Remember, it was grounded and mothballed for several years before it got launched. (Can anyone say "Engineering difficulties and the Challenger explosion"?) According to this timeline on Nasa's website, "spacecraft integration" was completed in 1985. By my math, that would make Hubble 15 years old today, not 10, although obviously the resolution wasn't too good before it got launched (though some would say the same about after it was launched and before the subsequent repairs).
Maybe this technology will see a return to the old practice of congregating around the water cooler/bubbler/whatever-regional-word-you-use, which has been so neglected in recent years with people wasting their time on the internet instead. Heavens knows, if you have to refill this thing, it won't be with tap water, and while geeks tend to stop being cheap when it comes to buying/maintaining computer hardware, it's just not as sexy to have to pick up distilled water from the grocery store.
In the (US) deep south, the government rarely killed any black men itself, but it sure did a good job of fostering a lynch-mob mentality among its citizens who did the dirty work for it. It's an extreme, but analogous situation, at least structurally.
I myself wouldn't mind the moderation nearly so much if it didn't allow really small people to further their really small interests by punishing those with something productive to say.
Statement 1 is not entirely correct. GPLed programs allowed to link to closed-source libraries as long as they are part of the standard distribution over which the program runs and no more restricted than the rest of the platform (which is why there are still so many GPLed windows programs that reference the win32 apis). What distinguishes LGPL code from GPLed code is that closed-source programs can link to LGPLed but not GPLed code.
Stupidity alone may not be immoral, but abject negligence usually is. If someone's actions will have adverse consequences for an enormous number of people, then by most moral systems, he has an obligation to exercise due care, including hiring an expert if his own capabilities are insufficient. Remember, it's not his state of mind that matters but rather the state of mind of the hypothetical reasonably prudent person.
And your notions of libel are equally off-base, at least by American legal principles. Since pyxd isn't a public figure, all he has to demonstrate is that his reputation suffered because of someone's false statements. Malicious intentions needn't be proved.
If you didn't own any vapor stocks, then you'll come out unscathed from this nonsense. If your own stocks plunged in sympathy with the rest of the market, then take this opportunity to invest more (if they're truly good companies). Otherwise, you're just gratifying yourself at the expense of others who, while stupid, have committed no other evil (if stupidity can be said to be evil).
Yes, lag is an important issue (inherent in the distances between earth and satellite combined with the speed of light), but its importance in a given application depends entirely on that application. If you're trying to play Quake, then you're SOL. If you're streaming audio from a shoutcast server (or downloading naughty pictures like most users), you won't take such a hit. But like with most of these technologies, it'll be embraced eagerly precisely by those who have no other choice, while the rest of us snicker with our T1s and cable modems.
We already ripped his theories to death eight months ago on this thread and flooded his email box, prompting him to post this response, which we then also tore to shreds on this thread over here.
Actually, perhaps "tore to shreds" is a bit too strong. Really, we just ignored Brin and alternately bitched and creamed our pants about the great event of visual masturbation that was/is StarWars TPM. Or at least that was my gist from the audience.
The only intrinsic value US currency has is that it's the only tender the US government will accept for payment of debts such as taxes.
For example, American dollars are the only currency that the Federal government is prepared to prevent the counterfeiting of (except perhaps for postal or food stamps). It's also the only currency you can expect to be paid in for winning a civil suit against the American government or anyone in its jurisdiction.
IMHO, Sony's being a bit too conservative on this point. Why not expand economics in this way?
Because quite frankly, there's nothing in it for them. It'd be a massive PR nightmare if Sony were seen as profiting from such enterprises, so they can't themselves get a cut. And in addition to the dearth of direct benefits for them, there is a massive amount of negative consequences, primarily in support. And keep in mind that they're likely just be covering their butts so as to make themselves unanswerable to angry customers. You'll find most companies in Sony's position hoarding a large measure of discretionary power in reserve so that when the stuff hits the fan, they'll be within their legal rights to do whatever suits the suits.
First it was people thinking Jesus was talking to them.
Then along came science fiction, and the same people now were worried about little green men and their ray guns, so they built themselves tinfoil hats and even tinfoil bodysuits.
Now here comes nanotech. Who knows how much more sophisticated these wackos are going to get? Let's all repeat after me: "Get them away from me!"
It's less clear than it used to be, but at least in the good old days, it was impossible to trademark acronyms. Hence efforts like Microsoft's to argue that "NT" doesn't actually stand for anything and is therefore a permissable trademark.
The problem is not that they want to be discriminating about preserving companies' trademarks, but that it might not be feasible. The problem is that they want to make money, and they might do this by registering trademarked domains (if such a thing can be said to exist) to people who ought not to have them. If NBC is the only one who is allowed to register nbc.tv, then NBC has no incentive to do so when it already owns nbc.com and has lots of marketing invested in it. The only incentive to buy most of the *.tv domains is to foreclose competitors from doing so.
You're forgetting that Tuvalu is something of a sovereign state. They're technically a Commonwealth Member state, so they might be answerable to British law on the matter. But if you really want to stop them, you should go and apply pressure to the UK, New Zealand, and Australia, since they're the ones contributing the foreign aid that comprises most of Tuvalu's economy.
And you'd best attack it that way, since your trademark lawsuits wouldn't hold much water. Owning tv.com doesn't give anyone any particular right to blah.tv. Owning one instance of a word on the internet doesn't bestow ownership on all other instances, since they might be in other fields not covered by the original trademark. Sure, coke is attacking coke.ch, but it's not a forgone conclusion that they will prevail.
For a second there, I thought someone was hiking the price of beer. It's hard enough with gas prices as high as they are; leave the other precious brown fluid alone, ok?
Although Linux-branded beer would be an interesting idea. Maybe SuSE and their German compatriots should get cracking on it!
but I heard the parties are still going to settle this with an old-fashioned gladiator battle, quake3 style. Let's just hope id uses a real champion and not Linus for the sake of name-value like Transmeta did.
Re:Some differences BeOS for Linux / Windows
on
BeOS For Linux!
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· Score: 1
But... you don't need swap space with 512 Mb RAM!... Sure, yeah, sure. But that's not the point.:-)
Hey, just make a ramdisk and put your swapfiles there.;-)
Engineering innovations like fire didn't violate the current understandings of physics. They occurred in the absence of any theories of physics.
Engineering innovations like fire were not elusive. They provided a glaring gaping hole in the current understanding of the world. More importantly, they were readily reproducible.
There's a big difference between "we have an effect that violates our notion of the universe, so let's revise our notion" and "we want to find an effect that, while it violates our notion of the universe and while it hasn't yet been discovered, it would be really neat if we could find it".
What is your definition of "doing something other than what the machine was explicitly programmed to do"? Deep-blue was programmed to play chess very well, and towards that end it has/had made many chess moves that at first baffled onlooking grandmasters (referring to the rematch with Kasparov). It's a far cry between chess (which is now mostly computable) and even other games (like Go) much less anything approaching AI, but the idea that you can't set up a handful of principles and watch them followed to their [il]logical conclusions doesn't seem too far-fetched.
Redmond (AP) -- Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer announced the company will still be enforcing its trademark on the color coloquially known as "BSOD Blue". When questioned about the recent landmark decision Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Samara Brothers, Inc., Balmer said: "Microsoft firmly believes that this shade of blue, consistent with QUALITEX CO. v. JACOBSON PRODUCTS CO., has acquired 'a secondary meaning' which 'serves no other purpose' and is therefore a permissable trademark under the Lanham act. After all, what purpose could this blue serve other than to identify a computer as running Windows? Surely it is not to inform the user that his computer has crashed when crashing is implicit in the very notion of running Windows".
No immediate lawsuits have been filed, but the suspected potential respondents are believed to be undergoing puberty somewhere in Scandinavia.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, it was grounded and mothballed for several years before it got launched. (Can anyone say "Engineering difficulties and the Challenger explosion"?) According to this timeline on Nasa's website, "spacecraft integration" was completed in 1985. By my math, that would make Hubble 15 years old today, not 10, although obviously the resolution wasn't too good before it got launched (though some would say the same about after it was launched and before the subsequent repairs).
Maybe this technology will see a return to the old practice of congregating around the water cooler/bubbler/whatever-regional-word-you-use, which has been so neglected in recent years with people wasting their time on the internet instead. Heavens knows, if you have to refill this thing, it won't be with tap water, and while geeks tend to stop being cheap when it comes to buying/maintaining computer hardware, it's just not as sexy to have to pick up distilled water from the grocery store.
MS's hotfixes and service packs are also free.
Sometimes. Other times, they're given names like "Windows 98" and are charged for.
There are a few catches: ...you'll need to be so bright that people put on sunglasses when you walk into a room.
You mean like through self-immolation?
In the (US) deep south, the government rarely killed any black men itself, but it sure did a good job of fostering a lynch-mob mentality among its citizens who did the dirty work for it. It's an extreme, but analogous situation, at least structurally.
I myself wouldn't mind the moderation nearly so much if it didn't allow really small people to further their really small interests by punishing those with something productive to say.
Statement 1 is not entirely correct. GPLed programs allowed to link to closed-source libraries as long as they are part of the standard distribution over which the program runs and no more restricted than the rest of the platform (which is why there are still so many GPLed windows programs that reference the win32 apis). What distinguishes LGPL code from GPLed code is that closed-source programs can link to LGPLed but not GPLed code.
Clearly he's using "lew" to denote a fanciful construction of the perfect past tense of the verb "to lee" meaning "to lie or speak falsely".
Stupidity alone may not be immoral, but abject negligence usually is. If someone's actions will have adverse consequences for an enormous number of people, then by most moral systems, he has an obligation to exercise due care, including hiring an expert if his own capabilities are insufficient. Remember, it's not his state of mind that matters but rather the state of mind of the hypothetical reasonably prudent person.
And your notions of libel are equally off-base, at least by American legal principles. Since pyxd isn't a public figure, all he has to demonstrate is that his reputation suffered because of someone's false statements. Malicious intentions needn't be proved.
If you didn't own any vapor stocks, then you'll come out unscathed from this nonsense. If your own stocks plunged in sympathy with the rest of the market, then take this opportunity to invest more (if they're truly good companies). Otherwise, you're just gratifying yourself at the expense of others who, while stupid, have committed no other evil (if stupidity can be said to be evil).
Yes, lag is an important issue (inherent in the distances between earth and satellite combined with the speed of light), but its importance in a given application depends entirely on that application. If you're trying to play Quake, then you're SOL. If you're streaming audio from a shoutcast server (or downloading naughty pictures like most users), you won't take such a hit. But like with most of these technologies, it'll be embraced eagerly precisely by those who have no other choice, while the rest of us snicker with our T1s and cable modems.
IIRC, it's one of the links off here.
We already ripped his theories to death eight months ago on this thread and flooded his email box, prompting him to post this response, which we then also tore to shreds on this thread over here.
Actually, perhaps "tore to shreds" is a bit too strong. Really, we just ignored Brin and alternately bitched and creamed our pants about the great event of visual masturbation that was/is StarWars TPM. Or at least that was my gist from the audience.
The only intrinsic value US currency has is that it's the only tender the US government will accept for payment of debts such as taxes.
For example, American dollars are the only currency that the Federal government is prepared to prevent the counterfeiting of (except perhaps for postal or food stamps). It's also the only currency you can expect to be paid in for winning a civil suit against the American government or anyone in its jurisdiction.
IMHO, Sony's being a bit too conservative on this point. Why not expand economics in this way?
Because quite frankly, there's nothing in it for them. It'd be a massive PR nightmare if Sony were seen as profiting from such enterprises, so they can't themselves get a cut. And in addition to the dearth of direct benefits for them, there is a massive amount of negative consequences, primarily in support. And keep in mind that they're likely just be covering their butts so as to make themselves unanswerable to angry customers. You'll find most companies in Sony's position hoarding a large measure of discretionary power in reserve so that when the stuff hits the fan, they'll be within their legal rights to do whatever suits the suits.
First it was people thinking Jesus was talking to them.
Then along came science fiction, and the same people now were worried about little green men and their ray guns, so they built themselves tinfoil hats and even tinfoil bodysuits.
Now here comes nanotech. Who knows how much more sophisticated these wackos are going to get? Let's all repeat after me: "Get them away from me!"
It's less clear than it used to be, but at least in the good old days, it was impossible to trademark acronyms. Hence efforts like Microsoft's to argue that "NT" doesn't actually stand for anything and is therefore a permissable trademark.
The problem is not that they want to be discriminating about preserving companies' trademarks, but that it might not be feasible. The problem is that they want to make money, and they might do this by registering trademarked domains (if such a thing can be said to exist) to people who ought not to have them. If NBC is the only one who is allowed to register nbc.tv, then NBC has no incentive to do so when it already owns nbc.com and has lots of marketing invested in it. The only incentive to buy most of the *.tv domains is to foreclose competitors from doing so.
You're forgetting that Tuvalu is something of a sovereign state. They're technically a Commonwealth Member state, so they might be answerable to British law on the matter. But if you really want to stop them, you should go and apply pressure to the UK, New Zealand, and Australia, since they're the ones contributing the foreign aid that comprises most of Tuvalu's economy.
And you'd best attack it that way, since your trademark lawsuits wouldn't hold much water. Owning tv.com doesn't give anyone any particular right to blah.tv. Owning one instance of a word on the internet doesn't bestow ownership on all other instances, since they might be in other fields not covered by the original trademark. Sure, coke is attacking coke.ch, but it's not a forgone conclusion that they will prevail.
For a second there, I thought someone was hiking the price of beer. It's hard enough with gas prices as high as they are; leave the other precious brown fluid alone, ok?
Although Linux-branded beer would be an interesting idea. Maybe SuSE and their German compatriots should get cracking on it!
but I heard the parties are still going to settle this with an old-fashioned gladiator battle, quake3 style. Let's just hope id uses a real champion and not Linus for the sake of name-value like Transmeta did.
But... you don't need swap space with 512 Mb RAM! ... Sure, yeah, sure. But that's not the point. :-)
;-)
Hey, just make a ramdisk and put your swapfiles there.
Iridium was far too expensive to maintain and use
This will mean no more stupid Iridium flares to get in the way of astronomical observations.
Face it, they were an eyesore, and I'm not sad to see them gone.
Engineering innovations like fire didn't violate the current understandings of physics. They occurred in the absence of any theories of physics.
Engineering innovations like fire were not elusive. They provided a glaring gaping hole in the current understanding of the world. More importantly, they were readily reproducible.
There's a big difference between "we have an effect that violates our notion of the universe, so let's revise our notion" and "we want to find an effect that, while it violates our notion of the universe and while it hasn't yet been discovered, it would be really neat if we could find it".
What is your definition of "doing something other than what the machine was explicitly programmed to do"? Deep-blue was programmed to play chess very well, and towards that end it has/had made many chess moves that at first baffled onlooking grandmasters (referring to the rematch with Kasparov). It's a far cry between chess (which is now mostly computable) and even other games (like Go) much less anything approaching AI, but the idea that you can't set up a handful of principles and watch them followed to their [il]logical conclusions doesn't seem too far-fetched.
Redmond (AP) -- Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer announced the company will still be enforcing its trademark on the color coloquially known as "BSOD Blue". When questioned about the recent landmark decision Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Samara Brothers, Inc., Balmer said: "Microsoft firmly believes that this shade of blue, consistent with QUALITEX CO. v. JACOBSON PRODUCTS CO., has acquired 'a secondary meaning' which 'serves no other purpose' and is therefore a permissable trademark under the Lanham act. After all, what purpose could this blue serve other than to identify a computer as running Windows? Surely it is not to inform the user that his computer has crashed when crashing is implicit in the very notion of running Windows".
No immediate lawsuits have been filed, but the suspected potential respondents are believed to be undergoing puberty somewhere in Scandinavia.
"Hey Billy, come ovah here und ztart daddy's car *hiccup*. I gots to get ta work."