Ah, wish I had the points to give you a +1 Insightful or something equally appropriate.
Unfortunately, there isn't also a +1 Pedantic.;-) But then you'd lose that point because you didn't also point out that the Gregorian Calendar doesn't have a year zero.
Speaking of pedantry... your ordinal number is wrong. It should be 21st, not "21th." It goes 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th.
So how will the judgment against Spamhaus be enforced? How will anyone force Spamhaus to pay, assuming they don't voluntarily fork over the money?
I'm not talking about what you think is right and wrong. (And on a personal note, I am perfectly OK with ignoring or disregarding laws I personally think are unjust, or which I do not generally agree with. But that's not terribly relevant either.) What I am asking is, very simply, how anyone can force Spamhaus to honor this judgment and pay up.
Since I don't think they have any U.S. assets of any kind whatsoever, nothing can be seized in the U.S. I suppose the spammers here who brought the suit could agitate for "justice" and try to squeeze blood from a turnip, but how? They could go to the UK and petition the courts there, I suppose, but the UK courts aren't obligated to enforce a civil ruling from a U.S. jurisdiction.
Similarly, your Microsoft analogy from a couple posts back is flawed, because Microsoft is a true multinational corporation with a real presence in Germany, and they have real assets that can be seized there. But while Germany might have the power to seize assets of Microsoft in Germany, it certainly can't seize assets held in another country without the cooperation of that country.
Your talk about what is OK or not OK to "publish" in various locales/jurisdictions is interesting but hardly relevant. I publish material routinely on my blog which is legal in the U.S., but is illegal in many other countries. If someone sues me in Turkey for something I post that he believes is defamatory to Islam, or the country of Turkey (it's illegal by Turkish law to disparage Turkey or "Turkishness"), do you think I'm going to hop on a plane and submit to their legal system? Absolutely not. Do you think I'm going to pay up if they fine me? No way. Would I deliver myself to their prison system? I don't think so!
So, I can totally understand why the Spamhaus folks would choose not to show up in a U.S. court to defend themselves and run the risk of lending more credence to an already questionable legal proceeding.
The problem with the notion of "universal competency" (courts that claim competency to hear cases outside their national borders) and so-called "long arm" legal tactics is that national sovereignty suffers as a result. I might add that sovereignty is something guaranteed by the UN, at least in principle.
You speak of how doing business in another country opens a company up to that country's laws. True enough, but again, it's a matter of enforcement. China prohibits direct access to all kinds of things, but the U.S. State Department actively works to make resources illegally available to Chinese citizens. OK, so this is lawbreaking sponsored by a government, not a company, but the principle applies similarly. Furthermore, while the ABC Company might be headquartered in Nebraska but do business in Thailand, that doesn't mean ABC Company has to have a physical presence in Thailand to do business there. If ABC Company runs afoul of some law in Thailand, they might be fined for it (especially if it's a civil and not a criminal matter). Should they choose not to pay the fine, there are many means that the country could bring to bear -- network filtering for an internet company, or blocking shipments of physical goods at the border. But they can't go to the State of Nebraska, or the U.S. federal government, and demand that money. (Well, they can, but they probably won't get it...)
And anyway, since it has been stated numerous times (including in articles linked from this Slashdot story) that there's no way for this judgment to be enforced in any way against Spamhaus, I have to ask again, how exactly can Spamhaus be forced to do anything in this matter? They can't. I challenge you to explain, in detail, what mechanism that could be brought to bear and force them to accept the judgment and pay the fine?
This has nothing to do with right and wrong. This has nothing to do with petty grudges
(This is why it pays to preview, and it pays to not use the auto-linking feature when the URL contains weird punctuation like the exclamation point.)
Secondly, although Yahoo! lost in civil court in France, it did not lose in criminal court.
Thirdly, Yahoo! was being somewhat disingenuous in how it handled matters, because it could have easily implemented controls to prevent French citizens from accessing the U.S. version of its auction site. (The article notes that locale-specific advertising appeared on the site, which hurt Yahoo's case.)
Fourth, Yahoo! was threatened with fines; although they could have simply refused to pay, they would have had to give up any subsidiaries in France or any other EU country that France could reasonably exert influence through in order to obtain fines. It's also likely that any Yahoo! corporate office, such as the President, would have to think twice before visiting France. (Although since this was a civil matter, and Yahoo! prevailed on the criminal grounds, so perhaps the President of Yahoo! didn't have to worry about being arrested.)
Fifth, when Yahoo! brought its case to a U.S. district court in the hopes that the French ruling would be effectively declared unenforceable in the U.S., Yahoo! initially prevailed. This case was then appealed by LICRA and the UEJF on the grounds that the court had no personal jurisdiction over them. So it's very interesting to me that the French courts claim expansive jurisdiction over U.S. corporations and citizens, yet the interested parties in France apparently have no shame over claiming U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over them. The appeals court accepted the personal jurisdiction argument.
Lastly, Yahoo! chose to comply with the French court by banning all auctions of Nazi memorabilia, rather than blocking French users from accessing such auctions. While they technically could have merely restricted French users from accessing such auctions, or all auctions altogether, there were technical issues at stake (e.g., insufficiency of geolocation based on IP address, which was only 70% effective at the time, or reliably tagging auctions of banned material).
This has the effect of chilling protected speech in the United States, a constitutional matter due to the First Amendment. The problem with so-called claims of "universal competence" by courts is that this very concept violates the notion of national sovereignty, something even the United Nations pays lip-service to.
My take? As an individual, or even as a corporation located solely within the United States, if I were faced with a fine or other legal ruling arrived at in another country, I'd simply say "Fine me all you like" and never pay. And then make sure I never set foot in that country again.
And when Apple's legal theory is tested and vindicated in a court, then (and only then, unless there's an appeal) is it a settled matter of law. Otherwise, Apple doesn't get to act like an authority and claim to tell you what is legal and what isn't.
Since their claims haven't been tested, their stated position is merely interesting. I certainly wouldn't automatically buy their position. At stake is the principle of "I get to do whatever I want with whatever I buy."
Also note that Apple is claiming that the jailbreaking procedure is a violation of copyright. However, if the jailbreak is performed by you, the end user, on your own hardware, and was not distributed in any way, there is no dissemination of copyrighted material without permission, and therefore no copyright violation. Jailbreaking in this case is akin to scribbling in a book you bought.
The EFF article you link to goes into other justifications that I won't bother to enumerate here, like reverse engineering (which is explicitly legal in the United States, though perhaps not in other countries).
Since when are lobotomies considered minimally invasive?
Well, in actuality, a lobotomy can be performed as an outpatient procedure -- and this was done quite a lot in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Basically, you insert a long, slender needle or other cutting instrument in through the ocular orbit (the bone is thin near the top of each socket), punch through the bone and tissue and then swipe the needle across the inside of the skull to sever the frontal lobe. Controlling the angle of insertion lets you control how far back you cut...
I think you're misguided. Did you read TFA? The Emily Howell program uses a different approach from Cope's previous work. It's entirely different work, sounding nothing like an existing composer. The new approach seems much more interactive, and involves machine learning, so the new program seems even more strong-AI-ish and more creative than the older, retired program that generated Mozart-like sonatas.
TFA spends a fair bit of time talking about how the software has been tuned to break the rules creatively, and is able to determine when it's OK to do so -- the older software did so to a degree, the newer software (Emily Howell) even moreso.
Cope is still right about one thing -- we are what we eat, and with music, we are what we hear. Or rather, we compose what we hear. Sometimes that inspiration comes from birds (Beethoven's Fifth comes to mind) or other environmental sounds. Usually, it comes from other humans. So yeah, there are going to be social, cultural, and regional influences... on stuff that various societies, cultures, and regions pick up from other societies, cultures, and regions. Nothing is created in a vacuum, and there is very little that is novel or original in music that isn't derived from something else. That's more of an evolutionary process, not spontaneous generation of art from pure nothingness.
So let me turn your assertion around: Humans won't be able to tread where humans haven't, since we only know the rules we give ourselves. Sounds a little absurd? Maybe. But largely a correct assertion. True innovation enters the system only slowly, usually introduced by some inspiration that impinges upon humans -- natural phenomena, new discoveries (scientific, philosophical, etc.) that shake our cultural foundations, even disasters.
At worst, you can say it's a highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist.
This is such a skewed view of reality, I had to laugh -- it's something only an engineer working within Microsoft could write, completely ignoring (just to pick one predatory example) the kinds of lopsided contracts that Microsoft's business side was penning with all sorts of hardware manufacturers, prohibiting them from shipping computers with rival operating systems or web browsers...
There was very little "accidental" about these predatory moves, and the monopoly trial very clearly showed that this was a pattern of behavior.
Contrast with:
The problem comes when the [internal] competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It's not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft's music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.
Gee, that sounds like the same kinds of behavior, just writ small. This strikes me as one of those "you reap what you sow" type of situations. Definitely, the offspring-eating behavior is well ingrained in the DNA of this particular organism...
The poetic justice is delicious. Pity that the author of TFA doesn't see it.
Anyone who still clings to the largely irrelevant requirement of technical skill [...]
That's what you wrote previously.
It sure seems that you're arguing the "relevance of skill," so it's a bit amusing that you'd contradict yourself in a subsequent comment and say you're not arguing the relevance of skill. Yes, you did clarify your previous intention, so we now know you meant that Duchamp had obvious technical skill, and so should not be dismissed. (Picasso had some great technical skill, too -- some of his earliest works looked photo-realistic to me.)
But it also seems that you're claiming one does not need technical skill to make art, that technical skill is "largely irrelevant." So you're also kind of saying, "Hey, you unwashed heathens, here's this artist who is acknowledged as being great, and I know you judge technical skill, so don't dismiss this guy on the grounds of technical skill... even though technical skill is irrelevant anyway, and you're all mistaken for judging by that metric."
I used to date someone at Syracuse University who was an art major there. I was shown all kinds of student art projects, and there was one that made me scratch my head -- some student was doing oil paintings of printed circuit boards. Now, I personally like the look of printed circuit boards, and I even find them aesthetically pleasing enough to put them on display occasionally. But I found the paintings to be sterile and aesthetically displeasing. When I commented that I found them to be the antithesis of art, what was I told? "You lack training in art, so nothing you say about these paintings is valid, except for your own personal aesthetic."
I still like to date artists, but that pretentious attitude was a bit much to handle. Just because I lacked the proper terminology and framework for doing "real" art criticism doesn't mean I have no valid opinions aside from what pleases me aesthetically.
That's a great way to blame someone for their own ignorance. What's the poor guy supposed to do, absorb that information by osmosis? Pick up a random art book and hope it teaches him about the "right" masters?
There was an art appreciation class at MIT that a friend of mine took. He told me the students in it called it "clapping for credit." I wanted to focus on writing and literature, so I skipped that class. Maybe taking it would have enriched me a great deal, but I have never had much regard for what amounts to learning a bunch of names and dates. "This guy was a really important 20th century artist." OK, because you (or someone) decided this guy was important. But was his importance for a particular reason, or some historical accident? A combination in Duchamp's case, it would seem -- and it's interesting to note that some of his works were rejected as "not being art" by artists of his time,
Some of us were discouraged from learning about things like art history by our families or our chosen academic careers. Rather than making smarmy comments about how ill-bred or ill-educated we are, maybe you could simply try to enlighten others and explain why some viewpoint is relevant or actually important.
And apparently, many people here on Slashdot and elsewhere reject the notion that art is whatever an artist says it is. Merely reiterating that statement over and over, and then saying "some important dude named Duchamp said so, so this must be a true statement," is not an argument. (Well, it's a fallacious argument.) Repeating something doesn't make it true, and citing an "authority" that is only recognized among artists and those who collect or appreciate art is an appeal to false authority, not a proof.
In short, for those of us who value logic and empiricism, there is little value in these claims.
Now, it might be true that art is important (whatever that means), or that it exists as more than just a perceptual construct of the human mind, or even that merely calling something art makes it so. But don't be shocked that rationalists are going to act skeptical of such claims, and don't go blaming said rationalists for their perceptions.
Note that I'm not actually taking a side here, just pointing out that those perpetuating this viewpoint, citing Duchamp etc., seem just as entrenched in a viewpoint that they're not willing to give up, as those they are arguing against.
Speaking to the point of authorities -- in most disciplines, there is the notions that practitioners of the discipline recognize some figures as authorities, but in the scientific and mathematical disciplines (including computer science), there are some things which are provable without appealing to any authority. So while an art authority is only recognized within the world of art, and his statements may be taken as truth by those who accept them within that realm, the truths expressed in mathematics are provable to anyone, by anyone. while in the sciences, what was received wisdom one day is a rejected notion the next. You can't do that for art, so people who are hyper-rational thinkers are not going to accept claims based on Marcel Duchamp's say-so. Or Frank Zappa's.
In earlier ages, the reason why you were supposed to be quiet in a library was because some people were there to do research and couldn't check out all the reference books they could possibly need. Who needs that, now that we have the Internet?
Anyone who needs to use a primary source that isn't available online. I'm not talking about encyclopedias or other "reference" books that are a good first step to finding out what you need, but rather, source books which may be out of print, or which are so specialized that few people other than librarians would ever consider purchasing them. Some of these books are rare enough that they'll never be put in circulation. And believe me, high school English teachers can be very insistent that you use those obscure primary sources for term papers and so forth.
And if your library has the materials to support the sort of hard-core research that requires dead-tree copies of things that aren't on the Internet yet, they probably have quiet research rooms.
But many libraries are under-funded, or too small to justify creating or adding on a dedicated research room. My home town library was like that, and it was once a mansion. (The children's library was built as an addition.) The Phoenix Public Library, main branch, has been in decline for years -- they spent a fortune creating a really lovely space inside with a waterfall or fountain type structure around a stairwell, though I've never seen it fully running. It totally doesn't surprise me that many patrons are rude, talking on cellphones or letting their children run wild. I needed to do research for my boss a few years back, and he sent me to the library to go find some journal articles and a book or two; the library staff actually kind of sneered at me, and told me that the library had "changed its mission" (focusing less on obscure publications and more on books, periodicals, and other activities that were deemed beneficial to the community at large). The stuff I needed had to be obtained from other libraries in other locales, through inter-library loan. Maybe the Phoenix Public Library, which the GP sort of mentioned, has some quiet research rooms, but my impression was that there was precious little dedicated space for such things -- you were expected to photocopy what you needed and take that with you.
This will show a digital copy of the image in includes all the digital processing and sensor data.
The link for the patent is available in someone else's post in a parallel thread. I took a look at it.
In point of fact, Kodak specifically talks about the motion preview mode using fast, lower quality processing, with fewer pixels being processed and displayed (in a dedicated ASIC), and a slower still mode using more sophisticated processing algorithms (done by a general purpose processor or DSP) for a much higher quality image.
So no, Kodak isn't showing you all, or even most, of the image data. Just enough that it's suitable for use as a viewfinder.
First, CCD is a sensor technology, and LCD is a display technology. Comparing the two as you do makes no sense: "[...] camcorders as well as the QV-11, which used CCD technology, not LCD technology [...]"
The "novelty" of avoiding the first step of converting the video signal to NTSC is in the eye of the beholder; I am fairly certain there's prior art for this notion, albeit not in a still camera. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that conversion of raster data from a sensor into an NTSC signal is entirely unnecessary, when the intended end result is to display that image data on a screen contained in the same device. So Kodak "invented" not performing an unnecessary conversion to and from an intermediate format? I'm not buying it.
Looking at the patent, I would also submit that scaling the image data to fit on a display with fewer pixels (some EVF implementations use very tiny LCD screens in a classic-style viewfinder you put your eye close to) is something for which prior art exists -- the techniques go back decades, and are covered in references such as Foley, Van Dam, et. al.
The patent mentions de-mosaicing the image data to recover color information. This is something Kodak already holds a separate patent on.
The patent wording is a bit disingenuous in that it speaks of the "necessity" of generating an NTSC signal. It obviously isn't necessary if Kodak isn't doing it. Then again, they need to make this claim sound as patentable as possible... At the very least, many of the claims in this patent appear overly broad; the only claim that doesn't appear that way to me is something covered in another patent.
Y'see, Kodak is patenting what is known as an electronic viewfinder. It's not that they have patented the idea of hooking up a display device to a sensor and then displaying what the sensor "sees" -- there's plenty of prior art for that! No, they're patenting the obvious idea of using a sensor and a display device to take the place of a traditional viewfinder as you might find in an SLR camera (where there's an array of mirrors and prisms to accomplish this goal).
Yes, Kodak has invented plenty of useful things that deserve patent protection, including the mosaic pattern on digital camera sensors to obtain color images. This viewfinder thing, though, isn't worthy of patent protection -- because it's obvious.
once we take away the double negative (which is, of course, a no no in english. sorry for the pun!)
A couple things. First, you're being overly simplistic when you say double negatives are a "no no" in English. (Note that English is capitalized, by the way.) In fact, many fine examples of English prose from days of yore contain double and even triple negatives; one example would be the Declaration of Independence, and another would be the U.S. Constitution. Back in those days, it was expected that the reader would sit there and ruminate for more than half a second to divine the meaning of a sentence, and therefore was adequately equipped to discern the meaning of said double negative.
The only time in English that double negatives are a "no no" is when they are unintentional, as when some poorly educated speakers mean one thing but say the opposite. "I ain't got nothin'!" The speaker meant he has nothing, but in fact is literally saying that he has something.
Secondly, "no no" doesn't really qualify as a pun. Even if you disagree, it's pretty weak -- even for a pun.
At any rate, the person to whom you are responding clearly falls into the "unintentionally self-sabotaging" category.:-)
My only observation is that there's some validity to his viewpoint, even if he did mangle the expression of it. If the source code for a plugin is readable only by disassembling the plugin, I'm not sure if that plugin really qualifies as Open Source (as defined by the industry). It seems to me that to meet the definition of Open Source, the author or publisher of the browser plugin ought to explicitly publish the source for the plugin.
Yes, I know my use of "disassemble" might seem strained to some folks, but the steps you have to take to get at the source for the plugin are not that far removed from decompiling a Java class you extract from a JAR file, for example, or running a binary through a disassembler. I'm sure others will grouse over what "explicitly publish" means -- frankly, I'd be satisfied with distributing commented source along with the plugin as a separate, human-readable file, or exposing it on a web site.
While you cite a Wikipedia article that states that neodymium isn't all that rare, the article (which I actually read) doesn't say what the relative concentrations are at the different mines. In other words, what are the provable reserves in China vs. the United States? We have 1 major mine in the U.S. that was producing (in the mining sense of the word -- providing, furnishing, supplying) rare earths, but shut down. The Chinese tried to purchase that mine, but the U.S. government wisely blocked that sale. I guess there are some other mining locations in the states which need to be developed, and the mine I already mentioned is apparently going to be reopened.
Still, China remains the primary producer of rare earths. You made the mistake of assuming that (a) the distribution of rare earth elements in the Earth's outer crust is uniform -- it isn't -- and (b) there isn't a substantial start-up cost or lead time to extracting useful amounts of rare earths from new mines, or mines that need to be restarted.
As TFA states, many mines outside of China are 5-10 years away from producing in useful quantities. It also states that the Chinese are actively attempting to buy mines in other countries, not just the U.S. one I mentioned. So I think you're off-base; I think it's very clear that the Chinese can and are trying to corner the market on rare earths, not just neodymium.
Your comment was a great example of how to take a quote out of context, add emphasis to further take it out of context, and use it to support an argument that it doesn't actually support. For crying out loud, even the Wikipedia article notes that neodymium falls behind cerium in abundance, so you can't even say neodymium is the most abundant of the rare earths. The "not rare at all" bit is a relative thing. It's pretty damned rare compared to, say, carbon, or iron, or silicon, or lead... In short, yes, there are rare earth mines in many countries, but everything I've read on the subject -- which is way more than TFA -- seems to indicate that China has the greatest provable reserves.
Optical is rubbish? Maybe if you don't care about archives. Yes, archival CD and DVD (and now Blu-Ray) media exists, and it's not cheap, but is guaranteed to have a century-plus shelf life after writing to it.
Nothing else comes close in terms of longevity or durability. Magnetic media degrades over time. Solid state storage eventually loses its data, and IIRC on time scales far shorter than a century.
Also, most solid state memory cards are tiny because of the applications/devices they're used in. They get lost and broken easily. Optical discs are actually an ideal size for handling and storage, and offer enough surface area on both the top of the disc and the carrier to print or write a fair amount of information about what's on that media.
He's talking about stereo imaging for an audio signal. I'm going to assume you figured out that he was making an analogy between sample rates for digital audio and frame rates for video (recorded or computer generated). Since his ears are the engaged organs in this example, "hear" is the appropriate verb. And the creation of a 3D soundstage is the whole point of using stereo, as opposed to having a single channel for sound.
As for what it means to "hear" imaging, it's really obvious to anyone who's ever listened to a high-end system with a musical sample they're intimately familiar with. Better imaging means you can more precisely locate instruments in the stereo soundstage -- at the very least, better localization in the horizontal plane, and if you're lucky, the "height" of the soundstage may seem to expand. Instead of getting a smear of sound across some general area, you can point your finger and say, "I hear the oboe coming from right there."
Obviously, higher frequencies are more directional than lower frequencies, so some musical instruments localize better than others.
And no, you don't need gold-plated anything to get this kind of performance, but it doesn't hurt to have gold plating on terminals to prevent corrosion. I've had cables with RCA connectors on them give a poor, noisy connection until I've cleaned off the oxidation.
I will say, though, that after listening to a $500,000+ system at a local HiFi boutique and comparing to, say, my current approx. $5000 system at home -- a difference of 2 orders of magnitude -- I know that I'm missing out on some of what the top-shelf system can reveal to me, but not enough to justify the massive difference in price. (The high end system was fed by Mark Levinson equipment, with two massive monoblock amps plugged into 220V mains feeding the speakers. Pretty outrageous.)
On the other hand, I can say that SACD definitely provides a superior experience to CD, as the GP indicated -- the effective sample rate for SACD is ridiculously high, even though the technology isn't directly comparable since CD uses 16-bit PCM and SACD uses 1-bit DSD. DVD Audio, not quite as much, but I have heard some impressive DVD-A demos at 192 kHz sample rate, 24 bit/ch sample size, which were almost holographic.
The bottom line is, whether you're talking about audio or video, more samples/sec or frames/sec is a good thing, especially with (in the case of video) a rapidly moving subject. This truth is why, for instance, "Doc" Edgerton at MIT pioneered high speed cameras and strobe technology to photograph bullets ripping through playing cards. OK, in the still photography case, you care about the inverse of frame rate, so to speak, but the principle applies; I do know "Doc" also did film work, and even won an Oscar.
Because that's the convention for adding a hyphenated modifier to a compound noun. "Mushroom cloud" is the noun, and when you're combining a noun with an adjective like "sized" to qualify that adjective, you use a hyphen. For example, "He shot me with the.357 magnum, and as I looked down, I saw a bowling ball-sized hole in my chest."
Speaking of bowling ball examples using "-sized" in them, I found a perfect example from Science News: Bowling ball-sized Devil Toad probably ate hatchling dinosaurs
(Come to think of it, there was probably a Slashdot story about that...)
But the rest of your comments are spot-on. Mushroom clouds are generally caused by explosions, and yes, they do come in all sizes, rendering the original author's statement completely meaningless.
For the size of an implosion, I reckon most people would consider the size to be the volume or area affected by the implosion -- same as for the "size" of an explosion. Since an implosion tends to pull in surrounding matter...
I'm sure the author of the summary thought the phrase sounded cool until we all started nit-picking him.
All the platforms that used to run Cobol, you mean. I'm looking at you, J2EE.
I don't see much C# (or other CLR managed code) running on set-top boxes, for just one instance, so I think it's a bit ludicrous to make such an assertion -- even if Java is often touted as the "COBOL of the 21st century." J2ME is part of Java, too, and that runs on cell phones of all types -- yet only phones running Windows Mobile will run apps written in C#.
For those reasons, I'm going to support the GP's assertion that Java is alive and well and running on platforms.NET could never dream of. Still. And I'm not just talking about enterprisey environments where COBOL used to dominate. If that's really all you can think of, you need to open your eyes.
I should also mention that a lot of new dynamic languages are hosted on the JVM, which may well outlast the Java language itself. The Java runtime is actually quite useful that way. JRuby and Groovy are gaining a lot of traction, and Groovy contains many of the things we in the Java world have been waiting forever to get (e.g., closures).
Since I haven't seen anyone else mention it yet...
"Size" and "mass" are two different things.
Size has to do with physical dimensions, whereas mass is an intrinsic property of matter. TFA clearly states these super Earths are 5 to 7.5 times the mass of Earth, not the "size." Summary is wrong.
Let's concede that the head-on-cartridge design is to be praised, even if it increases the cost of the cartridges.
Head-on-cartridge was one of the reasons I ultimately ditched Epson for HP. The HP carts at the time had the print head built into the cartridge, so if I ran into problems, I simply bought a new print cartridge and life was good.
Epsons have the print head built captively into the carriage, which makes cleaning the print head all but impossible unless you work for Epson.
I eventually switched away from HP after I ran into a problem with my HP color printer of many years. It seems that even keeping the print head on the cartridge doesn't eliminate all problems. I thought my HP had some kind of print head clog from me not printing in color for a while, but that wasn't it. Turns out it was a logic problem in the printer.
My solution was to buy a Canon. Canon keeps the print head separate from the ink tanks, and each ink color is in its own tank. I purchased one of the 6-color photo printers which had special photo-cyan and photo-magenta colors in addition to the usual CMYK. What sets Canon apart from Epson, though, is that the print head can be removed from the unit and replaced without any special tools. You install the print head when you unbox the unit and set it up, and only ever remove it if there's a problem -- the only downside to this is, by the time you need to replace the print head, it might be impossible to find.
So in conclusion, I would say that head-on-cartridge is good (especially for low volume printing where quality isn't paramount), but having a user replaceable print head is the best possible solution.
Yet Greenbaum repeatedly insisted in the comments on the site that he did not violate their privacy policy, using the (in this case) absurd notion that the IP address and the timestamp of the comment were not personally identifiable information. If that's the case, why call up the admins over at the school and hand them what little information he had, if not to unmask Pussyman?
I love how on one side, we have media companies trying to convince judges that an IP address is PII because it's convenient for them to do so -- and pointing out things like NAT are rather inconvenient to such legal arguments -- while on the other side, we have a different kind of media company trying to convince the court of public opinion that an IP address is not PII. So, which is it? Well, in this particular case it was enough of an identification that Greenbaum knew which school to contact, and giving them the timestamps of the two postings let them identify the poster. Just because the website has its own definition of what constitutes PII doesn't mean that a court will agree with their definition.
Good book, but the summary on Wikipedia is incorrect and misleading. It turns out that the so-called micro black hole wasn't actually a black hole, but an even more exotic synthetic object. (The Wikipedia article also implies that this object was human-made, when in fact it was clearly established later in the book that it is made by someone intelligent somewhere, just not humans.) The object was exotic enough that it had some properties that a MBH does not have, allowing it to be sent over presumably long interstellar distances without evaporating along the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, wish I had the points to give you a +1 Insightful or something equally appropriate.
Unfortunately, there isn't also a +1 Pedantic. ;-) But then you'd lose that point because you didn't also point out that the Gregorian Calendar doesn't have a year zero.
Speaking of pedantry... your ordinal number is wrong. It should be 21st, not "21th." It goes 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th.
So how will the judgment against Spamhaus be enforced? How will anyone force Spamhaus to pay, assuming they don't voluntarily fork over the money?
I'm not talking about what you think is right and wrong. (And on a personal note, I am perfectly OK with ignoring or disregarding laws I personally think are unjust, or which I do not generally agree with. But that's not terribly relevant either.) What I am asking is, very simply, how anyone can force Spamhaus to honor this judgment and pay up.
Since I don't think they have any U.S. assets of any kind whatsoever, nothing can be seized in the U.S. I suppose the spammers here who brought the suit could agitate for "justice" and try to squeeze blood from a turnip, but how? They could go to the UK and petition the courts there, I suppose, but the UK courts aren't obligated to enforce a civil ruling from a U.S. jurisdiction.
Similarly, your Microsoft analogy from a couple posts back is flawed, because Microsoft is a true multinational corporation with a real presence in Germany, and they have real assets that can be seized there. But while Germany might have the power to seize assets of Microsoft in Germany, it certainly can't seize assets held in another country without the cooperation of that country.
Your talk about what is OK or not OK to "publish" in various locales/jurisdictions is interesting but hardly relevant. I publish material routinely on my blog which is legal in the U.S., but is illegal in many other countries. If someone sues me in Turkey for something I post that he believes is defamatory to Islam, or the country of Turkey (it's illegal by Turkish law to disparage Turkey or "Turkishness"), do you think I'm going to hop on a plane and submit to their legal system? Absolutely not. Do you think I'm going to pay up if they fine me? No way. Would I deliver myself to their prison system? I don't think so!
So, I can totally understand why the Spamhaus folks would choose not to show up in a U.S. court to defend themselves and run the risk of lending more credence to an already questionable legal proceeding.
The problem with the notion of "universal competency" (courts that claim competency to hear cases outside their national borders) and so-called "long arm" legal tactics is that national sovereignty suffers as a result. I might add that sovereignty is something guaranteed by the UN, at least in principle.
You speak of how doing business in another country opens a company up to that country's laws. True enough, but again, it's a matter of enforcement. China prohibits direct access to all kinds of things, but the U.S. State Department actively works to make resources illegally available to Chinese citizens. OK, so this is lawbreaking sponsored by a government, not a company, but the principle applies similarly. Furthermore, while the ABC Company might be headquartered in Nebraska but do business in Thailand, that doesn't mean ABC Company has to have a physical presence in Thailand to do business there. If ABC Company runs afoul of some law in Thailand, they might be fined for it (especially if it's a civil and not a criminal matter). Should they choose not to pay the fine, there are many means that the country could bring to bear -- network filtering for an internet company, or blocking shipments of physical goods at the border. But they can't go to the State of Nebraska, or the U.S. federal government, and demand that money. (Well, they can, but they probably won't get it...)
And anyway, since it has been stated numerous times (including in articles linked from this Slashdot story) that there's no way for this judgment to be enforced in any way against Spamhaus, I have to ask again, how exactly can Spamhaus be forced to do anything in this matter? They can't. I challenge you to explain, in detail, what mechanism that could be brought to bear and force them to accept the judgment and pay the fine?
This has nothing to do with right and wrong. This has nothing to do with petty grudges
First off, here is the corrected link for that article:
LICRA vs. Yahoo
(This is why it pays to preview, and it pays to not use the auto-linking feature when the URL contains weird punctuation like the exclamation point.)
Secondly, although Yahoo! lost in civil court in France, it did not lose in criminal court.
Thirdly, Yahoo! was being somewhat disingenuous in how it handled matters, because it could have easily implemented controls to prevent French citizens from accessing the U.S. version of its auction site. (The article notes that locale-specific advertising appeared on the site, which hurt Yahoo's case.)
Fourth, Yahoo! was threatened with fines; although they could have simply refused to pay, they would have had to give up any subsidiaries in France or any other EU country that France could reasonably exert influence through in order to obtain fines. It's also likely that any Yahoo! corporate office, such as the President, would have to think twice before visiting France. (Although since this was a civil matter, and Yahoo! prevailed on the criminal grounds, so perhaps the President of Yahoo! didn't have to worry about being arrested.)
Fifth, when Yahoo! brought its case to a U.S. district court in the hopes that the French ruling would be effectively declared unenforceable in the U.S., Yahoo! initially prevailed. This case was then appealed by LICRA and the UEJF on the grounds that the court had no personal jurisdiction over them. So it's very interesting to me that the French courts claim expansive jurisdiction over U.S. corporations and citizens, yet the interested parties in France apparently have no shame over claiming U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over them. The appeals court accepted the personal jurisdiction argument.
Lastly, Yahoo! chose to comply with the French court by banning all auctions of Nazi memorabilia, rather than blocking French users from accessing such auctions. While they technically could have merely restricted French users from accessing such auctions, or all auctions altogether, there were technical issues at stake (e.g., insufficiency of geolocation based on IP address, which was only 70% effective at the time, or reliably tagging auctions of banned material).
This has the effect of chilling protected speech in the United States, a constitutional matter due to the First Amendment. The problem with so-called claims of "universal competence" by courts is that this very concept violates the notion of national sovereignty, something even the United Nations pays lip-service to.
My take? As an individual, or even as a corporation located solely within the United States, if I were faced with a fine or other legal ruling arrived at in another country, I'd simply say "Fine me all you like" and never pay. And then make sure I never set foot in that country again.
And when Apple's legal theory is tested and vindicated in a court, then (and only then, unless there's an appeal) is it a settled matter of law. Otherwise, Apple doesn't get to act like an authority and claim to tell you what is legal and what isn't.
Since their claims haven't been tested, their stated position is merely interesting. I certainly wouldn't automatically buy their position. At stake is the principle of "I get to do whatever I want with whatever I buy."
Also note that Apple is claiming that the jailbreaking procedure is a violation of copyright. However, if the jailbreak is performed by you, the end user, on your own hardware, and was not distributed in any way, there is no dissemination of copyrighted material without permission, and therefore no copyright violation. Jailbreaking in this case is akin to scribbling in a book you bought.
The EFF article you link to goes into other justifications that I won't bother to enumerate here, like reverse engineering (which is explicitly legal in the United States, though perhaps not in other countries).
Well, in actuality, a lobotomy can be performed as an outpatient procedure -- and this was done quite a lot in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Basically, you insert a long, slender needle or other cutting instrument in through the ocular orbit (the bone is thin near the top of each socket), punch through the bone and tissue and then swipe the needle across the inside of the skull to sever the frontal lobe. Controlling the angle of insertion lets you control how far back you cut...
I think you're misguided. Did you read TFA? The Emily Howell program uses a different approach from Cope's previous work. It's entirely different work, sounding nothing like an existing composer. The new approach seems much more interactive, and involves machine learning, so the new program seems even more strong-AI-ish and more creative than the older, retired program that generated Mozart-like sonatas.
TFA spends a fair bit of time talking about how the software has been tuned to break the rules creatively, and is able to determine when it's OK to do so -- the older software did so to a degree, the newer software (Emily Howell) even moreso.
Cope is still right about one thing -- we are what we eat, and with music, we are what we hear. Or rather, we compose what we hear. Sometimes that inspiration comes from birds (Beethoven's Fifth comes to mind) or other environmental sounds. Usually, it comes from other humans. So yeah, there are going to be social, cultural, and regional influences... on stuff that various societies, cultures, and regions pick up from other societies, cultures, and regions. Nothing is created in a vacuum, and there is very little that is novel or original in music that isn't derived from something else. That's more of an evolutionary process, not spontaneous generation of art from pure nothingness.
So let me turn your assertion around: Humans won't be able to tread where humans haven't, since we only know the rules we give ourselves. Sounds a little absurd? Maybe. But largely a correct assertion. True innovation enters the system only slowly, usually introduced by some inspiration that impinges upon humans -- natural phenomena, new discoveries (scientific, philosophical, etc.) that shake our cultural foundations, even disasters.
This is such a skewed view of reality, I had to laugh -- it's something only an engineer working within Microsoft could write, completely ignoring (just to pick one predatory example) the kinds of lopsided contracts that Microsoft's business side was penning with all sorts of hardware manufacturers, prohibiting them from shipping computers with rival operating systems or web browsers...
There was very little "accidental" about these predatory moves, and the monopoly trial very clearly showed that this was a pattern of behavior.
Contrast with:
Gee, that sounds like the same kinds of behavior, just writ small. This strikes me as one of those "you reap what you sow" type of situations. Definitely, the offspring-eating behavior is well ingrained in the DNA of this particular organism...
The poetic justice is delicious. Pity that the author of TFA doesn't see it.
That's what you wrote previously.
It sure seems that you're arguing the "relevance of skill," so it's a bit amusing that you'd contradict yourself in a subsequent comment and say you're not arguing the relevance of skill. Yes, you did clarify your previous intention, so we now know you meant that Duchamp had obvious technical skill, and so should not be dismissed. (Picasso had some great technical skill, too -- some of his earliest works looked photo-realistic to me.)
But it also seems that you're claiming one does not need technical skill to make art, that technical skill is "largely irrelevant." So you're also kind of saying, "Hey, you unwashed heathens, here's this artist who is acknowledged as being great, and I know you judge technical skill, so don't dismiss this guy on the grounds of technical skill... even though technical skill is irrelevant anyway, and you're all mistaken for judging by that metric."
I used to date someone at Syracuse University who was an art major there. I was shown all kinds of student art projects, and there was one that made me scratch my head -- some student was doing oil paintings of printed circuit boards. Now, I personally like the look of printed circuit boards, and I even find them aesthetically pleasing enough to put them on display occasionally. But I found the paintings to be sterile and aesthetically displeasing. When I commented that I found them to be the antithesis of art, what was I told? "You lack training in art, so nothing you say about these paintings is valid, except for your own personal aesthetic."
I still like to date artists, but that pretentious attitude was a bit much to handle. Just because I lacked the proper terminology and framework for doing "real" art criticism doesn't mean I have no valid opinions aside from what pleases me aesthetically.
That's a great way to blame someone for their own ignorance. What's the poor guy supposed to do, absorb that information by osmosis? Pick up a random art book and hope it teaches him about the "right" masters?
There was an art appreciation class at MIT that a friend of mine took. He told me the students in it called it "clapping for credit." I wanted to focus on writing and literature, so I skipped that class. Maybe taking it would have enriched me a great deal, but I have never had much regard for what amounts to learning a bunch of names and dates. "This guy was a really important 20th century artist." OK, because you (or someone) decided this guy was important. But was his importance for a particular reason, or some historical accident? A combination in Duchamp's case, it would seem -- and it's interesting to note that some of his works were rejected as "not being art" by artists of his time,
Some of us were discouraged from learning about things like art history by our families or our chosen academic careers. Rather than making smarmy comments about how ill-bred or ill-educated we are, maybe you could simply try to enlighten others and explain why some viewpoint is relevant or actually important.
And apparently, many people here on Slashdot and elsewhere reject the notion that art is whatever an artist says it is. Merely reiterating that statement over and over, and then saying "some important dude named Duchamp said so, so this must be a true statement," is not an argument. (Well, it's a fallacious argument.) Repeating something doesn't make it true, and citing an "authority" that is only recognized among artists and those who collect or appreciate art is an appeal to false authority, not a proof.
In short, for those of us who value logic and empiricism, there is little value in these claims.
Now, it might be true that art is important (whatever that means), or that it exists as more than just a perceptual construct of the human mind, or even that merely calling something art makes it so. But don't be shocked that rationalists are going to act skeptical of such claims, and don't go blaming said rationalists for their perceptions.
Note that I'm not actually taking a side here, just pointing out that those perpetuating this viewpoint, citing Duchamp etc., seem just as entrenched in a viewpoint that they're not willing to give up, as those they are arguing against.
Speaking to the point of authorities -- in most disciplines, there is the notions that practitioners of the discipline recognize some figures as authorities, but in the scientific and mathematical disciplines (including computer science), there are some things which are provable without appealing to any authority. So while an art authority is only recognized within the world of art, and his statements may be taken as truth by those who accept them within that realm, the truths expressed in mathematics are provable to anyone, by anyone. while in the sciences, what was received wisdom one day is a rejected notion the next. You can't do that for art, so people who are hyper-rational thinkers are not going to accept claims based on Marcel Duchamp's say-so. Or Frank Zappa's.
Anyone who needs to use a primary source that isn't available online. I'm not talking about encyclopedias or other "reference" books that are a good first step to finding out what you need, but rather, source books which may be out of print, or which are so specialized that few people other than librarians would ever consider purchasing them. Some of these books are rare enough that they'll never be put in circulation. And believe me, high school English teachers can be very insistent that you use those obscure primary sources for term papers and so forth.
But many libraries are under-funded, or too small to justify creating or adding on a dedicated research room. My home town library was like that, and it was once a mansion. (The children's library was built as an addition.) The Phoenix Public Library, main branch, has been in decline for years -- they spent a fortune creating a really lovely space inside with a waterfall or fountain type structure around a stairwell, though I've never seen it fully running. It totally doesn't surprise me that many patrons are rude, talking on cellphones or letting their children run wild. I needed to do research for my boss a few years back, and he sent me to the library to go find some journal articles and a book or two; the library staff actually kind of sneered at me, and told me that the library had "changed its mission" (focusing less on obscure publications and more on books, periodicals, and other activities that were deemed beneficial to the community at large). The stuff I needed had to be obtained from other libraries in other locales, through inter-library loan. Maybe the Phoenix Public Library, which the GP sort of mentioned, has some quiet research rooms, but my impression was that there was precious little dedicated space for such things -- you were expected to photocopy what you needed and take that with you.
The link for the patent is available in someone else's post in a parallel thread. I took a look at it.
In point of fact, Kodak specifically talks about the motion preview mode using fast, lower quality processing, with fewer pixels being processed and displayed (in a dedicated ASIC), and a slower still mode using more sophisticated processing algorithms (done by a general purpose processor or DSP) for a much higher quality image.
So no, Kodak isn't showing you all, or even most, of the image data. Just enough that it's suitable for use as a viewfinder.
A few things:
The patent wording is a bit disingenuous in that it speaks of the "necessity" of generating an NTSC signal. It obviously isn't necessary if Kodak isn't doing it. Then again, they need to make this claim sound as patentable as possible... At the very least, many of the claims in this patent appear overly broad; the only claim that doesn't appear that way to me is something covered in another patent.
Y'see, Kodak is patenting what is known as an electronic viewfinder. It's not that they have patented the idea of hooking up a display device to a sensor and then displaying what the sensor "sees" -- there's plenty of prior art for that! No, they're patenting the obvious idea of using a sensor and a display device to take the place of a traditional viewfinder as you might find in an SLR camera (where there's an array of mirrors and prisms to accomplish this goal).
Yes, Kodak has invented plenty of useful things that deserve patent protection, including the mosaic pattern on digital camera sensors to obtain color images. This viewfinder thing, though, isn't worthy of patent protection -- because it's obvious.
A couple things. First, you're being overly simplistic when you say double negatives are a "no no" in English. (Note that English is capitalized, by the way.) In fact, many fine examples of English prose from days of yore contain double and even triple negatives; one example would be the Declaration of Independence, and another would be the U.S. Constitution. Back in those days, it was expected that the reader would sit there and ruminate for more than half a second to divine the meaning of a sentence, and therefore was adequately equipped to discern the meaning of said double negative.
The only time in English that double negatives are a "no no" is when they are unintentional, as when some poorly educated speakers mean one thing but say the opposite. "I ain't got nothin'!" The speaker meant he has nothing, but in fact is literally saying that he has something.
Secondly, "no no" doesn't really qualify as a pun. Even if you disagree, it's pretty weak -- even for a pun.
At any rate, the person to whom you are responding clearly falls into the "unintentionally self-sabotaging" category. :-)
My only observation is that there's some validity to his viewpoint, even if he did mangle the expression of it. If the source code for a plugin is readable only by disassembling the plugin, I'm not sure if that plugin really qualifies as Open Source (as defined by the industry). It seems to me that to meet the definition of Open Source, the author or publisher of the browser plugin ought to explicitly publish the source for the plugin.
Yes, I know my use of "disassemble" might seem strained to some folks, but the steps you have to take to get at the source for the plugin are not that far removed from decompiling a Java class you extract from a JAR file, for example, or running a binary through a disassembler. I'm sure others will grouse over what "explicitly publish" means -- frankly, I'd be satisfied with distributing commented source along with the plugin as a separate, human-readable file, or exposing it on a web site.
While you cite a Wikipedia article that states that neodymium isn't all that rare, the article (which I actually read) doesn't say what the relative concentrations are at the different mines. In other words, what are the provable reserves in China vs. the United States? We have 1 major mine in the U.S. that was producing (in the mining sense of the word -- providing, furnishing, supplying) rare earths, but shut down. The Chinese tried to purchase that mine, but the U.S. government wisely blocked that sale. I guess there are some other mining locations in the states which need to be developed, and the mine I already mentioned is apparently going to be reopened.
Still, China remains the primary producer of rare earths. You made the mistake of assuming that (a) the distribution of rare earth elements in the Earth's outer crust is uniform -- it isn't -- and (b) there isn't a substantial start-up cost or lead time to extracting useful amounts of rare earths from new mines, or mines that need to be restarted.
As TFA states, many mines outside of China are 5-10 years away from producing in useful quantities. It also states that the Chinese are actively attempting to buy mines in other countries, not just the U.S. one I mentioned. So I think you're off-base; I think it's very clear that the Chinese can and are trying to corner the market on rare earths, not just neodymium.
Your comment was a great example of how to take a quote out of context, add emphasis to further take it out of context, and use it to support an argument that it doesn't actually support. For crying out loud, even the Wikipedia article notes that neodymium falls behind cerium in abundance, so you can't even say neodymium is the most abundant of the rare earths. The "not rare at all" bit is a relative thing. It's pretty damned rare compared to, say, carbon, or iron, or silicon, or lead... In short, yes, there are rare earth mines in many countries, but everything I've read on the subject -- which is way more than TFA -- seems to indicate that China has the greatest provable reserves.
Optical is rubbish? Maybe if you don't care about archives. Yes, archival CD and DVD (and now Blu-Ray) media exists, and it's not cheap, but is guaranteed to have a century-plus shelf life after writing to it.
Nothing else comes close in terms of longevity or durability. Magnetic media degrades over time. Solid state storage eventually loses its data, and IIRC on time scales far shorter than a century.
Also, most solid state memory cards are tiny because of the applications/devices they're used in. They get lost and broken easily. Optical discs are actually an ideal size for handling and storage, and offer enough surface area on both the top of the disc and the carrier to print or write a fair amount of information about what's on that media.
He's talking about stereo imaging for an audio signal. I'm going to assume you figured out that he was making an analogy between sample rates for digital audio and frame rates for video (recorded or computer generated). Since his ears are the engaged organs in this example, "hear" is the appropriate verb. And the creation of a 3D soundstage is the whole point of using stereo, as opposed to having a single channel for sound.
As for what it means to "hear" imaging, it's really obvious to anyone who's ever listened to a high-end system with a musical sample they're intimately familiar with. Better imaging means you can more precisely locate instruments in the stereo soundstage -- at the very least, better localization in the horizontal plane, and if you're lucky, the "height" of the soundstage may seem to expand. Instead of getting a smear of sound across some general area, you can point your finger and say, "I hear the oboe coming from right there."
Obviously, higher frequencies are more directional than lower frequencies, so some musical instruments localize better than others.
And no, you don't need gold-plated anything to get this kind of performance, but it doesn't hurt to have gold plating on terminals to prevent corrosion. I've had cables with RCA connectors on them give a poor, noisy connection until I've cleaned off the oxidation.
I will say, though, that after listening to a $500,000+ system at a local HiFi boutique and comparing to, say, my current approx. $5000 system at home -- a difference of 2 orders of magnitude -- I know that I'm missing out on some of what the top-shelf system can reveal to me, but not enough to justify the massive difference in price. (The high end system was fed by Mark Levinson equipment, with two massive monoblock amps plugged into 220V mains feeding the speakers. Pretty outrageous.)
On the other hand, I can say that SACD definitely provides a superior experience to CD, as the GP indicated -- the effective sample rate for SACD is ridiculously high, even though the technology isn't directly comparable since CD uses 16-bit PCM and SACD uses 1-bit DSD. DVD Audio, not quite as much, but I have heard some impressive DVD-A demos at 192 kHz sample rate, 24 bit/ch sample size, which were almost holographic.
The bottom line is, whether you're talking about audio or video, more samples/sec or frames/sec is a good thing, especially with (in the case of video) a rapidly moving subject. This truth is why, for instance, "Doc" Edgerton at MIT pioneered high speed cameras and strobe technology to photograph bullets ripping through playing cards. OK, in the still photography case, you care about the inverse of frame rate, so to speak, but the principle applies; I do know "Doc" also did film work, and even won an Oscar.
Because that's the convention for adding a hyphenated modifier to a compound noun. "Mushroom cloud" is the noun, and when you're combining a noun with an adjective like "sized" to qualify that adjective, you use a hyphen. For example, "He shot me with the .357 magnum, and as I looked down, I saw a bowling ball-sized hole in my chest."
Speaking of bowling ball examples using "-sized" in them, I found a perfect example from Science News: Bowling ball-sized Devil Toad probably ate hatchling dinosaurs
(Come to think of it, there was probably a Slashdot story about that...)
But the rest of your comments are spot-on. Mushroom clouds are generally caused by explosions, and yes, they do come in all sizes, rendering the original author's statement completely meaningless.
For the size of an implosion, I reckon most people would consider the size to be the volume or area affected by the implosion -- same as for the "size" of an explosion. Since an implosion tends to pull in surrounding matter...
I'm sure the author of the summary thought the phrase sounded cool until we all started nit-picking him.
I don't see much C# (or other CLR managed code) running on set-top boxes, for just one instance, so I think it's a bit ludicrous to make such an assertion -- even if Java is often touted as the "COBOL of the 21st century." J2ME is part of Java, too, and that runs on cell phones of all types -- yet only phones running Windows Mobile will run apps written in C#.
For those reasons, I'm going to support the GP's assertion that Java is alive and well and running on platforms .NET could never dream of. Still. And I'm not just talking about enterprisey environments where COBOL used to dominate. If that's really all you can think of, you need to open your eyes.
I should also mention that a lot of new dynamic languages are hosted on the JVM, which may well outlast the Java language itself. The Java runtime is actually quite useful that way. JRuby and Groovy are gaining a lot of traction, and Groovy contains many of the things we in the Java world have been waiting forever to get (e.g., closures).
Since I haven't seen anyone else mention it yet...
"Size" and "mass" are two different things.
Size has to do with physical dimensions, whereas mass is an intrinsic property of matter. TFA clearly states these super Earths are 5 to 7.5 times the mass of Earth, not the "size." Summary is wrong.
Head-on-cartridge was one of the reasons I ultimately ditched Epson for HP. The HP carts at the time had the print head built into the cartridge, so if I ran into problems, I simply bought a new print cartridge and life was good.
Epsons have the print head built captively into the carriage, which makes cleaning the print head all but impossible unless you work for Epson.
I eventually switched away from HP after I ran into a problem with my HP color printer of many years. It seems that even keeping the print head on the cartridge doesn't eliminate all problems. I thought my HP had some kind of print head clog from me not printing in color for a while, but that wasn't it. Turns out it was a logic problem in the printer.
My solution was to buy a Canon. Canon keeps the print head separate from the ink tanks, and each ink color is in its own tank. I purchased one of the 6-color photo printers which had special photo-cyan and photo-magenta colors in addition to the usual CMYK. What sets Canon apart from Epson, though, is that the print head can be removed from the unit and replaced without any special tools. You install the print head when you unbox the unit and set it up, and only ever remove it if there's a problem -- the only downside to this is, by the time you need to replace the print head, it might be impossible to find.
So in conclusion, I would say that head-on-cartridge is good (especially for low volume printing where quality isn't paramount), but having a user replaceable print head is the best possible solution.
Yet Greenbaum repeatedly insisted in the comments on the site that he did not violate their privacy policy, using the (in this case) absurd notion that the IP address and the timestamp of the comment were not personally identifiable information. If that's the case, why call up the admins over at the school and hand them what little information he had, if not to unmask Pussyman?
I love how on one side, we have media companies trying to convince judges that an IP address is PII because it's convenient for them to do so -- and pointing out things like NAT are rather inconvenient to such legal arguments -- while on the other side, we have a different kind of media company trying to convince the court of public opinion that an IP address is not PII. So, which is it? Well, in this particular case it was enough of an identification that Greenbaum knew which school to contact, and giving them the timestamps of the two postings let them identify the poster. Just because the website has its own definition of what constitutes PII doesn't mean that a court will agree with their definition.
It's funny that PC Pro says the card is 13" long when TFA (Hothardware) says in its review that the hardware they were reviewing was 12" long.
Of course, I imagine there will be some variances between card manufacturers, but 1" of variance seems a lot.
Good book, but the summary on Wikipedia is incorrect and misleading. It turns out that the so-called micro black hole wasn't actually a black hole, but an even more exotic synthetic object. (The Wikipedia article also implies that this object was human-made, when in fact it was clearly established later in the book that it is made by someone intelligent somewhere, just not humans.) The object was exotic enough that it had some properties that a MBH does not have, allowing it to be sent over presumably long interstellar distances without evaporating along the way.