the DEFENSE is saying that obvious patents should be thrown out, and (b) some big IT firms including Cisco are supporting the DEFENSE in this case.
This isn't really all that surprising, if you think about it. I mean, products like Cisco routers or Microsoft Windows do have a huge number of really obvious features -- And I'm sure the savings would be considerable if they didn't have to hire an army of lawyers to check if every single feature was unpatented (thus freeing up said lawyers to pursue anti-piracy litigation against their users...)
Well, suppose you didn't just want to backup 400GB of data every day, but that you actually generated that much NEW data every day, and that you wanted to keep ALL of it. For a LOT longer than five days -- like maybe a year. Or ten. Maybe you're running a mission-critical database of financial transactions for a bank or brokerage, and you need to be able to retrieve transaction details for audit reasons.
In general, tape will be cheaper than HDDs iff you need to store enough data that the price of the tape DRIVE becomes inconsequential, so the relevant comparison is just the tape media versus HDD media.
It used to be true that even small or medium-sized companies needed tape backup -- but today it's only really necessary for banks and phone companies and other really big things. I work in the data networking industry, and I have seen LOTS of decent-sized customers who are still paying for the milion-dollar loans they took out to pay for their room-sized 2 TB robot-driven tape archive system.
Let's build the orbital tether for our space elevator ENTIRELY out of bacterial bio-glue. I mean, presumably the stuff will stick to itself, yes? :-)
People mention the "jamming issues" -- here's the scoop... GPS transmits signals intended for both cilivian and military use, in distinct frequency ranges. The military one is encrypted and can (theoretically) thus only be used by the US military and its friends. In a war zone, the US military can "jam" the civilian bands while leaving the military signal intact, which from a military perspective is a Good Thing.
The originally proposed Galileo design was such that the frequency range used by Galileo's equivalent to the US civilian signal overlapped the GPS military one. Thus, if the US wanted to jam or block Galileo's civilian signal, it would also have to jam the GPS military one -- which (to the US military) is a Bad Thing.
I don't know if/how this situation was resolved. Anyone?
I suspect that, if you were to visit China, you WOULD be able to use Skype to your heart's content -- because you'd be getting online from a nice western-style hotel, approved for foreigners' use.
:-)
I did some work in Tianjin about two years ago, and amused myself by trying to test the "Great Firewall of China" that I'd been hearing so much about. Try as I might, I found NOTHING that I could not access -- American newspapers, ebay, slashdot, anti-chinese blogs, stuff about the Dalai Lama, Taiwanese pro-independence articles, the gnutella network, really naughty pr0n -- you name it, I got there.
I'm guessing that western hotels (this was a Holiday Inn) get special treatment by the China Internet Police -- or did I just get lucky? Or will they be waiting for me next time I apply for a Chinese Visa?
Thank you, parent poster! I've been trying for years to make that point clear to people who don't get the significance.
Communism is an ECONOMIC ideal, much like Capitalism is. It has nothing whatsoever to do with democracy or the lack thereof. It is perfectly possible for a nation to democratically elect to be Communist, just as it's possible for a fascist dictator to believe in free market economics. They're two sides of the same coin.
Economically, China is a lot close to capitalism than to communism. Politically, China is a single-party semi-fascist autocracy. That the party is called "communist" is largely irrelevant.
We in the US tend to use the word "communist" to describe both China's economic and political systems. Really, this is wrong on both counts -- since the word doesn't apply to politics in the first place, and the Chinese economy isn't communistic in the second.
My favourite was always this one:
... and so on.
C:\> prompt "Abort, Retry, Fail: "
Abort, Retry, Fail: A
Incorrect command or file name.
Abort, Retry, Fail:
A P2-3560? Pshaw!
:-)
My current firewall, NAT proxy, and print server is an old 486DX2/66 with 16M RAM and a 40M HDD. That's right -- 40M, not 40G!. It's running an older Linux release (from way back when real geeks used the Yggdrasil distros), so it's probably insecure as all hell, but it's just too cool to change.
Yeah, I know -- I could get a $39 router at Fry's to do the same things, but it just wouldn't have the same Cool Factor.
You're right, that first post was essentially unreadable, but the guy did apologize for that and tried to clarify. I don't know why you were modded as flamebait, but modders are people too. Maybe they just reacted to the tone of your message compared to the tone of the original (which was incoherent by helpful-sounding).
Be that as it may, I think what he's trying to say is that, as long as your screen refresh rate is faster than your framerate, the framerate won't be the cause of any flickering that you may notice.
That's not quite the same as saying that you won't notice any difference between 30fps and 60fps. After all there are any number of video problems (jerky movement, motion blurring, etc.) that will be exacerbated by low framerates.
Right. If Bill Gates woke up tomorrow and decided he wanted to retire in a mansion on Mars, and was willing to commit his $50B to this goal, I bet there would be a LOT more serious interest in space travel.
Privately owned launch alternatives like Sea Launch are going to help a bit, but we still need someone with a lot of money who wants to do more than launch TV satellites.
But then again, your spaceship probably wouldn't have any $5,000 toilet seats, right?! :-)
NASA tech is overrated! They STILL haven't found anything better to do with those huge empty space shuttle external fuel tanks than just let them burn up after each use. How 'bout a little boost to get 'em into orbit, then doing something with 'em?
I mean, there's got to be SOMEthing useful we could in space with a handful of big, sturdy, airtight containers. Live in them, store stuff in them, build something in them, whatever -- but using them as giant disposable lighters just can NOT be the most cost-efficient thing...
It depends on the kind of environment you're in. Looking at traffic dumps is often the fastest and easiest way to identify things like misbehaving drivers, faulty network hardware, and things like that.
If you're reasonably sure that your network is functioning properly, and all you're worried about is what your users are doing to it, you probably don't really need to look at packet dumps too often. But if the network infrastructure itself is suspect, looking at the actual traffic is *very* helpful.
I work for a network equipment manufacturer, and I simply could not function in the field without traffic sniffers. I mosly use Sniffer Pro because I spend a lot of time in ATM networks, and there's just no free replacement for the ATMBook hardware. Ethereal is great for Ethernet LANs though!
Honestly, I think the benefits of either a moon base or a station at one of the L-points are about the same. Both are better than what we have today, but none are as good as Mars.
But neither is likely to happen as long as our space program is tied exclusively to NASA -- sorry, but it's true. NASA did great things in the past, and they have lots of really smart people, but the whole organization has devolved into nothing but a political tool. The "space race" days of the 60s and 70s are gone -- in today's political climate, no non-military government spending project will ever be able to survive for the kind of time (multiple administration changes!) it would take to build something like this.
What we need is for more really rich peope (you listening, Bill? Ross? Ted?) to take an interest in this. I mean, c'mon -- you KNOW that, if Bill Gates woke up tomorrow and decided that his new goal in life was to own the Lunar Hilton, it'd be in place within 20 years at most, and probably a lot less!
And just for the record, I'm not saying that it's ethically or legally OK for people, whether they're 15 or 75, to knowingly distribute copyrighted material, regardless of whether all their friends are doing it or not.
I'm just suggesting that maybe, just MAYBE, there are better things for the RIAA to be doing than suing people like this and pretending that it's going to help turn around the moribund economy of their floundering industry.
I think their logic is something like this: "Let's see... we're losing $1B a month. If a million people each download a hundred songs a month, and if each song costs us $10 in lost sales, then all we have to do is stop all those people to instantly become profitable again. Someone call some lawyers!"
Of course, it's probably futile to expect metacorps like the RIAA to actually behave rationally about things like this, but this is just ridiculous.
For one thing, they won't be able to stop (or even slow down) the p2p sharers out there, no matter how much they try. The only way to really do that would be to permanently cripple the Net by doing things like, say, cutting off all international access points. Don't they realize that people in Outer Mongolia and Gabon and places like that also use these programs?
And their entire logic seems based on the tried-but-false idea that their industry loses money every time some kid downloads a song. False!!! They only lose money if that kid, had he not downloaded the song, would otherwise have purchased the CD. Does anyone really think that a 12-year old with a library of, say, 10K mp3 tracks would actually have purchased a thousand CDs if he couldn't have donwloaded them? Absurd!
Why do people still think like that?
This is one of my biggest pet peeves, so I could go on for quite a while, but I'll spare everyone from reading what would really just be a long, boring rant about how ignorant people are becoming, and on this board I would just be preaching to the choir, so to speak.
Really, the thing that's amazing about this is that there are human beings who are able to keep up with machines like Deep Blue. I know Kasparov was all P.O.'d that he lost, but I think it's just mind-boggling that he was able to play a machine like that and win even a single game! Think about it -- even dumb, off-the-shelf PC chess programs can handily beat the 99.99% of humans whose chess rating is, say, below 2200 or so. Then comes a custom-made supercomputer, tailored to Kasparov's particular playing style, with a memorized library of *all* his past games, and he *still* can compete with it on an equal footing. That's freakin' amazing!
OK, it seems as if most of us agree that the gaming industry's semi-obnoxious focus on sex and violence is just targetted marketing at work. After all, the biggest market for computer and/or console games is boys/men in, roughly, the teen through early twenties age groups. And males in that age group, as every Hollywood producer knows, *like* sex and violence. Simple enough, really. But, consider: People grow up. In a few years, lots of the people who are buying today's games will be getting boring real-world jobs, settling down with their wives, and raising kids. Are all of those people just going to stop playing games at that time? Of course not. But their tastes will have changed somewhat, and the gaming industry will have to come to grips with a huge chunk of their market no longer consisting exclusively of technologically sophisticated but culturally underdeveloped adolescents. I can't wait!
Saying "god did it" is a pretty poor way to explain away the complexity of the world. In order for god to have created a complex object, such as the infant universe, god would have to be pretty darn complex himself -- so all you've really done is replace one unexplainable complexity with another one that you like better. If "god did it" is the best explanation for complex things, and if god is also a complex thing/being, what's the best explanation for god? If you can accept "god was just always there, and nothing was before god," why can't you accept "the universe came from nothing, and nothing was before the universe?" Either way your cosmology has to deal with at least one unexplainable and complex thing/being/force...