How this got modded informative is beyond me. Anyone can simply head over to the web site that Apple maintains with the list of stores. The stores in Arizona are:
Chandler, Chandler Fashion Center
Gilbert, SanTan Village
Glendale, Arrowhead
Phoenix, Biltmore (where I do most of my Apple Store shopping)
Scottsdale, Scottsdale Quarter (note that this is not the Scottsdale Fashion Square!)
Tucson, La Encantada
Furthermore, there's a link to the store at Scottsdale Quarter, which gives a map that shows the store is located on Scottsdale Road south of Kierland Boulevard. A Google search will turn up the site for the Scottsdale Fashion Square mall, which is at the intersection of Camelback and Scottsdale Roads. Plugging that into Google Maps (which Apple conveniently uses for the map and provides a driving directions link for) shows that the two locations are separated by 8.5 miles. So they're not even close.
Which raises the question, what thread did you read because while topical to the article your completely tangent to this thread.
You conveniently omitted the rant you provided wherein you railed about a Troll moderation to your own posts. Here, let me refresh your memory:
What is wrong with the moderators today? My post is not a troll. It's fact.
A vehicle which weighs a fraction of current cars using traditional materials, which has no crumple zones, which has never been crash test, which has no air bags, can factually be referred to as a go-cart.
Go-carts often get great mileage compared to cars, but it doesn't make it a real car. In the end its still a go-cart.
What is wrong with moderators these days?!?!?!
I especially like the interleaved question marks and exclamation points. Very classy, and not at all petulant seeming. (It's way more endearing than your confusion over "your" and "you're" in the more recent post.)
Sarcasm aside, that is what knewter is responding to. It's also the kind of crap-spewing that will get you a Troll moderation, whether or not you think you deserve it. Simply put, you ranted about go-karts and how, by implication, electric cars that amount to go-karts are not real cars. There was also talk about apples-to-oranges comparisons between these "fake" cars and "real" cars that offer safety features, etc. So no, sorry, knewter was very much on-topic for the particular message he responded to, and for the original article in general. In fact, judging by the original article, I'd say most of your ranting is off-topic, and should be modded so, but I don't currently have the mod points for that.
There's also something to be said for a certain level of civility and decorum in modern discourse. I know it might be fashionable in some circles to eschew etiquette and be impolite to those you hold in intellectual disdain, but you know what? People don't necessarily want to be subjected to that. If you have a point to make, you can make it without going off the deep end. In fact, you can even rip someone a new asshole and still come across as a gentleman (or lady) if you know how to do it right.
Judging from your response to ahabswhale, it seems that you've pretty much made up your mind that everyone else is wrong and you're right, but I'll take a stab anyway at why I think you're missing the point:
Looking up a given unique identifier quickly is something your average relational database is very good at. And writing the wrapper function to implement your hypothetical get() function is trivial in most languages. I'm completely at a loss for what your SQL-free database is offering me in this case. It's saving you from the horror of writing 10 lines of code, once, to implement get(in)? 60 minutes with a good SQL tutorial will teach you everything you need to know. Sure, there is a lot more you can learn, but for the simple case you're describing you can understand SQL at only the most simple level.
Hoo boy... so much here, where to begin? First off, the condescension is uncalled-for. It's not that people who hate SQL are somehow incapable of writing SQL queries, or learning how to. I think the objections are twofold:
Everything in SQL assumes that data is formatted in a tabular fashion. For data that's truly tabular, it makes sense. But trying to represent certain other data in a SQL database is just painful. For instance, it's overkill for an associative array such as a large hashtable. I've had DBAs tell me tree structures are "trivial" to represent in SQL, but my general experience has been that the standard ways to implement this (and the hacks that some commercial DBMSes employ to optimize this) are tortured and tortuous.
The extra layers of indirection and ceremony you have to go through to marshal and unmarshal data to/from a relational database. If you have many disparate fields and you want to do complex selection based on multiple fields or multiple conditions, a relational database makes sense, but again if what you have is essentially a giant hashtable, the extra layers of indirection for what is essentially a bunch of key-value pairs is way overkill.
To use the example you latched upon in the GP post, you talk about how trivial it is to write a wrapper function to give us a get() method equivalent. Sure, it might only take 10 lines of user-generated code, but let's consider what is going on behind the scenes:
That wrapper function will need to take that SQL and turn it into some form that can be processed more efficiently by the DB. If you take advantage of prepared statements, this might be a one-time operation. However, consider that some databases such as MySQL don't have a good or even a working implementation of prepared statements -- in the case of MySQL, I have it on good authority from one of the devs that prepared statements never worked right, so the code for that was yanked when they did the Drizzle fork; in fact, the JDBC drivers for MySQL kind of "roll their own" in their implementation of PreparedStatement, instead of letting the database do the work.
The statement to execute then gets shipped through the network connection to the database for execution. In all but the most trivial applications, the database won't reside on the same machine, so there's network overhead to be concerned with -- that'll be true whether you're talking about a SQL database or a no-SQL alternative. It does seem to me that in the case of a giant hashtable in the sky, the request is going to be a lot smaller over the wire than even invoking a prepared statement with a single parameter.
Once the request hits the DB engine, there's going to be some non-zero execution time. On the SQL side, even with a prepared statement, the parameter has to be plugged in and the compiled expression executed. On the no-SQL, giant hashtable side, we have little in the way of processing to do other than doing the actual lookup, which is hard-coded logic in the engine.
Retrieval should be a trivial matter, right? Well, in a traditional relational database, it's true that the column used as the primar
Re:Counting from 0 - fail
on
The Geek Atlas
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· Score: 1
The typical CS smug counts from 0, giving 128 = 1111111. Nice 'round' binary number generally means it is the largest number that fits within a certain number of bits.
I have no idea how you convinced yourself that 128 = 1111111, but that is most certainly wrong in any binary counting system ever devised. And for the record, the author of the review article (as well as the book's author) started "counting" from 0, since you need a value to represent 0 itself and 0 is that representation in binary (or 00000000 if you prefer). If anyone did it the way you suggest, 0000000 binary would represent decimal 1. That's simply absurd, and not how modern computers do it at all. Nor do real computer nerds. Nor do computer scientists, or for that matter any other scientist or mathematician.
I challenge you to work out the base 2 math for yourself. Or, try using any software that can convert numeric values between different numeric bases. The calculator apps that ship standard with Windows and Mac OS X can both do conversions from decimal to hex and binary, and vice-versa. I'm sure there are plenty of FOSS apps that can do it for you too.
As for what defines a "round" number, there is no one definition of what makes a round number. To the human mind, a "round" number is often what consists of a few non-zero digits followed by typically several zeroes, a general definition that seems to be echoed by, for example, the Wikipedia entry for round number. Note that the definition provided by Wikipedia extends this meaning to bases other than 10, including binary; in this case, 128 qualifies as round since it is 10000000 binary. There's a completely different sense of round number as defined by mathematicians, and you can see there's a link to it from the Wikipedia article, but I should note that this specialized sense of the term is no closer to your definition of a "binary round number" than the colloquial understanding of the term "round number."
Hand in your geek card at the door.
Dude, take your own advice. But then again, you probably weren't too sure of your own material, which is why you posted as AC, right? Either that, or you were trolling.
I'm surprised none of these instructions mentions anything about cleaning materials that can bind to and "neutralize" the mercury. I have read that sulfur will bind nicely to mercury, making it easier to clean up a mercury spill or a CFL bulb breakage -- just sprinkle liberally over the area before doing your cleaning. As a bonus, many garden supply sections of major stores (Home Depot, Wal-Mart, etc.) will carry sulfur in a form suitable for this application.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to pour the sweepings into someone's mouth and see what happens, but at least it makes the clean-up a little more manageable and less hazardous.
Thank you for pointing out what should be obvious to every American opining here. We have rights that are inalienable -- the government didn't give them to us, we had those rights all along!
All this talk about inciting a public panic (which isn't remotely analogous to what Lori Drew and her co-conspirators did) is beside the point.
For me, this isn't about a free speech issue. It's about committing fraud (Lori Drew, her own daughter, and one of her daughter's friends all conspired to create a fake account and misrepresent their collective identity for the purpose of spying on and manipulating another girl). I'm not sure if I agree or not with the whole idea of trying to find a way to prosecute Lori Drew or the other girls who helped her, and trying to pin that on some contorted notion of what is and isn't legal to say to someone, but... the fact that Lori Drew deleted the MySpace account after the victim committed suicide tells me that there was some acknowledgement of guilt by Lori Drew.
I'm not talking about the legal concept of guilt. I'm talking about the recognition that someone has when they think they've done something bad. You know, the pricking of conscience. I'm betting she probably heard the news and thought, "Crap, I didn't think it would go that far." It didn't even matter that Drew wasn't the one who sent the nasty messages that triggered the victim's suicide (at least, according to the accounts I read, it was one of the girls working with/for Drew, who got an immunity deal from the prosecution). It's because of this, and a few other details, that I think it's ludicrous for Lori Drew's defense to spin the tale now that there was no wrongdoing.
I agree that trying to prosecute Lori Drew with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, by saying she violated the TOS for MySpace, was a bit of reaching, and I'm glad the judge had the sense to realize the profound impact of his decision if he let that conviction stand. It's always dangerous when you take something that ought to be a civil matter and try to turn it into a criminal offense.
Yes, that's why PNG is a W3C recommendation and not a mandatory part of the spec. They don't generally put a gun to your head and tell you what graphics file formats to support, but they do give you a set of recommendations. PNG is an official W3C recommendation.
I hate to reply to myself, but apparently a missing close-tag rendered a mess of my response to some quoted material. So, here's the same section, disambiguated:
not that pedophilia is anything on the scale of plutonium possession, i'm simply using the analogy to suggest that if you possess item X, that is enough to suggest some sort of intent, since there is no godly reason to have item X that doesn't suggest some sort of malfeasance.
That kind of reasoning might be good enough to get you into the police academy, and it might be good enough as a legal theory to arrest someone, but that doesn't make the theory correct, nor will it automatically win a conviction. Incidentally, the term of art is “probable cause,” and all it means is that some material or behavior created a reasonable level of suspicion in a cop's mind that a crime had been committed. Sometimes the cops find nothing, which is embarrassing — and don't think that a cop won't take that embarrassment out on the suspect. Sometimes they find what they think is something, and then it turns out at trial that they had nothing.
Dude, you're exactly epitomizing the sort of knee-jerk, irrational argument that just about everyone else here has been talking about. That this little masterpiece of yours is a follow-up to a response to your initial diatribe against "them highfalutin' smarty-pants jerkwads" (my take on your rant about how social IQ is somehow superior to more traditional measures of human intellect) shows that you want to glorify irrationality and perpetuate a social order that suppresses intellectualism and, apparently, encourages mob rule.
say i have a pound of plutonium. should i be free and clear? or does mere possession of it suggest intent? that is, no one has a valid reason for possession of plutonium, other than malfeasance
Ridiculous half-assed attempt at a straw-man argument. What if you have permission from the relevant authorities to possess a pound of plutonium? What if you are building a nuclear reactor? What if you are working in the field of nuclear medicine? By itself, saying you have a pound of anything doesn't really mean anything, and you're relying on a "big scary" like nuclear material to try and get automatic buy-in to your fallacious straw-man argument.
there is no godly reason to be in possession of [...]
Considering how many times the phrase "godly reason" showed up in your prose, it's pretty clear where your bias comes from. Why don't you just give up any pretense of trying to argue rationally and just admit that you have a religious bias? Then your lack of actual rational argument and, apparently, critical thinking skills won't be seen as quite so much of a detriment.
not that pedophilia is anything on the scale of plutonium possession, i'm simply using the analogy to suggest that if you possess item X, that is enough to suggest some sort of intent, since there is no godly reason to have item X that doesn't suggest some sort of malfeasance. That kind of reasoning might be good enough to get you into the police academy, and it might be good enough as a legal theory to arrest someone, but that doesn't make the theory correct, nor will it automatically win a conviction. Incidentally, the term of art is "probable cause," and all it means is that some material or behavior created a reasonable level of suspicion in a cop's mind that a crime had been committed. Sometimes the cops find nothing, which is embarrassing -- and don't think that a cop won't take that embarrassment out on the suspect. Sometimes they find what they think is something, and then it turns out at trial that they had nothing.
say i have kiddie porn, real or fantasy: WHY do i have that? there is no reason you can give me for having that that doesn't imply some sort of mal intent
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you have "fantasy" child porn in your possession, which I shall interpret as so-called virtual porn. Just so we're not too far off base from TFA, let's say you have porn that consists of some teenager's face photoshopped -- badly! -- onto someone else's adult naked body. Why would you possess such a thing? Maybe for the same reason other men who possess such images would -- for sexual self-gratification, i.e., masturbation. Now, was a minor harmed? Remember that in TFA we've been discussing a teenager who is a public figure, so her image is already everywhere. So the photographs have been taken in a non-exploitive manner. I would argue that, in this type of scenario, no minor was actually harmed.
The whole point of child pornography laws isn't to stop adults from fantasizing about something you might consider "sick," but to protect children from being harmed and exploited. The law isn't there to prevent thought crimes (even though some would like it to be).
not that i think drawn/ photoshopped kiddie porn should be illegal. i think it should be legal. in order to trac
In the US, we just got lazy and started using periods everywhere.
That's just silly. These rules are a matter of convention, and some of these conventions were adopted as late as the 20th century. The British make distinctions between an abbreviation (where you leave off the end-part of a word) and a contraction (where you drop the middle part), whereas Americans and Canadians don't so much, and this is where some of the difference lies. The examples you gave with the trailing period are technically contractions by that definition. But it really irks me to see this pseudo-apologetic crap getting spewed by Americans, almost as much as it annoys me to be "corrected" by a Briton.
This has nothing to do with laziness, and everything to do with divergence of language over time between two geographically distinct groups. In fact, one could view the US writing styles as archaic (as many Commonwealth people do). After all, Americans use a different style of quotation from what the British generally do (although the "old" style is still considered correct in Britain, and I believe still used by some of their print publications). Viewed in that light, it isn't our laziness but that of our overseas friends that led to the change of style.
Americans have nothing to apologize for when it comes to our language. And yeah, I said "our" language, because it's certainly not the same as "their" language, even if there's a large area of overlap. Many common words actually have different connotations in the US vs. the UK, creating misunderstandings. The question is when you transition from being a dialect to being a distinct language, and the answer depends on whom you ask.
And speaking of matters of style and convention, some publications have their own house style guides (e.g., the New York Times) which are yet different from the general style guidelines you get taught in English class (in either the US or the UK, take your pick). Acronyms are a fun example. A typical US writer would use NASA, whereas the BBC will render it Nasa (drives me totally nuts), and the New York Times will render it as N.A.S.A. (which looks clunky to me).
Yes, keystroke snooping is a great way to obtain passwords, and password masking won't protect against that... but there are situations where a background, headless app will quietly take screenshots at some predefined interval (or when certain trigger events occur) when you're on the system, and any unmasked passwords can easily be captured this way. Many companies have a policy of recording screen captures of their employees' computers during the work day, and you wouldn't want to trust sensitive password information to a low-level tech monitoring those screen captures for evidence of malfeasance. Someone who's low-paid enough might be tempted to snag a bank password (many employees bank from work online) or the password to some other sensitive site in order to profit, directly or indirectly. Or just to have a little hooligan fun at someone else's expense.
Some folks may be working in such a paranoid environment and may not realize it. Where I work, this isn't done routinely — that I know! — but the capability exists through one of a few packages that are installed by default as part of our core workstation image.
There's a follow-up story here which mentions, among other things, that this practice is a TOS violation for many web sites. However, nobody seems clued in yet that there may be other legal issues, like violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The Pre Dev Wiki link provides some truly puzzling prose. First they repeatedly tell us that they were not threatened, and were not contacted by lawyers, then they tell us there's no secret agreement with Palm, and then they feed us this line of horseshit:
This development group has simply decided to take a stand and do things the right way instead of violating legal agreements.
Erm, what legal agreements are we talking about? Between whom? If lawyers weren't involved in this discussion, and if Palm didn't threaten these developers, what gives? If the legal agreements are between Palm and Sprint, so what? An independent group of developers isn't beholden to legal agreements between Palm and Sprint unless they signed something (a contract, say) agreeing to be bound by an agreement between other parties.
Note that Sprint does not have a plan available for use with the Pre which allows tethering under the Terms Of Service.
Yeah, because Sprint removed all mention from tethering from their Pre web pages.
On a separate but related note, I found the Register article pretty cringe-worthy, especially how they kept referring to AJAX as a platform for the Pre as well as the early iPhone. (AJAX is a programming style, not a "platform," and the Pre's software development platform is HTML 5 + JavaScript, with the HTML 5 engine providing a SQLite database for local storage.) The mention of native apps on the Pre was tantalizing, though all the Register would say is that such apps would be limited to Palm partners.
Suddenly, the iPhone development model doesn't look so locked-down and controlling.
Actually, you're the second (someone else asked the exact same question 36 minutes before you did). But although IANAL, I can say that there's probably a substantial amount of legal liability there. The only question is if it's worth suing over. Solid Oak probably can't afford the legal muscle to do something like this.
Assuming that a legal challenge can be brought, the next question is whether the computer manufacturer can mount a defense. It's not clear how much shielding a US-based manufacturer gets if the customer is a foreign entity and the goods themselves are probably not produced in the U.S. Expect the lawyers for Dell, et al, to claim that they're protected precisely because the goods never passed through American soil.
Since the computer manufacturers also didn't write the code, they could claim to be innocent -- except they've been placed on notice by Solid Oak, so they can't claim ignorance. This gets into the whole "contributory infringement" angle of copyright. I'm sure a certain NewYorkCountryLawyer could probably speak to that, since that concept figures so heavily in the RIAA and MPAA lawsuits.
According to a copy of the writer's bible for TNG that I read once, the Ferengi were supposed to be modeled after Yankee Traders. Don't bother looking that up on Wikipedia, since the article there is about some stupid BBS turn-based game that loosely relates to the historical concept of a Yankee Trader, and borrows the term as its name. Yankee Traders were American merchants who, when the United States was still young, practiced a sort of wild and wooly capitalism which was characterized (or caricatured) by rapacious greed and dishonest dealings. "Swindler" is given as a synonym for "Yankee horse trader" by some older dictionaries.
Makes sense when you realize that the United States was a so-called "pirate nation" in its early years, with 14-year copyrights for us and no recognition of anyone else's copyrights -- we had a lot of books published here with no money going to their European authors.
Based on TFA (any of the 3 linked articles that are actually about this issue and not links to previous Slashdot coverage of Green Dam), I find your third scenario highly unlikely unless Solid Oak was lying through their teeth about being upset that Green Dam "stole" their code and was hitting their servers. I mean, maybe Solid Oak was just putting up a smokescreen about threatening legal action and was really supplying their code to China for Green Dam, but if that's the case, you'd think they'd have been smart enough to either not have the "Chinese" version of their code pointing at their own servers, or they'd get enough money up front from their Chinese partners to build out server infrastructure.
As it is, they're complaining bitterly in part because they are doubtful they can handle the load from all these additional users, yet they don't want to alienate their legitimate customers in that geographic region by blocking an entire country.
You could make the argument that Moore's law not only dictates the number of transistors every two years, but inverted, also means the number of competitors.
You could make that argument, but it would be very silly. Even if you could show a strong statistical correlation (though it's not clear what's being correlated -- transistor count with number of companies doing chip fabbing, I suppose), it's far from certain you could show a causal relationship.
It's also worth noting that at one point, Gordon Moore revised the time scale of his eponymous law downward from 2 years to 18 months, to reflect industry changes. The law has always been an observational one which industry players have striven to keep true with new technological innovations. Even if we assume the number of companies that fab chips has shrunk (which is far from clear to me, as there are numerous players now in countries that never had chip fabs in the early days), we can't automatically assume this is all attributable to increased capital costs and increased complexity of integrated circuits. As any industry matures, there will be consolidation -- mergers, the failure of some early players, etc.
Connecticut? Really? I grew up there, and even though I moved away in 1994, I don't recall having to provide proof of insurance or vehicle registration to get my license. I didn't own the vehicle I took the driving test in anyway, my parents did, and they had me on their insurance after I passed the test IIRC. I was only required to provide other forms of ID. It would be kind of perverse to require someone to own a car before letting them get a license (especially a teen driver), and insurance companies would prefer that you have a valid license and registration before insuring a vehicle. Yeah, you can insure a vehicle that you can't (legally) drive, but it's a different kind of policy.
It seems to me that DMV offices requiring insurance or vehicle registration paperwork to get a driver's license is bound to create chicken-and-egg scenarios.
Fortunately, there's an update at the same site with the real dope: It's 26 episodes, not 13! So, we get a full season. I know my fiancee and I are going to celebrate...
Even more impressive, the next generation Snapdragon (the QSD8672) is dual core, running at 1.5 GHz. I'd really like to get my hands on a netbook running that device!
Has anyone found anything on how Android applications dependent on cell phone-ish hardware (like GPS location and the like) will be handled inside a device like the eee PC?
Well, based on what I've been able to glean from the site linked in my previous paragraph, and a few other tidbits scattered elsewhere on the web, it looks as though this Snapdragon processor platform actually supplies all the logic to decode GPS and do most of the other cell phone-ish things that you'd care to do. Of course, there's no guarantee that manufacturers will actually implement all those features, but it's not for lack of hardware support. Just add antennas and support circuitry!
There is as much wrong with nationalism as with any other bigotry. It seems from your speech that you are not only a bigot, but also a pretty uncultivated one, filled with hatred which seems to be the most important purpose in your life. Poor you.
And you pretty much sabotaged your own attempt to make any sort of point whatsoever by indulging in an ad hominem attack.
It doesn't help your case that nationalism is not recognized as a form of bigotry. I'll cut you some slack since English is clearly not your primary language, but I would like to share a couple definitions. First, for nationalism:
national spirit or aspirations.
devotion and loyalty to one's own nation; patriotism.
excessive patriotism; chauvinism.
the desire for national advancement or independence.
the policy or doctrine of asserting the interests of one's own nation, viewed as separate from the interests of other nations or the common interests of all nations.
[...]
There are other senses of the word which I did not include, but the ones cited should suffice for this discussion. Note that only the third sense given above is explicitly negative, while the fifth sense could be construed as negative or positive depending on the circumstances.
stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own.
the actions, beliefs, prejudices, etc., of a bigot.
While you could argue that some forms of nationalism are pathological (and I would agree), it's a stretch to call nationalism a form of bigotry. While you could even argue that the United States is chock full of bigots (which I consider to be an unfair characterization of the vast majority of Americans), you haven't really shown the GP to be a bigot.
You also seem to take issue with the GP's mode of expression, which, while somewhat confrontational, is pretty culturally common here in the U.S. It's the height of cultural arrogance to expect us to conform to your social norms. You accuse him of hatred and a whole host of other things, but I don't actually see anything hateful in his speech. If you're judging him by a UK lexicon, may I simply remind you that the United States has its own dialect of English that is distinct from the standard UK dialect that most Europeans are exposed to. Expecting his language patterns to conform to some arbitrary foreign set of standards is a bit like expecting a cab driver in Mexico City to speak Castillian, complete with European Spanish idioms.
Finally, just to point out, when you accuse the GP of being delusional, you sort of miss the point he was trying to make. The GP never once said that he actually thought it would be a good idea for other nations to have their own root DNS servers. He was being sarcastic.
First off, you list more than "a couple" omissions.:-)
Secondly, we must have read different articles, because I saw the Matrox Mystique and the i740 both mentioned explicitly. (And I was particularly looking for the Mystique because I owned one -- mine came with Tomb Raider in the box, a special version designed to showcase the card.)
In this application the quotation marks are placed around a single word or phrase, and they indicate that the word or phrase does not signify its literal or conventional meaning. In contrast to the nominal typographic purpose of quotation marks, the enclosed word(s) may not necessarily be quoted from another source. [...] Writers use scare quotes for a variety of reasons. [...] If scare quotes are enclosing a word or phrase that does not represent a quotation from another source they may simply serve to alert the reader that the word or phrase is used in an unusual, special, or non-standard way or should be understood to include caveats to the conventional meaning. Alternatively, material in scare quotes may represent the writer's concise (but possibly misleading) paraphrasing, characterization, or intentional renaming of statements, concepts, or terms used by a third party. This may be an expression of sarcasm or incredulity.
I think the GP meant that he interprets "disappointment" as "flop" in this context, and I think that based on the context of TFA, it's easy to see how he would get that impression. I certainly know many people where I work who play the political game, and they often say "disappointment" when they would say "flop" or "failure" in a more unguarded moment.
This seems like pure flamebait, or perhaps just extremely ignorant journalism.
Mostly ignorant journalism. These guys do no research. I read TFA, and followed a link to an earlier article which was even more cringe-worthy (so much so that I had to finally register for an account at PCAuthority just to leave a comment). These guys pretty much pass off personal conjecture as fact, and do next to no research on anything, leading to some amusing prose that unfortunately is unintentionally amusing in some spots.
The bit about biometrics is pretty retarded, considering that biometrics are quietly infiltrating more and more aspects of our lives (including passive biometric scanning that most people aren't even aware of -- smile for the hidden cameras in the airport!). Yes, there are flaws in any biometric system, and even DNA profiling fails with human chimeras, who are more common than previously thought.
I find the inclusion of Bluetooth baffling beyond belief.
Slashdot Mirror
How this got modded informative is beyond me. Anyone can simply head over to the web site that Apple maintains with the list of stores. The stores in Arizona are:
Furthermore, there's a link to the store at Scottsdale Quarter, which gives a map that shows the store is located on Scottsdale Road south of Kierland Boulevard. A Google search will turn up the site for the Scottsdale Fashion Square mall, which is at the intersection of Camelback and Scottsdale Roads. Plugging that into Google Maps (which Apple conveniently uses for the map and provides a driving directions link for) shows that the two locations are separated by 8.5 miles. So they're not even close.
You conveniently omitted the rant you provided wherein you railed about a Troll moderation to your own posts. Here, let me refresh your memory:
I especially like the interleaved question marks and exclamation points. Very classy, and not at all petulant seeming. (It's way more endearing than your confusion over "your" and "you're" in the more recent post.)
Sarcasm aside, that is what knewter is responding to. It's also the kind of crap-spewing that will get you a Troll moderation, whether or not you think you deserve it. Simply put, you ranted about go-karts and how, by implication, electric cars that amount to go-karts are not real cars. There was also talk about apples-to-oranges comparisons between these "fake" cars and "real" cars that offer safety features, etc. So no, sorry, knewter was very much on-topic for the particular message he responded to, and for the original article in general. In fact, judging by the original article, I'd say most of your ranting is off-topic, and should be modded so, but I don't currently have the mod points for that.
There's also something to be said for a certain level of civility and decorum in modern discourse. I know it might be fashionable in some circles to eschew etiquette and be impolite to those you hold in intellectual disdain, but you know what? People don't necessarily want to be subjected to that. If you have a point to make, you can make it without going off the deep end. In fact, you can even rip someone a new asshole and still come across as a gentleman (or lady) if you know how to do it right.
Judging from your response to ahabswhale, it seems that you've pretty much made up your mind that everyone else is wrong and you're right, but I'll take a stab anyway at why I think you're missing the point:
Hoo boy... so much here, where to begin? First off, the condescension is uncalled-for. It's not that people who hate SQL are somehow incapable of writing SQL queries, or learning how to. I think the objections are twofold:
To use the example you latched upon in the GP post, you talk about how trivial it is to write a wrapper function to give us a get() method equivalent. Sure, it might only take 10 lines of user-generated code, but let's consider what is going on behind the scenes:
I have no idea how you convinced yourself that 128 = 1111111, but that is most certainly wrong in any binary counting system ever devised. And for the record, the author of the review article (as well as the book's author) started "counting" from 0, since you need a value to represent 0 itself and 0 is that representation in binary (or 00000000 if you prefer). If anyone did it the way you suggest, 0000000 binary would represent decimal 1. That's simply absurd, and not how modern computers do it at all. Nor do real computer nerds. Nor do computer scientists, or for that matter any other scientist or mathematician.
I challenge you to work out the base 2 math for yourself. Or, try using any software that can convert numeric values between different numeric bases. The calculator apps that ship standard with Windows and Mac OS X can both do conversions from decimal to hex and binary, and vice-versa. I'm sure there are plenty of FOSS apps that can do it for you too.
As for what defines a "round" number, there is no one definition of what makes a round number. To the human mind, a "round" number is often what consists of a few non-zero digits followed by typically several zeroes, a general definition that seems to be echoed by, for example, the Wikipedia entry for round number. Note that the definition provided by Wikipedia extends this meaning to bases other than 10, including binary; in this case, 128 qualifies as round since it is 10000000 binary. There's a completely different sense of round number as defined by mathematicians, and you can see there's a link to it from the Wikipedia article, but I should note that this specialized sense of the term is no closer to your definition of a "binary round number" than the colloquial understanding of the term "round number."
Dude, take your own advice. But then again, you probably weren't too sure of your own material, which is why you posted as AC, right? Either that, or you were trolling.
I'm surprised none of these instructions mentions anything about cleaning materials that can bind to and "neutralize" the mercury. I have read that sulfur will bind nicely to mercury, making it easier to clean up a mercury spill or a CFL bulb breakage -- just sprinkle liberally over the area before doing your cleaning. As a bonus, many garden supply sections of major stores (Home Depot, Wal-Mart, etc.) will carry sulfur in a form suitable for this application.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to pour the sweepings into someone's mouth and see what happens, but at least it makes the clean-up a little more manageable and less hazardous.
Thank you for pointing out what should be obvious to every American opining here. We have rights that are inalienable -- the government didn't give them to us, we had those rights all along!
All this talk about inciting a public panic (which isn't remotely analogous to what Lori Drew and her co-conspirators did) is beside the point.
For me, this isn't about a free speech issue. It's about committing fraud (Lori Drew, her own daughter, and one of her daughter's friends all conspired to create a fake account and misrepresent their collective identity for the purpose of spying on and manipulating another girl). I'm not sure if I agree or not with the whole idea of trying to find a way to prosecute Lori Drew or the other girls who helped her, and trying to pin that on some contorted notion of what is and isn't legal to say to someone, but... the fact that Lori Drew deleted the MySpace account after the victim committed suicide tells me that there was some acknowledgement of guilt by Lori Drew.
I'm not talking about the legal concept of guilt. I'm talking about the recognition that someone has when they think they've done something bad. You know, the pricking of conscience. I'm betting she probably heard the news and thought, "Crap, I didn't think it would go that far." It didn't even matter that Drew wasn't the one who sent the nasty messages that triggered the victim's suicide (at least, according to the accounts I read, it was one of the girls working with/for Drew, who got an immunity deal from the prosecution). It's because of this, and a few other details, that I think it's ludicrous for Lori Drew's defense to spin the tale now that there was no wrongdoing.
I agree that trying to prosecute Lori Drew with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, by saying she violated the TOS for MySpace, was a bit of reaching, and I'm glad the judge had the sense to realize the profound impact of his decision if he let that conviction stand. It's always dangerous when you take something that ought to be a civil matter and try to turn it into a criminal offense.
Yes, that's why PNG is a W3C recommendation and not a mandatory part of the spec. They don't generally put a gun to your head and tell you what graphics file formats to support, but they do give you a set of recommendations. PNG is an official W3C recommendation.
That kind of reasoning might be good enough to get you into the police academy, and it might be good enough as a legal theory to arrest someone, but that doesn't make the theory correct, nor will it automatically win a conviction. Incidentally, the term of art is “probable cause,” and all it means is that some material or behavior created a reasonable level of suspicion in a cop's mind that a crime had been committed. Sometimes the cops find nothing, which is embarrassing — and don't think that a cop won't take that embarrassment out on the suspect. Sometimes they find what they think is something, and then it turns out at trial that they had nothing.
Oh, how I wish I had my mod points today.
Dude, you're exactly epitomizing the sort of knee-jerk, irrational argument that just about everyone else here has been talking about. That this little masterpiece of yours is a follow-up to a response to your initial diatribe against "them highfalutin' smarty-pants jerkwads" (my take on your rant about how social IQ is somehow superior to more traditional measures of human intellect) shows that you want to glorify irrationality and perpetuate a social order that suppresses intellectualism and, apparently, encourages mob rule.
Ridiculous half-assed attempt at a straw-man argument. What if you have permission from the relevant authorities to possess a pound of plutonium? What if you are building a nuclear reactor? What if you are working in the field of nuclear medicine? By itself, saying you have a pound of anything doesn't really mean anything, and you're relying on a "big scary" like nuclear material to try and get automatic buy-in to your fallacious straw-man argument.
Considering how many times the phrase "godly reason" showed up in your prose, it's pretty clear where your bias comes from. Why don't you just give up any pretense of trying to argue rationally and just admit that you have a religious bias? Then your lack of actual rational argument and, apparently, critical thinking skills won't be seen as quite so much of a detriment.
That's just silly. These rules are a matter of convention, and some of these conventions were adopted as late as the 20th century. The British make distinctions between an abbreviation (where you leave off the end-part of a word) and a contraction (where you drop the middle part), whereas Americans and Canadians don't so much, and this is where some of the difference lies. The examples you gave with the trailing period are technically contractions by that definition. But it really irks me to see this pseudo-apologetic crap getting spewed by Americans, almost as much as it annoys me to be "corrected" by a Briton.
This has nothing to do with laziness, and everything to do with divergence of language over time between two geographically distinct groups. In fact, one could view the US writing styles as archaic (as many Commonwealth people do). After all, Americans use a different style of quotation from what the British generally do (although the "old" style is still considered correct in Britain, and I believe still used by some of their print publications). Viewed in that light, it isn't our laziness but that of our overseas friends that led to the change of style.
Americans have nothing to apologize for when it comes to our language. And yeah, I said "our" language, because it's certainly not the same as "their" language, even if there's a large area of overlap. Many common words actually have different connotations in the US vs. the UK, creating misunderstandings. The question is when you transition from being a dialect to being a distinct language, and the answer depends on whom you ask.
And speaking of matters of style and convention, some publications have their own house style guides (e.g., the New York Times) which are yet different from the general style guidelines you get taught in English class (in either the US or the UK, take your pick). Acronyms are a fun example. A typical US writer would use NASA, whereas the BBC will render it Nasa (drives me totally nuts), and the New York Times will render it as N.A.S.A. (which looks clunky to me).
Yes, keystroke snooping is a great way to obtain passwords, and password masking won't protect against that... but there are situations where a background, headless app will quietly take screenshots at some predefined interval (or when certain trigger events occur) when you're on the system, and any unmasked passwords can easily be captured this way. Many companies have a policy of recording screen captures of their employees' computers during the work day, and you wouldn't want to trust sensitive password information to a low-level tech monitoring those screen captures for evidence of malfeasance. Someone who's low-paid enough might be tempted to snag a bank password (many employees bank from work online) or the password to some other sensitive site in order to profit, directly or indirectly. Or just to have a little hooligan fun at someone else's expense.
Some folks may be working in such a paranoid environment and may not realize it. Where I work, this isn't done routinely — that I know! — but the capability exists through one of a few packages that are installed by default as part of our core workstation image.
There's a follow-up story here which mentions, among other things, that this practice is a TOS violation for many web sites. However, nobody seems clued in yet that there may be other legal issues, like violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The Pre Dev Wiki link provides some truly puzzling prose. First they repeatedly tell us that they were not threatened, and were not contacted by lawyers, then they tell us there's no secret agreement with Palm, and then they feed us this line of horseshit:
Erm, what legal agreements are we talking about? Between whom? If lawyers weren't involved in this discussion, and if Palm didn't threaten these developers, what gives? If the legal agreements are between Palm and Sprint, so what? An independent group of developers isn't beholden to legal agreements between Palm and Sprint unless they signed something (a contract, say) agreeing to be bound by an agreement between other parties.
Yeah, because Sprint removed all mention from tethering from their Pre web pages.
On a separate but related note, I found the Register article pretty cringe-worthy, especially how they kept referring to AJAX as a platform for the Pre as well as the early iPhone. (AJAX is a programming style, not a "platform," and the Pre's software development platform is HTML 5 + JavaScript, with the HTML 5 engine providing a SQLite database for local storage.) The mention of native apps on the Pre was tantalizing, though all the Register would say is that such apps would be limited to Palm partners.
Suddenly, the iPhone development model doesn't look so locked-down and controlling.
Actually, you're the second (someone else asked the exact same question 36 minutes before you did). But although IANAL, I can say that there's probably a substantial amount of legal liability there. The only question is if it's worth suing over. Solid Oak probably can't afford the legal muscle to do something like this.
Assuming that a legal challenge can be brought, the next question is whether the computer manufacturer can mount a defense. It's not clear how much shielding a US-based manufacturer gets if the customer is a foreign entity and the goods themselves are probably not produced in the U.S. Expect the lawyers for Dell, et al, to claim that they're protected precisely because the goods never passed through American soil.
Since the computer manufacturers also didn't write the code, they could claim to be innocent -- except they've been placed on notice by Solid Oak, so they can't claim ignorance. This gets into the whole "contributory infringement" angle of copyright. I'm sure a certain NewYorkCountryLawyer could probably speak to that, since that concept figures so heavily in the RIAA and MPAA lawsuits.
According to a copy of the writer's bible for TNG that I read once, the Ferengi were supposed to be modeled after Yankee Traders. Don't bother looking that up on Wikipedia, since the article there is about some stupid BBS turn-based game that loosely relates to the historical concept of a Yankee Trader, and borrows the term as its name. Yankee Traders were American merchants who, when the United States was still young, practiced a sort of wild and wooly capitalism which was characterized (or caricatured) by rapacious greed and dishonest dealings. "Swindler" is given as a synonym for "Yankee horse trader" by some older dictionaries.
Makes sense when you realize that the United States was a so-called "pirate nation" in its early years, with 14-year copyrights for us and no recognition of anyone else's copyrights -- we had a lot of books published here with no money going to their European authors.
Based on TFA (any of the 3 linked articles that are actually about this issue and not links to previous Slashdot coverage of Green Dam), I find your third scenario highly unlikely unless Solid Oak was lying through their teeth about being upset that Green Dam "stole" their code and was hitting their servers. I mean, maybe Solid Oak was just putting up a smokescreen about threatening legal action and was really supplying their code to China for Green Dam, but if that's the case, you'd think they'd have been smart enough to either not have the "Chinese" version of their code pointing at their own servers, or they'd get enough money up front from their Chinese partners to build out server infrastructure.
As it is, they're complaining bitterly in part because they are doubtful they can handle the load from all these additional users, yet they don't want to alienate their legitimate customers in that geographic region by blocking an entire country.
You could make that argument, but it would be very silly. Even if you could show a strong statistical correlation (though it's not clear what's being correlated -- transistor count with number of companies doing chip fabbing, I suppose), it's far from certain you could show a causal relationship.
It's also worth noting that at one point, Gordon Moore revised the time scale of his eponymous law downward from 2 years to 18 months, to reflect industry changes. The law has always been an observational one which industry players have striven to keep true with new technological innovations. Even if we assume the number of companies that fab chips has shrunk (which is far from clear to me, as there are numerous players now in countries that never had chip fabs in the early days), we can't automatically assume this is all attributable to increased capital costs and increased complexity of integrated circuits. As any industry matures, there will be consolidation -- mergers, the failure of some early players, etc.
Connecticut? Really? I grew up there, and even though I moved away in 1994, I don't recall having to provide proof of insurance or vehicle registration to get my license. I didn't own the vehicle I took the driving test in anyway, my parents did, and they had me on their insurance after I passed the test IIRC. I was only required to provide other forms of ID. It would be kind of perverse to require someone to own a car before letting them get a license (especially a teen driver), and insurance companies would prefer that you have a valid license and registration before insuring a vehicle. Yeah, you can insure a vehicle that you can't (legally) drive, but it's a different kind of policy.
It seems to me that DMV offices requiring insurance or vehicle registration paperwork to get a driver's license is bound to create chicken-and-egg scenarios.
Fortunately, there's an update at the same site with the real dope: It's 26 episodes, not 13! So, we get a full season. I know my fiancee and I are going to celebrate...
Even more impressive, the next generation Snapdragon (the QSD8672) is dual core, running at 1.5 GHz. I'd really like to get my hands on a netbook running that device!
Well, based on what I've been able to glean from the site linked in my previous paragraph, and a few other tidbits scattered elsewhere on the web, it looks as though this Snapdragon processor platform actually supplies all the logic to decode GPS and do most of the other cell phone-ish things that you'd care to do. Of course, there's no guarantee that manufacturers will actually implement all those features, but it's not for lack of hardware support. Just add antennas and support circuitry!
And you pretty much sabotaged your own attempt to make any sort of point whatsoever by indulging in an ad hominem attack.
It doesn't help your case that nationalism is not recognized as a form of bigotry. I'll cut you some slack since English is clearly not your primary language, but I would like to share a couple definitions. First, for nationalism:
There are other senses of the word which I did not include, but the ones cited should suffice for this discussion. Note that only the third sense given above is explicitly negative, while the fifth sense could be construed as negative or positive depending on the circumstances.
By contrast, here's a definition for bigotry:
While you could argue that some forms of nationalism are pathological (and I would agree), it's a stretch to call nationalism a form of bigotry. While you could even argue that the United States is chock full of bigots (which I consider to be an unfair characterization of the vast majority of Americans), you haven't really shown the GP to be a bigot.
You also seem to take issue with the GP's mode of expression, which, while somewhat confrontational, is pretty culturally common here in the U.S. It's the height of cultural arrogance to expect us to conform to your social norms. You accuse him of hatred and a whole host of other things, but I don't actually see anything hateful in his speech. If you're judging him by a UK lexicon, may I simply remind you that the United States has its own dialect of English that is distinct from the standard UK dialect that most Europeans are exposed to. Expecting his language patterns to conform to some arbitrary foreign set of standards is a bit like expecting a cab driver in Mexico City to speak Castillian, complete with European Spanish idioms.
Finally, just to point out, when you accuse the GP of being delusional, you sort of miss the point he was trying to make. The GP never once said that he actually thought it would be a good idea for other nations to have their own root DNS servers. He was being sarcastic.
First off, you list more than "a couple" omissions. :-)
Secondly, we must have read different articles, because I saw the Matrox Mystique and the i740 both mentioned explicitly. (And I was particularly looking for the Mystique because I owned one -- mine came with Tomb Raider in the box, a special version designed to showcase the card.)
Technically, she was blown out. :-) (Yes, that's a silly TNG reference.)
That is one reason to use scare quotes. There are others:
I think the GP meant that he interprets "disappointment" as "flop" in this context, and I think that based on the context of TFA, it's easy to see how he would get that impression. I certainly know many people where I work who play the political game, and they often say "disappointment" when they would say "flop" or "failure" in a more unguarded moment.
Mostly ignorant journalism. These guys do no research. I read TFA, and followed a link to an earlier article which was even more cringe-worthy (so much so that I had to finally register for an account at PCAuthority just to leave a comment). These guys pretty much pass off personal conjecture as fact, and do next to no research on anything, leading to some amusing prose that unfortunately is unintentionally amusing in some spots.
The bit about biometrics is pretty retarded, considering that biometrics are quietly infiltrating more and more aspects of our lives (including passive biometric scanning that most people aren't even aware of -- smile for the hidden cameras in the airport!). Yes, there are flaws in any biometric system, and even DNA profiling fails with human chimeras, who are more common than previously thought.
I find the inclusion of Bluetooth baffling beyond belief.