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User: Waffle+Iron

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  1. Re:Isn't this illegal? on Storm Brewing over Microsoft on the Horizon? · · Score: 4, Funny
    In case you've forgotten he, or at least his wife, owns one.

    Well, if I the choice is between having the president in the pocket of Big Oil vs. in the pocket of Big Ketchup, I suppose that I would pick the latter. I guess I just really don't care that much if the administration sets our National Condiment Policy in closed-door meetings with industry insiders.

  2. Re:Can't do that-Inheritance. on Proposal: Put Library of Congress' Contents Online · · Score: 5, Insightful
    If you get an inheritance? You effectively do.

    I might inherit a portion of his farm. But that's a result of money that he saved at the time. I do not collect royalties on the *work* that he did 70 years ago.

    If an author or musician wants to leave an inheritance, then they should save the money they make during a reasonable copyright term, and give that to their children. They can leave their typewriters, musical instruments, and other tools of the trade (analagous to a farm) as well.

    They might have to actually forego a blowing everything they earn on cocaine and refrain from signing away most of their income on bad contracts to actually achieve this, but then so do the rest of us.

  3. Re:Why hasn't this fucktard gotten a +5 yet? on Presidential Candidates Arrested at Debates · · Score: 1
    American Heritage Dictionary:

    democracy P Pronunciation Key (d-mkr-s) n. pl. democracies

    Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.

    Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Law:

    Main Entry: democracy Pronunciation: di-'mä-kr&-sE Function: noun Inflected Form: plural -cies

    1 a : government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections

    Hey look! I found your source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary! You only showed the first of four meanings. Why am I not surprised? And now... The REST of the story:

    2. Government by popular representation; a form of government in which the supreme power is retained by the people, but is indirectly exercised through a system of representation and delegated authority periodically renewed; a constitutional representative government; a republic.

    The list goes on, but I'll add one more:

    Semanticly-obsessed-legal-funamentalist-wingnut n.

    1. See: AC

  4. Re:Can't do that. on Proposal: Put Library of Congress' Contents Online · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I mean, God forbid they or their childern are able to make money off their own creations and ideas.

    Their children can go out and get their own damned jobs. They would then be making a productive contribution to the economy.

    My grandpa was a farmer who died over 50 years ago. Since I don't get to collect royalties on the corn he grew in the 1930s, I've had to work to produce my own income. Imagine that.

  5. Re:Get a fucking clue, moderators on Presidential Candidates Arrested at Debates · · Score: 1

    WTF are you rambling about? About all that's clear is that you're hung up obsolete semantics, unable to come to terms with the fact that the English language has changed since the 18th century.

  6. Re:'ere, what's this then? on Presidential Candidates Arrested at Debates · · Score: 1
    we are a Constitutionaly limit republic

    And the constitution (as modified by the 17th ammendment) limits the method of selection of senators and representatives so that they shall be chosen democratically. It does not limit the electoral college from being chosen democratically, and every state has chosen to use such a method. Your point was?

  7. Re:'ere, what's this then? on Presidential Candidates Arrested at Debates · · Score: 5, Insightful
    America is NOT a "democracy", NOR SHOULD IT BE.

    A republic implies only that decisions are made by a group of representatives, regardless of how they are chosen.

    In our country, the representatives are elected by the general public. That makes our system a democratic republic, and therefore it can be considered to be a democracy.

    Restricting the definition of democracy to only mean a pure system like ancient Greece would be pretty useless, since almost no country in history since then has actually used that system. Common usage of the term includes democratic republics. Every president that I can remember has gone on and on about the benefits of "freedom and democracy". Surely they're not talking just about a system of government that is not used currently by any country.

  8. Re:Overkill on 32-bit Processors, Cheap · · Score: 1
    You couldn't assemble the sources directly, but Intel provided software tools to automatically convert assembly source code from 8008 -> 8080, and also from 8080 -> 8086. (Since the 8086, of course, they've maintained full binary compatibility.)

    To support this, they designed the chips to be a close enough match so that the source code conversion could be done mechanically. It's a kludge, but it was probably a valuable checklist feature to get their existing customers to feel that their investment in code written for the old architecture wasn't being lost.

    If you could track down the original Intel conversion tools, you could run a script to convert and assemble an 8008 source file to run on today's machines.

  9. Re:Overkill on 32-bit Processors, Cheap · · Score: 1
    Manufacturers are not stupid, therefore I'd be shocked if the 32-bit uC's are not backward-compatible with the older 8-bit models.

    That would be a wise move; the CPU market loves backwards compatibility. The latest Athlon-64s are still assembly-source compatible with the Intel 8008 from 1972.

  10. Re:Security issue? on Breaking Google's DRM · · Score: 2, Insightful
    No, I'm not joking, and note that I said user, not administrator.

    I own my computer. I am the user *and* the administrator; remote websites are not administrators of my system. I am the one who gets to determine which memory I am allowed to access. If somebody tries to hijack that control, that is a security risk.

  11. Re:Thats it then on Sun and Kodak Settle Out of Court · · Score: 1
    One thing is for sure, when this does get shot down (which it will be, maybe even if Kodak doesn't try to extort anyone else), McNealy is going to look quite to fool for handing out this much money.

    I would have to hope that they're smart enough to include a refund clause in case the patent gets invalidated. Maybe Sun figures that this is going to get knocked down by someone else anyway, and temporarily parking the $92M deposit at Kodak is easier than going through the effort of fighting it themselves. (And at the same time this strategy totally eliminates possibility of the worst case $1B payout).

  12. Re:Invention vs Production on Sun and Kodak Settle Out of Court · · Score: 1
    but wouldn't it suck to work 100 hr weeks for a year bringing a project together only to have a rival company copy it the day it's released, spending 1/10th the time and money you did?

    That would suck less than spending 100hr weeks for a year and then getting whacked by some jackass who pops out of the with a submarine patent. At least in the first case they couldn't take money directly out of your bank account, they couldn't scare your customers away with FUD, and they couldn't take away your right to continue producing your products.

  13. Re:And just like that, on Congress Plans Space Tourism Regulation · · Score: 4, Insightful
    If you drop a booster on my house, I'll sue you into the stone age.

    In your unregulated world where lawsuits are the only way to keep people's bad actions in check, who gets all the power to make decisions?

    It would be those damned trial lawyers, meddling judges and looney juries. It would probably be only system that could possibly be worse than our current one.

  14. Re:It does when... on EFF Goes To Court To Fight The Broadcast Flag · · Score: 2, Interesting
    And of course building anything that does not honr the flag is disallowed by the DMCA. It's basically a form of prohibition all over again.

    One question would be how hard would it be to filter the flag with a generic piece of hardware? Say somebody produces a little dongle with a small FPGA in it for generically filtering serial data streams. It would have substantial non-infringing uses, because you might be able to use it to encrypt SATA drive traffic, for example. However, you might also be able to download a configuration from a foreign server that parses digitial TV streams and zeroes out the broadcast flag.

  15. Re:WTF ? Released ? on SUSE 9.2 Released · · Score: 1
    Currently, it's as much "released" as Longhorn.

    That's comparing apples and oranges. SuSE has been on a 6-month incremental release schedule for a long time. If any major problems crop up in a release, they would most likely drop the specific new features causing the problems and simply push those to the next release. They have a history of shipping versions mostly on time twice per year.

    Microsoft, OTOH, goes with a gargantuan monolithic overhaul of the entire OS and userland every several years. Since they tear up so much of the old stuff, they have to get much of the new stuff working together before they ship. And much of the new stuff tends to be based on whatever untested new "paradigm of the week" they're pushing that's going to save the world. (This time for sure. Really!) The uncertainty involved with inventing anything that attempts to save the world inherently has unpredictable development times. They have a history of slipping each release several years past the original target date.

    The SuSE release is almost certainly going to happen approximately on schedule. Longhorn is still a big question mark.

  16. Re:Approaching the tipping point on AT&T Considers Mac OS X, Linux For 70,000 Desktops · · Score: 1
    Perot Systems is a good example. The company I work for pays them over $100K/year just for support of one 10 year old system.

    Now there's a giant sucking sound.

  17. Re:Emergency Brakes on A Car With A Mind Of Its Own · · Score: 1
    Emergency brakes suck. On some cars the emergency brakes have a hard time keeping the car stationary on a gentle incline.

    The real brakes, OTOH, are much more powerful than the engine. That's why they can stop a car from a given speed in a fraction of the distance that it takes the same car to accelerate to that speed.

    The key in this case would be to stomp on the real brakes and stop the car as quickly as possible. If the guy tried to ride on the brakes to keep the car going slow, they would quickly overheat, and he would lose them. (Of course it would have been better still to pop the transmission into neutral.)

  18. Re:obsesive compulsive correction! on Cray XD1 Now Available · · Score: 1
    All modern X86 processors emulate the instruction set. The internal hardware looks very little like the logical architecture view presented to the the programmer.

    The Itanium just happens to have a particularly poor X86 emulation implementation.

  19. Re:Power consumption on AMD 90nm Evaluated · · Score: 2, Informative
    Uh, how is electric heating "inefficient"? Is not 100% of the electrical power being turned into heat?

    Electric power generation and distribution isn't very efficient. For every joule of electrical energy delivered to your outlet, two or three joules of heat energy are dumped from the power station's cooling towers and smokestacks or lost in the transmission lines.

    A good gas furnace can be around 90% efficient. The relative costs of heating by both methods reflect this in most areas.

    (Electric heat pumps can be competitive because they transfer a couple of joules of heat for every joule of electricity that they consume. However, a computer is not a heat pump.)

  20. Re:Reason? on Nanoscale Switches in Memory · · Score: 1
    What makes the transfer rate limit for magnetic media 100 gigabit/inch? Why this specific number?

    It's another limitation of the BIOS API.

  21. Re:Mechanical == Achilles' Heel on Nanoscale Switches in Memory · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Wearing out" usually involves microscopic particles getting rubbed off of the mechanical parts by friction. Each of these switches is probably smaller than any particle shedded by normal wear-and-tear, and also smaller than the surface features that the whole concept of friction is based on. That may give them essentially unlimited life, or at least lifetime comparable to solid state electronics (which can suffer some "wear" from atomic migration in the crystal lattice).

  22. Re:sweet on Nanoscale Switches in Memory · · Score: 4, Funny
    You can pick these up at Radio Shack right?

    Yes, a blister pack containing six nanoswitches is $2.79.

  23. Re:How is software really different? on Groklaw Rants On Software Patents · · Score: 1
    I don't know how something patented can be a trade secret. Part of being a trade secret is that you have to keep it a secret. Patenting something is the complete opposite: you are disclosing the invention to the world in exchange for a limited monopoly.

    The patent just has to give the general idea of how to implement the patented idea. It doesn't have to reveal the specific program that the patent filer is protecting; that usually remains a trade secret. A lot of software patents have little more than a block diagram describing the algorithm at a very high level.

    Patents give you broad coverage over a swath of the industry, and trade secrets give you targeted protection of the tricky details of your own products. A particular software product can enjoy both complementary barriers.

    This double whammy can be daunting. Microsoft's secrets about how the Word file format are a formidable barrier would take would-be competitors many man-years to divine. If you throw in the possibility that after having gone through of all that effort, Microsoft will hit you with a patent infringement suit on the Word interoperability, most potential competitors aren't even going to try.

  24. Re:Production Costs on Suing Your Customers a Good Idea? · · Score: 1
    small artists would be at a great disadvantage when it comes to negotiating contracts and stuff without a label's backing

    Small artists are at a great disadvantage negotiating contracts even with the label's "backing". That's why the label retains the vast majority of the cash and the small artist usually ends up with zilch.

  25. Re:The Cause of Global Warming on Global Warming Expected to Intensify Hurricanes · · Score: 1
    No credible scientist has yet come out and stated that the miniscule amounts of CO2 we pump into the atmosphere is in any way a significant factor for global warming.

    This statement is true, if we redefine "credible" to mean "hosts a talk radio show".