"Though the idea of using a material that burns when exposed to a camera flash, for storage, is a little unnerving... Anyone know how they plan to address that and other problems/inherent properties of nanotubes?"
Now, I'm not there, not involved with the company at all, but I'm going to venture a guess and say that maybe, just maybe, they won't have the nanotubes exposed and just lying around? Maybe, just maybe, the nanotube wafers will be, oh I dunno, enclosed in something? Cause where a flash would hurt it, I imagine a well-placed finger would hurt them too.
"microprocessors have gotten faster and faster. hard disks have not."
Good lord! Are you serious??? You obviously never had to use debug to partition an esdi drive. You obviously have somehow missed the whole transition from 10Mb burst to 160Mb burst we've seen in the last few years. Scsi has, as well, gone from 8-bit with 5Mb transfer (scsi1) to 10Mb transfer @ 8bit or 20Mb transfer @ 16bit (scsi2), 40Mb transfer @ 16bit wide (scsi3) and now 80Mb transfer @ 16bit wide with ultra2. And while that's just what the *bus* can handle, I can promise you that the disks of today are far faster than the disks of even just a year ago.
Ask yourself...what restricts data fransfer speed? Several things, really. Density is actually a factor, as its an engineerign feat to get the disks spinning fast, so the more bits go past the heads during a given time, the more can be put on/pulled off. Also, the ability to process that data, which - guess what, has significantly increased. Then there's the length of time a head needs to spend to actually get a bit to seat at a N/S, 0/1 - materials platters are made of are constantly being improved, so that's far better. Then theres the mamangement of the data itself, algorythms for where to write what, etc. Again, substantially improving, constantly. And all I've discussed was scsi - ide has improved (has quantity on its side) far more than scsi has the last few years, too.
How in the WORLD could you say hard disks haven't gotten faster? Oh wait, I know how...because you are either being sarcastic, you're insane, or you simply have no idea what you're talking about. Did you just start using computers last week?
"People like to remember a time when things were simpler and life was better than it is now"
Ok, listen - yes, people like old things. They like old cars, old houses, old paintings. Sure. They can even like old computers. But you know what? Its not because life was better back then.
Apple ][ came out in 1976. The next year, Gerald Ford ended his term (you know, the guy that took over for Nixon...). The economy was in terrible shape, much worse than now. We had just left vietnam a couple years before (1974). The Cold War was HUGE. A radioacive leak occured at 3 Mile Island in Penn in 1979.
Also in 1976, we had Gregg vrs Georgia, in which the Supreme Court of the US decided that the death penalty did not violate the constitutions protection against "cruel and unusual punishment," thereby keeping us in that sad, barbaric state of affairs.
Shall I go on? What in god's green earth makes you think life was simpler and better than now? What, precisely, was better? What was more simple? Was it just because you were a kid, or at least much younger, then? Because nothing about life during that time was something to long for.
Grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, if you're a cow. Personally, I like climate control inside of my car. I like to be able to listen to great sound from a little peice of plastic I slip in a slot casually, without having to fumble with some 8-track or cassette. I like the little things we have now, that we didn't then. Call me odd.
"I was answering his point, rather than making my own."
actually no, that was one of the more important parts of my point. You have alternatives. Let the market decide. Be part of the market. The sky is not falling.
The technology is going to be like cars. You don't need one but not having one is a restriction in itself.
Really? I mean, I personally think of automobiles as a huge technological breakthrough, the culmination of a lot of extremely signigicant technologies. It is one of the things that most impacted the 20th century. Do you REALLY think DRM is like that???
Get a grip, people. If you wanna use windows, keep using windows2000 or xp, then you'll be safe in your drm-free world. And then when this MS bumble fails like so many other MS things have, everyone will see it for what it is. Is passport used the way MS said it would be? No. I could go on, but you're all too busy running for fear that the sky is falling.
TIP: The world is revolving around the US less and less every day. There will be more than plenty of places you can get things from that do what you want to do, even if all of windows gets drm-locked-down. They're a whole world out there - check it out.
Right there in the article is a comparison to the P4 3Gz, which the 970 is only slightly faster than. Now, compare the price of a p4 3.0 (or a duel p4 2.6 or such) to the price of a 970...
Glad that there is a great chip out there (970) but price per performance, the guy (intel) that's making far more chips still is doign it cheaper. Economics.
"I realize that a talented producer can cost a lot of money and some bands drink a lot of beer, but why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?"
Mayhaps because far more than "four out of five new albums" never reach the top 500, and most likely "four out of five new albums" never get heard at all by more than 1% of the population? And that those cd's that cost much are actually produced in ways that are still superior (for now)?
Or, maybe there's a conspiracy...
OR, maybe production is just a tiny fraction of the cost anyway...
OR, inflation...
OR...shall I go on? There are a lot of low-priced CD's out there. Most of my favorite music is pretty damn indy, and I would imagine that at least 95% of the stuff I listen to was produced digitally. Lots of conjecture, but hey...its what you asked for.
first, let me start by saying this is my second attempt at putting a review here. The first one was aborted due to the fact that when I clicked "quit" after the first game in a totally seperate window, it killed both windows. So, everything from my first post was gone. Annoying. After seeing that, I now notice that when I open, in a new window, that site to play the game, the banner up top for my slashdot posting window has changed to "digital game based learning." Interesting. Won't change my review, however.
For those who grew up playing games at the arcade, Space Duel is an ideal learning interface. This game works for one player or two players across the Internet or an intranet. Users are certified via any number of questions plus a set of "facts" or "ideas," all linked to reference material on any web site or page. Rigorous learning and certification, PLUS all the engagement of a classic arcade game!
Sounds reasonable, right? I selected the "Ethics - Rules for business conduct" topic for my game. I was then given the "how to play" rules.
Use the up and down arrows to move your spaceship (on the left) and the space bar to fire.
Hitting the opponent gets you a question. Being hit gets you a concept.
Hitting bubbles gives special effects.
Your goal is to answer all the questions correctly and get the highest possible score.
Use the Concepts, Reference, Scores, and Questions Only buttons as needed.
First question:
A client wants you to select their proposal. Which gifts can you accept from the client?
A. 2 great yankee tickets
B. None
C. Use of their Caribbean Resort
D. $100 in cash
Needing a vacation, and wanting to answer a question wrong, I selected C. The right answer was B, however. The correct answer is B. Gifts intended to influence a transaction are never permissible. At this point, to continue I had to press the "see reference" button to continue, which popped up a display telling me various things. I was quite confused though, since there it says:
Employees may accept reasonable and conventional business courtesies, such as joining a customer or vendor in attending sporting events, golf outings or concerts, provided that such activities involve no more than the customary amenities.
Left and right hands must be having a fight. Anyway, I was then allowed to continue as soon as I clicked the "back to game" button that appeared when I clicked the "see reference" button. Here, I ran in to the same technical problem I did last time - having gone to a seperate window, now going back to the game window I had no controls over my spacecraft. It just sat there. Despite that, after several minutes the computer opponent had not killed my disabled defenseless spacecraft - very difficult game. I clicked in the window several times, screwed around, and regained control. I decided to kill the opponent again, and this time answer a question correctly. "True or False: You join the board of your best friend's internet startup. Since this has nothing to do with the firm's business, you needn't disclose it to the firm." Answering "false," I was rewarded by not having to click "see reference" before returning to the game.
All in all, I guess in theory the concept is ok, however the deliver is absolutely terrible - this game, at least, absolutely sucks. If I were playing a quake game and got weapons upgrades by fixing downed servers, or if I were playing some sort of corporate climbing game and the ultra-hot HR chic "rewarded" me when I was a good boy (tryign to think of an ok business ethics theme, but I guess that one doesn't work either), that might be different. But this...this just sucks, IMHO.
"My own environment (on PC hardware) actually runs Windows NT, but it is used mainly as a graphics terminal connected to a Plan 9 server, in a way approximately analogous to an X windows client."
Eh? so what. SOme of us don't think of unix as a place to do gui, but instead as a place to do work;)
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for more than 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following: "In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland, and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. "Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called "A." When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax: for(;P("\n"),R=;P("|"))for(e=C;e=P("_"+(* u++/ 8)%2))P("|"+(*u/4)%2); "To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other U.S. corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960s technological parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix and C programmer.
just an engineer
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't find myself agreeing with him "politically" generally, but like he himself, and as he poitns out RMS as well, says...he's just an engineer.
Seems reasonable to me though. You don't have to compile it in to the kernel you use if you don't want it. He's just offering a choice. For this one, I will accept that he is in fact remaining neutral politically.
you missed my point. If someone is a pervert, they're a pervert. Some kid posting their name and city isn't going to suddenly make some 40yr old guy a pervert - that guy was already one. Do you think the guy really cares what the kid's last name is, even? Just pull over, let the parent's call his name, then come back later and you know it. Or...whatever. Go to a place kids hang out (movies?) and listen to them talk for about 30 seconds.
A freak is a freak. Knowing that there's someone named "Johny Smith" living in San Diego, CA, doesn't change that. I mean..they can almost assume. And what would they be armed with? A name and a city? Good lord...so what? Its a name and a city. In the smaller towns, people know each other anyway.
My point is that its pointless to have a problem with something that silly. Having not reviewed COPPA, I won't give my opinion on it. I'm just giving an opinion on whether a name+city/state is dangerous:P
The complaint provides an example of a review that was allegedly posted by an 11-year-old and contained the child's full name along with the child's home city and state.
Come on...drive down a street, any street, and open a mailbox. You'll get the last name. Watch the house. You'll see if there are kids. If you listen, you'll hear the parents call out their kid's names.
If someone is a pervert, being armed with a name and a city/state isn't going to make them do something. They're going to do something because they're a pervert, and they'll be able to get a name with no problem regardless. Come on.
if you take a downloaded file, convert it back to a format for the cd, then rip that cd...hmm...might still be able to give it a signature, really. There could just be noises you can't hear, tiny streams outside the human hearing range, and that effectively sign who it was that downloaded it. Have it be a repeating 2-5 second thing, and then any corroption can be taken care of in the redundancy.
eh, just a way you could still do it. As it is, if you buy a CD in a store, that's hard to track. But really...it shouldn't be. I'm suprized they're not already doing this sort of thing on music cd's.
rather simplistic. You don't have to sign the same bits every time. There's all sorts of noise, and inserting things at random places that don't get interpreted as a sound (and are therefore effectively ignored) yet do offer a valid signature...not very complicated.
then all that would need to happen would be to have someone write a program that identifies areas that the player would be ignoring, and delete them. But that would probably be quite difficult, and easy for the record companies to fool...
I'd like to see two different people buy and then download the same song, and then compare the two files. Now that I think of it, this signature thing probably isn't all that wild. I bet you'll find the two files are different...anyone? Maybe I'll just do two accounts on my own, for fun.
I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I'm going to make a tongue-in-cheek jab at a wild "what if" here...
Is how they're going to sort out whom has a legal copy of a song, and whom has an illegal copy of a song. I suppose that even if you "buy" a song online you still can't put it on kazaa, as that would be considered distribution?
What if they were just trying to track down the distributors? It would be SOO easy to put a signature on each track they allow someone to download. Then, they just connect to all the various file-sharing places, download songs, and analyze them. They find out who put their tracks out there. Then they prosecute those people.
This would be SOO easy to do, too. I mean...geeze...ESPECIALLY if they ake the people play the downloaded tracks with a special codec they have to download, that has a private key in it...but even without that, you can still sign a file without encrypting it, and just wait and see who's files get shared. Then when you arrest those people and charge them $10,000 per shared song, you take care of the problem from the other end. When people have 100Gigs of MP3's, there's almost no chance they have even 10% of the cd's to back them up. Someone, somewhere, ripped those cd's and originally shared them. So don't just go after the people who continue to share things they've never had - those go on and on. Go after the ones who do the original ripping.
MINOR details. Yes, I'm quite curious where the 250 cars per station came from too. You see, I'm not going to make wild guesses when there are so many factors missing.
Its NOT just about the number of cars (and you know, gas stations also service these things called semis, or tractor/trailers....lots of mileage there). Its about distance traveled. If the average vehicle gets 20mpg, and the average vehicle travels 15,000 miles a year, and there are 1.6 million cars...then we're getting somewhere. But those are 3 wild guesses already. Then we gota guess how many gallons of gas the average gas station can put out. Then we gota figure out that some gas stations are no where near optimum output, staying in business only because they sell 32ox sodas at a 90% profit. Then we gota figure in all the gas stations that exist not because of a steady market, but simply because they are between steady markets, and people don't have 100gallon gas tanks generally so they have to refill ever 200-400 miles.
Like I said, I don't like wild guesses, esp wild_guesses^4 or something. And as another poster said - I'd be MUCH more instered in WHY they wanted to move Mt Fuji. I almost always ask "why" first, and I always insist that the place I work makes the "why" available.
smokers suing tobacco companies? wait a sec...if the tobacco companies were forcing the smokers to pay for stuff (time and access) no matter what the smokers did to make them go away...sure. But I don't know anyone who has ever "opt-in"'d for 99.99% of the spam out there (ok, I do admit to having subscribed to some lists in the past, which accounts for 1/1000 of my spam).
what a stupid comparison! Smokers go get cigarettes on purpose. They want them. Those who get spam don't want it. Its so unlike, that its almost exactly the opposite:P
Besides, you're young most likely, and thus grew up with the benefit of not having lots of cigarette ads, and people telling you cigarettes weren't bad for you. For those over the age of 40 or whatnot, that's not the case.
For the gas station one - you need to know the vague population of the US if you want to give them a number answer - but they are really happy if you just explain the correct solution aloud with variables. You need to be able to give a working estimate of how many people in what sort of area one gas station can service, and then figure out how many people over what area (useable area) of the states is then available - then you can determine the need that is there and then what portion of that is filled.
That doesn't work. Reason: you've obviously never been out in a rural area! If you have a town 200 miles from any other place that has only 200 people living in it, guess what...there will be a gas station. In *fact*, if its 200 miles from anywhere else, chances are the gas station will be a large portion of the economy of the town. On the other hand, there are large gas stations in busy areas that I've seen with as many as 20 islands...its no where near as simple as determiniung the # of people, and then trying to extrapolate from that how many stations there are, based on an estimate of how many a single station can service. There's absolultely no way one could come close.
And yes, I realize there was no point to this post. There wasn't one to the article, so...I'm ok;)
How can a responsible thinker so easily shrug off the need to protect oneself from the unknown abuses of the future just because one may think things are relatively agreeable at present?
There's a reason free-thinking is called that...its not worth much!;)
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I'm not there, not involved with the company at all, but I'm going to venture a guess and say that maybe, just maybe, they won't have the nanotubes exposed and just lying around? Maybe, just maybe, the nanotube wafers will be, oh I dunno, enclosed in something? Cause where a flash would hurt it, I imagine a well-placed finger would hurt them too.
Just a thought.
Good lord! Are you serious??? You obviously never had to use debug to partition an esdi drive. You obviously have somehow missed the whole transition from 10Mb burst to 160Mb burst we've seen in the last few years. Scsi has, as well, gone from 8-bit with 5Mb transfer (scsi1) to 10Mb transfer @ 8bit or 20Mb transfer @ 16bit (scsi2), 40Mb transfer @ 16bit wide (scsi3) and now 80Mb transfer @ 16bit wide with ultra2. And while that's just what the *bus* can handle, I can promise you that the disks of today are far faster than the disks of even just a year ago.
Ask yourself...what restricts data fransfer speed? Several things, really. Density is actually a factor, as its an engineerign feat to get the disks spinning fast, so the more bits go past the heads during a given time, the more can be put on/pulled off. Also, the ability to process that data, which - guess what, has significantly increased. Then there's the length of time a head needs to spend to actually get a bit to seat at a N/S, 0/1 - materials platters are made of are constantly being improved, so that's far better. Then theres the mamangement of the data itself, algorythms for where to write what, etc. Again, substantially improving, constantly. And all I've discussed was scsi - ide has improved (has quantity on its side) far more than scsi has the last few years, too.
How in the WORLD could you say hard disks haven't gotten faster? Oh wait, I know how...because you are either being sarcastic, you're insane, or you simply have no idea what you're talking about. Did you just start using computers last week?
Ok, listen - yes, people like old things. They like old cars, old houses, old paintings. Sure. They can even like old computers. But you know what? Its not because life was better back then.
Apple ][ came out in 1976. The next year, Gerald Ford ended his term (you know, the guy that took over for Nixon...). The economy was in terrible shape, much worse than now. We had just left vietnam a couple years before (1974). The Cold War was HUGE. A radioacive leak occured at 3 Mile Island in Penn in 1979.
Also in 1976, we had Gregg vrs Georgia, in which the Supreme Court of the US decided that the death penalty did not violate the constitutions protection against "cruel and unusual punishment," thereby keeping us in that sad, barbaric state of affairs.
Shall I go on? What in god's green earth makes you think life was simpler and better than now? What, precisely, was better? What was more simple? Was it just because you were a kid, or at least much younger, then? Because nothing about life during that time was something to long for.
Grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, if you're a cow. Personally, I like climate control inside of my car. I like to be able to listen to great sound from a little peice of plastic I slip in a slot casually, without having to fumble with some 8-track or cassette. I like the little things we have now, that we didn't then. Call me odd.
actually no, that was one of the more important parts of my point. You have alternatives. Let the market decide. Be part of the market. The sky is not falling.
The technology is going to be like cars. You don't need one but not having one is a restriction in itself.
Really? I mean, I personally think of automobiles as a huge technological breakthrough, the culmination of a lot of extremely signigicant technologies. It is one of the things that most impacted the 20th century. Do you REALLY think DRM is like that???
Get a grip, people. If you wanna use windows, keep using windows2000 or xp, then you'll be safe in your drm-free world. And then when this MS bumble fails like so many other MS things have, everyone will see it for what it is. Is passport used the way MS said it would be? No. I could go on, but you're all too busy running for fear that the sky is falling.
TIP: The world is revolving around the US less and less every day. There will be more than plenty of places you can get things from that do what you want to do, even if all of windows gets drm-locked-down. They're a whole world out there - check it out.
Right there in the article is a comparison to the P4 3Gz, which the 970 is only slightly faster than. Now, compare the price of a p4 3.0 (or a duel p4 2.6 or such) to the price of a 970...
Glad that there is a great chip out there (970) but price per performance, the guy (intel) that's making far more chips still is doign it cheaper. Economics.
Mayhaps because far more than "four out of five new albums" never reach the top 500, and most likely "four out of five new albums" never get heard at all by more than 1% of the population? And that those cd's that cost much are actually produced in ways that are still superior (for now)?
Or, maybe there's a conspiracy...
OR, maybe production is just a tiny fraction of the cost anyway...
OR, inflation...
OR...shall I go on? There are a lot of low-priced CD's out there. Most of my favorite music is pretty damn indy, and I would imagine that at least 95% of the stuff I listen to was produced digitally. Lots of conjecture, but hey...its what you asked for.
poor guy...when I click on someone, they tend to like it. Guess it all depends on how good a clicker you are! ;)
For those who grew up playing games at the arcade, Space Duel is an ideal learning interface. This game works for one player or two players across the Internet or an intranet. Users are certified via any number of questions plus a set of "facts" or "ideas," all linked to reference material on any web site or page. Rigorous learning and certification, PLUS all the engagement of a classic arcade game!
Sounds reasonable, right? I selected the "Ethics - Rules for business conduct" topic for my game. I was then given the "how to play" rules.
Use the up and down arrows to move your spaceship (on the left) and the space bar to fire.
Hitting the opponent gets you a question. Being hit gets you a concept.
Hitting bubbles gives special effects.
Your goal is to answer all the questions correctly and get the highest possible score.
Use the Concepts, Reference, Scores, and Questions Only buttons as needed.
First question:
A client wants you to select their proposal. Which gifts can you accept from the client?
A. 2 great yankee tickets
B. None
C. Use of their Caribbean Resort
D. $100 in cash
Needing a vacation, and wanting to answer a question wrong, I selected C. The right answer was B, however. The correct answer is B. Gifts intended to influence a transaction are never permissible. At this point, to continue I had to press the "see reference" button to continue, which popped up a display telling me various things. I was quite confused though, since there it says:
Employees may accept reasonable and conventional business courtesies, such as joining a customer or vendor in attending sporting events, golf outings or concerts, provided that such activities involve no more than the customary amenities.
Left and right hands must be having a fight. Anyway, I was then allowed to continue as soon as I clicked the "back to game" button that appeared when I clicked the "see reference" button. Here, I ran in to the same technical problem I did last time - having gone to a seperate window, now going back to the game window I had no controls over my spacecraft. It just sat there. Despite that, after several minutes the computer opponent had not killed my disabled defenseless spacecraft - very difficult game. I clicked in the window several times, screwed around, and regained control. I decided to kill the opponent again, and this time answer a question correctly. "True or False: You join the board of your best friend's internet startup. Since this has nothing to do with the firm's business, you needn't disclose it to the firm." Answering "false," I was rewarded by not having to click "see reference" before returning to the game.
All in all, I guess in theory the concept is ok, however the deliver is absolutely terrible - this game, at least, absolutely sucks. If I were playing a quake game and got weapons upgrades by fixing downed servers, or if I were playing some sort of corporate climbing game and the ultra-hot HR chic "rewarded" me when I was a good boy (tryign to think of an ok business ethics theme, but I guess that one doesn't work either), that might be different. But this...this just sucks, IMHO.
I really didn't see too much in the whole book I could take seriously, actually. So like, calm down, Mr Hater. LOL
Eh? so what. SOme of us don't think of unix as a place to do gui, but instead as a place to do work ;)
page 337:
* u++/
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson,
Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating
system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April
Fools prank kept alive for more than 20 years. Speaking at the recent
UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:
"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/AT&T
Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early
release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland,
and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and
power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilarious
National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien Lord of the Rings
trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment
and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating
environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to
be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration
levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other
more risque allusions.
"Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal,
called "A." When we found others were actually trying to create real
programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and
evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C. We stopped when we got a
clean compile on the following syntax:
for(;P("\n"),R=;P("|"))for(e=C;e=P("_"+(
8)%2))P("|"+(*u/4)%2);
"To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually
thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science
progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T
and other U.S. corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C!
It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate
even marginally useful applications using this 1960s technological
parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense)
of the general Unix and C programmer.
Seems reasonable to me though. You don't have to compile it in to the kernel you use if you don't want it. He's just offering a choice. For this one, I will accept that he is in fact remaining neutral politically.
A freak is a freak. Knowing that there's someone named "Johny Smith" living in San Diego, CA, doesn't change that. I mean..they can almost assume. And what would they be armed with? A name and a city? Good lord...so what? Its a name and a city. In the smaller towns, people know each other anyway.
My point is that its pointless to have a problem with something that silly. Having not reviewed COPPA, I won't give my opinion on it. I'm just giving an opinion on whether a name+city/state is dangerous :P
Come on...drive down a street, any street, and open a mailbox. You'll get the last name. Watch the house. You'll see if there are kids. If you listen, you'll hear the parents call out their kid's names.
If someone is a pervert, being armed with a name and a city/state isn't going to make them do something. They're going to do something because they're a pervert, and they'll be able to get a name with no problem regardless. Come on.
those that object the question "why" at least
eh, just a way you could still do it. As it is, if you buy a CD in a store, that's hard to track. But really...it shouldn't be. I'm suprized they're not already doing this sort of thing on music cd's.
then all that would need to happen would be to have someone write a program that identifies areas that the player would be ignoring, and delete them. But that would probably be quite difficult, and easy for the record companies to fool...
I'd like to see two different people buy and then download the same song, and then compare the two files. Now that I think of it, this signature thing probably isn't all that wild. I bet you'll find the two files are different...anyone? Maybe I'll just do two accounts on my own, for fun.
Is how they're going to sort out whom has a legal copy of a song, and whom has an illegal copy of a song. I suppose that even if you "buy" a song online you still can't put it on kazaa, as that would be considered distribution?
What if they were just trying to track down the distributors? It would be SOO easy to put a signature on each track they allow someone to download. Then, they just connect to all the various file-sharing places, download songs, and analyze them. They find out who put their tracks out there. Then they prosecute those people.
This would be SOO easy to do, too. I mean...geeze...ESPECIALLY if they ake the people play the downloaded tracks with a special codec they have to download, that has a private key in it...but even without that, you can still sign a file without encrypting it, and just wait and see who's files get shared. Then when you arrest those people and charge them $10,000 per shared song, you take care of the problem from the other end. When people have 100Gigs of MP3's, there's almost no chance they have even 10% of the cd's to back them up. Someone, somewhere, ripped those cd's and originally shared them. So don't just go after the people who continue to share things they've never had - those go on and on. Go after the ones who do the original ripping.
Decent conspiracy theory?
Its NOT just about the number of cars (and you know, gas stations also service these things called semis, or tractor/trailers....lots of mileage there). Its about distance traveled. If the average vehicle gets 20mpg, and the average vehicle travels 15,000 miles a year, and there are 1.6 million cars...then we're getting somewhere. But those are 3 wild guesses already. Then we gota guess how many gallons of gas the average gas station can put out. Then we gota figure out that some gas stations are no where near optimum output, staying in business only because they sell 32ox sodas at a 90% profit. Then we gota figure in all the gas stations that exist not because of a steady market, but simply because they are between steady markets, and people don't have 100gallon gas tanks generally so they have to refill ever 200-400 miles.
Like I said, I don't like wild guesses, esp wild_guesses^4 or something. And as another poster said - I'd be MUCH more instered in WHY they wanted to move Mt Fuji. I almost always ask "why" first, and I always insist that the place I work makes the "why" available.
what a stupid comparison! Smokers go get cigarettes on purpose. They want them. Those who get spam don't want it. Its so unlike, that its almost exactly the opposite :P
Besides, you're young most likely, and thus grew up with the benefit of not having lots of cigarette ads, and people telling you cigarettes weren't bad for you. For those over the age of 40 or whatnot, that's not the case.
For the gas station one - you need to know the vague population of the US if you want to give them a number answer - but they are really happy if you just explain the correct solution aloud with variables.
You need to be able to give a working estimate of how many people in what sort of area one gas station can service, and then figure out how many people over what area (useable area) of the states is then available - then you can determine the need that is there and then what portion of that is filled.
That doesn't work. Reason: you've obviously never been out in a rural area! If you have a town 200 miles from any other place that has only 200 people living in it, guess what...there will be a gas station. In *fact*, if its 200 miles from anywhere else, chances are the gas station will be a large portion of the economy of the town. On the other hand, there are large gas stations in busy areas that I've seen with as many as 20 islands...its no where near as simple as determiniung the # of people, and then trying to extrapolate from that how many stations there are, based on an estimate of how many a single station can service. There's absolultely no way one could come close.
And yes, I realize there was no point to this post. There wasn't one to the article, so...I'm ok ;)
There's a reason free-thinking is called that...its not worth much! ;)
Did I mention how WONDERFUL intel is??? Did I? And its such a great buy right now...