No, Its about copyright holders maintaining their rights. All the rhetoric about how evil the RIAA and MPAA are and how they are taking away rights masks the fact that copyright holders are losing their rights too. It is my right to protect my intellectual property from redistribution, public performance, and copying whether you like it or not. Until Copyright Law changes these are MY rights and you can't take them away.
It must give you a warm fuzzy feeling to know that we're all moving towards living in a police state just for your benefit.
There's usually no conformal coating on the pins of the components attached to the PCB. Some surface-mount ICs have extremely tiny gaps between their exposed leads.
I still say there is no practical reason for this.
If nobody had ever worked on areas that have no immediate practical purpose, we'd still be focused on optimizing the designs of pointed sticks and stone hammers.
What they really ought to do with top-level-window-polluting apps like the GIMP is group together all of the windows that belong to a single GIMP instance. Then, by default, clicking on the tab would bring forward/minimize all of one GIMP instance's windows as a group. Another copy of the GIMP would create a separate tab.
Otherwise, I personally don't like grouped tags of any kind. I really don't need them anyway because I set the task bar to a vertical orientation. In that configuration, large numbers of tabs fit stacked on top of each other in rows, and I haven't run out of space yet.
I wasn't claiming that there was any problem with sending plutonium to Saturn. I was just pointing out that there isn't "plenty of plutonium" out there.
I hate to rain on their parade, but there's plenty of it out there already...
Other than in man-made devices, probably the only place that you're going to find a macroscopic amount of plutonium in this universe is in the vicinity of a recent supernova explosion. It does not generally occur in nature.
Fission is the process of a large isotope splitting into smaller more stable isotopes.
Actually, the term "fission" is usually reserved for a large isotope splitting into two roughly equal-sized atoms. The term "decay" usually refers to an isotope splitting into a small particle (electron, photon, or helium nucleus) and a new isotope of slightly smaller size. RTGs collect energy from the decay of a particular rare plutonium isotope (this is not the same isotope of plutonium used for fission in nuclear bombs).
Decay usually occurs at a fixed rate that depends only on the isotope in question, and is not affected by outside factors.
Fission is most commonly encountered in chain reactions whose rate is highly dependent on the physical configuration of the fuel, and may highly unstable (like a bomb). The job of a nuclear reactor is to use complex thermally controlled geometry and/or mechanical means to keep the fission reaction rate stable. OTOH, since decay is perfectly stable by itself, an RTG just sits there. It has no moving parts.
Genuine nuclear reactors have been used in space, especially by the Soviet Union. Several dozen Soviet fission reactor cores from defunct military satellites are still orbiting the earth today.
There are many vendors and buyers out there that honestly believe that one should only buy Intel as AMD is unstable.
Well, Intel has been making x86 CPUs since 1978, but AMD didn't start making them until 1979. Obviously, AMD has had less time to iron out any stability problems with their products.
That kind of reminds me of those genetically modified crops that have been tweaked to be sterile after the first generation.
Re:The city was being reasonable, not Smirnoff
on
Reverse Graffiti
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Except that he cleaned the wall, he didn't add anything to it, it just so happened that he cleaned in a pattern and then stopped
The problem here is that the pattern itself conveys information independent of the medium. It doesn't matter much whether the pattern is formed from clean spots or spray paint.
If instead of spam, the guy had used cleaner to write offensive obscene or racist messages, nobody would be trying to defend him on this technicality.
Holiday gift exchanges with my extended family has devolved into exchanging various gift certificates from big box retail chains. IMO, this is pretty stupid, since all we're doing is mutually constraining our purchase options. Plus, it's just another thing that I have to remember is buried in my wallet. I've gone to stores over and over, forgetting each time to use one of their gift cards that's been in my wallet for over a year.
I wonder why it's acceptable to send someone an Amazon gift card as a present, but it's not acceptable to send them $20 cash, which would be more generally useful.
Maybe it's because then we would realize that the cash exchange cancels out to zero. If we convert the cash to a non-interchangeable form of private money, it makes it seem like the whole exercise has some kind of point.
I guess it's yet another example of an opportunity for smart proprietors to profit off of a common logic flaw in the human brain.
And if you look on the flipside of that token, DRM is great. It's an attempt to enforce, empower, and maintain the rights of the content creators to prevent their rights being trampled on by freeloaders.
Do you seriously think that even one single freeloader anywhere on the planet has been thwarted from downloading a Velvet Revolver track by this scheme? All this has achieved is to install one more piece of bloatware onto millions of computers. That, and force you to agree to an additional EULA before playing the CD on your computer, which negates the long established principle of first sale.
Just think how great it will be when every CD comes with its own unique DRM scheme fighting over your CD-ROM and audio settings, or whatever other secret crap they try to pull in your system. And the DMCA will make it illegal to attempt to fix your computer once it has been hosed by all of these bug-ridden trojans.
Add 4) use it because of cool features like integration with Windows Authentication so they don't have to enter a password for their intranet applications. Not exactly "forced."
Cool. Once this exploit is installed, the haX0rs are automatically authenticated on your company's intranet applications.
It doesn't rule out using the connection for general web browsing and email, which is probably all that 95% of their target market want anyway.
If their bandwidth is so precious that it only supports web browsing and email, then it's not quite "broadband", is it? It reminds me of Monty Python's "Insurance Sketch":
Vicar(Eric Idle): But my car was hit by a lorry while standing in the garage and you refuse to pay my claim.
Insurance Agent(Michael Palin): Oh well, Reverend Morrison... in your policy... in your policy... here we are. It states quite clearly that no claim you make will be paid.
Vicara: Oh dear.
Agent: You see, you unfortunately plumped for our 'Neverpay' policy, which, you know, if you never claim is very worthwhile... but you had to claim, and, well, there it is.
That's the real reason. The human body is very energy constrained, mainly because that big brain burns energy at 20% of the basal metabolic rate. Giant muslces would need to provide a major guaranteed increase in food to be favored by evolution.
...Then this sounds like a perfect adaptation for an environment full of double-meat burgers, super-sized fries and 1/2-gallon sodas. This baby's genes seem to have a very bright future.
People have been lambasting them about security for many years. They didn't need the help of hindsight. They needed to stop corner cutting and procrastinating.
When you have an OS that can give itself the luxury of modifying the driver architecture between point releases so that everyone has to recompile things always look so much easier.
Simple things like closing off stupid ports by default and not automatically launching downloaded executables doesn't require driver changes or hindsight. It just requires some management direction and a little common sense. They could have easily done that in 1996.
1992 is irrelevant. Microsoft didn't start pushing Internet connections for Windows machines until circa 1996, after it was clear that their effort to get everyone on their own AOL-ish network utopia was going to fail.
That is when they should have fixed their OS. Whether Linux was ready in 1996 is also irrelevant. A lack of viable alternatives would have been all the more reason for Microsoft to take the time to overhaul their OS security before enabling and encouraging computing neophytes to hook their machines directly to the Internet.
It would have been painful for them to fix things back then. Since they've put it off to this late date, the huge amount of extra compatibility baggage makes it much more painful for them now. Nevertheless, they have nobody but themselves to blame for their procrastination.
You won't sell a lot of anything like that, unfortunately.
So? That's Microsoft's problem, isn't it. They got into this bind by cutting corners: putting software designed for a departmental workgroup environment on the Internet. Maybe they shouldn't have been selling it in the first place. Who cares if sales drop because of necessary fixes? They've got $60B in the bank to buy groceries until they figure out a better workaround.
That was the wise way to go about the conversion. Here in the U.S., they tried to do it ass-backwards. Back in the 70s or 80s, they tacked little "kph" conversions onto speed-limit signs and speedometers to help everyone get "acclimated". This just pissed off and confused everyone with extra tiny numbers, and it was applied to an area of measurement that really isn't very important to metricize. (You can't even do easy physics calculations unless you use m/s anyway.)
The net result was a backlash that delayed adoption of the metric system here by decades. Instead of the in-your-face road signs, they should have just quietly started converting smaller things over and let the old system fade away gradually.
We probably will eventually switch over, but this won't happen until after our capability to design or manufacture anything domestically has totally atrophied, and we rely on 100% metric imported goods.
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Meanwhile, Word can't successfully open a document from any of those 5 Linux word processors. I guess Word must suck 5 times worse.
It must give you a warm fuzzy feeling to know that we're all moving towards living in a police state just for your benefit.
There's usually no conformal coating on the pins of the components attached to the PCB. Some surface-mount ICs have extremely tiny gaps between their exposed leads.
Scientific discovery has little use unless you teach the resulting knowledge to others.
If nobody had ever worked on areas that have no immediate practical purpose, we'd still be focused on optimizing the designs of pointed sticks and stone hammers.
Otherwise, I personally don't like grouped tags of any kind. I really don't need them anyway because I set the task bar to a vertical orientation. In that configuration, large numbers of tabs fit stacked on top of each other in rows, and I haven't run out of space yet.
This isn't true, it's never been true, and it likely will never be true.
OK, but that sentence fragment has a totally different meaning than the complete sentence from the story header.
Given that, I don't see why you bothered commenting.
I wasn't claiming that there was any problem with sending plutonium to Saturn. I was just pointing out that there isn't "plenty of plutonium" out there.
Other than in man-made devices, probably the only place that you're going to find a macroscopic amount of plutonium in this universe is in the vicinity of a recent supernova explosion. It does not generally occur in nature.
At least the tornado risk should be minimal.
Actually, the term "fission" is usually reserved for a large isotope splitting into two roughly equal-sized atoms. The term "decay" usually refers to an isotope splitting into a small particle (electron, photon, or helium nucleus) and a new isotope of slightly smaller size. RTGs collect energy from the decay of a particular rare plutonium isotope (this is not the same isotope of plutonium used for fission in nuclear bombs).
Decay usually occurs at a fixed rate that depends only on the isotope in question, and is not affected by outside factors. Fission is most commonly encountered in chain reactions whose rate is highly dependent on the physical configuration of the fuel, and may highly unstable (like a bomb). The job of a nuclear reactor is to use complex thermally controlled geometry and/or mechanical means to keep the fission reaction rate stable. OTOH, since decay is perfectly stable by itself, an RTG just sits there. It has no moving parts.
Genuine nuclear reactors have been used in space, especially by the Soviet Union. Several dozen Soviet fission reactor cores from defunct military satellites are still orbiting the earth today.
Well, Intel has been making x86 CPUs since 1978, but AMD didn't start making them until 1979. Obviously, AMD has had less time to iron out any stability problems with their products.
That kind of reminds me of those genetically modified crops that have been tweaked to be sterile after the first generation.
The problem here is that the pattern itself conveys information independent of the medium. It doesn't matter much whether the pattern is formed from clean spots or spray paint.
If instead of spam, the guy had used cleaner to write offensive obscene or racist messages, nobody would be trying to defend him on this technicality.
I wonder why it's acceptable to send someone an Amazon gift card as a present, but it's not acceptable to send them $20 cash, which would be more generally useful.
Maybe it's because then we would realize that the cash exchange cancels out to zero. If we convert the cash to a non-interchangeable form of private money, it makes it seem like the whole exercise has some kind of point.
I guess it's yet another example of an opportunity for smart proprietors to profit off of a common logic flaw in the human brain.
Do you seriously think that even one single freeloader anywhere on the planet has been thwarted from downloading a Velvet Revolver track by this scheme? All this has achieved is to install one more piece of bloatware onto millions of computers. That, and force you to agree to an additional EULA before playing the CD on your computer, which negates the long established principle of first sale.
Just think how great it will be when every CD comes with its own unique DRM scheme fighting over your CD-ROM and audio settings, or whatever other secret crap they try to pull in your system. And the DMCA will make it illegal to attempt to fix your computer once it has been hosed by all of these bug-ridden trojans.
It seems to me that if you worked that job, it would be prudent to invest in a tinfoil jockstrap.
Cool. Once this exploit is installed, the haX0rs are automatically authenticated on your company's intranet applications.
Well, the article got it a lot closer than me. My calculations came up with an age of -16 years.
If their bandwidth is so precious that it only supports web browsing and email, then it's not quite "broadband", is it? It reminds me of Monty Python's "Insurance Sketch":
Vicar (Eric Idle): But my car was hit by a lorry while standing in the garage and you refuse to pay my claim.
Insurance Agent (Michael Palin): Oh well, Reverend Morrison ... in your policy... in your policy... here we are. It states quite clearly that no claim you make will be paid.
Vicara: Oh dear.
Agent: You see, you unfortunately plumped for our 'Neverpay' policy, which, you know, if you never claim is very worthwhile ... but you had to claim, and, well, there it is.
People have been lambasting them about security for many years. They didn't need the help of hindsight. They needed to stop corner cutting and procrastinating.
When you have an OS that can give itself the luxury of modifying the driver architecture between point releases so that everyone has to recompile things always look so much easier.
Simple things like closing off stupid ports by default and not automatically launching downloaded executables doesn't require driver changes or hindsight. It just requires some management direction and a little common sense. They could have easily done that in 1996.
That is when they should have fixed their OS. Whether Linux was ready in 1996 is also irrelevant. A lack of viable alternatives would have been all the more reason for Microsoft to take the time to overhaul their OS security before enabling and encouraging computing neophytes to hook their machines directly to the Internet.
It would have been painful for them to fix things back then. Since they've put it off to this late date, the huge amount of extra compatibility baggage makes it much more painful for them now. Nevertheless, they have nobody but themselves to blame for their procrastination.
So? That's Microsoft's problem, isn't it. They got into this bind by cutting corners: putting software designed for a departmental workgroup environment on the Internet. Maybe they shouldn't have been selling it in the first place. Who cares if sales drop because of necessary fixes? They've got $60B in the bank to buy groceries until they figure out a better workaround.
The net result was a backlash that delayed adoption of the metric system here by decades. Instead of the in-your-face road signs, they should have just quietly started converting smaller things over and let the old system fade away gradually.
We probably will eventually switch over, but this won't happen until after our capability to design or manufacture anything domestically has totally atrophied, and we rely on 100% metric imported goods.