Oh, come on. It's pretty obvious geographically that all of Alaska, especially the panhandle, should belong to Canada. We'll even give you Quebec if it makes you feel better.
BC Ferries has three catamarans for sale. The PacifiCat Explorer, and the PacifiCat Discovery are currently in service in British Columbia. They're the second-largest aluminum-hulled catamarans in the world, and can do 34 knots. They'd probably run you about $200 million (Canadian) a piece.
$600 Million (Canadian, or about $400 million US) is a hell of a lot cheaper than $60 billion, and you can take your car onto the ferry... The ferries are almost new, and, while I don't like the decor too much, they're not bad.
Vertical Limit was boring. Here's the entire movie:
People, roped together, climbing dangerous terrain. One slips, pulls the rest down, everyone is hanging by one clip/ice axe.
The only difference between scenes is who is hanging from the cliff or whatever, how many people there are, and who (if anyone) dies. The terrain varies slightly, too. Oh yeah, people repeatedly get blown up by nitro.
Miss Congeniality was slightly better, although kind of formula...
Rodent studies are useful as a filter, to tell you what bears closer inspection, but trying to conclude anything about effects of X on humans based on rodent studies is pure crap.
I bet'cha all 226 of those were carcinogenic to humans - ranging from mild to severe. Remember, we're all mammals.
Rats are closely related to mice, yet the study found significant differences in their reactions to suspected carcinogens. Now are humans more closely related to rats than mice are? I don't think so. There are millions of years of evolution seperating us from Rodenta.
You can simulate YEARS of exposure over a course of a couple weeks.
This is so fucking stupid I can't believe it, especially since I explained why this was wrong in my last post. Here's another, simpler explanation for you.
Gee Mikey, I wonder if low-level microwaves are bad for rats.
I don't know, Steve. I don't want to wait a year to do a real study, so let's just put little Pinkey in the microwave.
Wow, Pinkey's head blew up! I guess low-level microwaves are bad.
Do you get it now? Many, many things are bad above a certain threshold, but harmless or even beneficial at lower levels (think vitamins). That's why claiming that low, normal levels of X are carcinogenic in humans based on rodent studies with super-high levels is Bad Science.
Examine their methodology.
They're using rodents. We want to know about humans. At best, their results should suggest an area for further research. They don't tell you how humans react to X.
Yes. Golly, I think we can indeed call them portable phones, even cellular phones if you like.
I thought it was obvious I was being sarcastic. I guess not. My point was that nobody used them nearly as much as people use cell phones now, and the technology is significantly different, so data from them isn't very relevant. Modern cell phones haven't been around as long.
The whole point is that lower power may not indicate less damaging when considering long-term cumulative effects. No question but that some cosmic ray muon zapping through you has more power than a photon from your cellphone, but you get a lot more of those photons and they interact with your tissues very differently. Long-period low-frequency EM exposure and periodic exposure to single high-energy particles are incommensurable quantities. We cannot make any conclusions about the former based on our knowledge of the latter.
Argh, where to start... You missed my point, and you made a few errors. I was trying to compare risks not the actual radiation. Given that background radiation is long-term, is always present, and is ionizing, whereas cell phone radiation is only occasional, it seems likely to be much less dangerous. Also, you confuse energy and power. Power is the rate of energy. Cell phone radiation probably has more power than background radiation, but the individual photons have much less energy, so much less, in fact, that they are not capable of ionizing anything. This means that they can probably only do damage through thermal effects, but half a watt isn't much heat...
Note [snip] that you cannot logically dismiss the possibility out-of-hand on the basis you're claiming.
I admit it is a possibilty, I'm just pointing out that it is so unlikely, and the risk so small, that it shouldn't concern anyone.
Hmm, makes me glad to sleep on a simple futon.
Just wait until you have to move with the damn thing. It will get you then:-)
Need is a relative word. You only need food if you care about living. You only need shelter if the weather sucks. You only need a cell phone if you have to communicate from places where there are no phones. Many people need to do this as part of their jobs or for other reasons. If it's required for your job, then I think it's safe to use the word "need".
People have been distracted while driving by many things for many years. The same argument was used against radios, and could be applied to makeup, food, coffee... Funny how nobody's trying to ban drinking coffee while driving, or talking while driving.
As for people talking in public, what does it matter if people are talking on the phone or just to someone beside them?
Cell phones ringing in theatres, yes, that's evil, but that's just idiots who don't RTFM and put their phone on silent-vibrate mode (mine always is).
Funny, my first programming job was at a company that did consulting in the cell phone industry. That was 10 years ago.
Can you really call those bricks portable phones? Nobody used them anywhere near as much as people do now, and frequencies and power levels used have changed since then. I should have said modern cell phones, so sue me...
Yes, which is why you shouldn't compare the two.
Um, why not (your analogy sucks, BTW)? If the backround radiation is more damaging/higher power than what cell phones produce, than we can probably ignore the cell phones. There isn't any solid evidence for cell phones causing cancer, nor is there a reasonable mechanism by which low-level non-ionizing radiation could cause cancer. Until somebody comes up with a well-done study showing a strong correlation, I won't worry.
Risk analysis involves not only the odds of an incident, but the loss per incident. The odds of cell-phone related cancers may seem, based on available data, to be low, but a brain tumor loses real big.
A hundred or so people die every year by having their beds collapse on them or through some other mechanical failure while sleeping. Nobody stresses about that, but death is about the biggest loss you can take (and what a way to go). Once the odds of dying (over your lifetime) from a particular cause drop below 1 in 10,000, it's probably not going to worry you, especially since there are better things to stress about. Keep risks in perspective.
Say what I want? OK, you're an arrogant prick for thinking you know other people's needs better than they do. That feels much better, thank you.
Your car breaks down on a remote road. Nobody is driving by. It's cold. You need a cell phone to call for help. A lot of people get phones to keep in their cars for emergency situations.
You could just as easily say nobody needs a phone, either. In some sense, all you really need is food and shelter, but that doesn't make all of modern civilization bad. I'd say you're a serious luddite, and are suffering from BYRS (Bourgeois Yuppie Resentment Syndrome).
I happen to have a cell phone instead of a regular phone, because it's about the same cost as a land line, and is more convenient. Radiation risks? Ha! I'm a physics student. I laugh at your 0.5 watts of non-ionizing radiation. If I have anything to worry about, it's working at the local particle accelerator for 4 months next summer.:-)
Rodent studies are essentially useless. The human skull is much thicker than that of a rat, and so the amount of radiation transmitted is different. Also, rats don't live nearly as long as humans. Brain tumours that take 10 - 15 years to develop in humans are obviously going to behave differently (if they happen at all) in rodents. You could try to correct for all this, but then you're really getting onto thin ice...
Besides, what causes cancer in rats doesn't necessarily cause cancer in humans. I remember hearing about a study of 226 known rodent carcinogens. Each substance was tested on both rats and mice. Something like 96 were carcinogenic in mice but not in rats, and 50-odd were carcinogenic in rats but not mice. Kinda makes you wonder if rodent studies have any relevancy to humans.
You could also strap phones to monkey heads, but you'd probably run into a lot of trouble there, and it would still take 10 - 15 years. You can't increase power levels to "speed up" the tests or "amplify" the effect because, at some threshold, you start running into significant heating effects that simply aren't an issue at lower levels.
The study of 891 people did find a slightly increased risk for a rare type of brain cancer, but the researchers said it was not statistically significant.
Why the hell does the media report "effects" that aren't statistically significant? A study also has a 50% chance of finding a non-significant correlation between cell phone use and below-average penis size (assuming penis size and cell phone use are unrelated--if they are related, YMMV). This is just alarmism (kinda like my use of bolding above:-). Science journalists should be required to take stats courses in journalism school.
"Since most solid tumors take 10 to 15 years to develop, it is probably too soon to see an effect"
If you did a study of the effect of smoking on people who have only been smoking for three years, it would be almost impossible for scientists to prove that smoking is harmful [snip] The same could apply to cell phones.
I am not an oncologist, but what you are saying sounds quite reasonable. Given that it takes 10 - 15 years for cancer to develop, any studies that do find a correlation between cell phone usage must be crap, since cell phones haven't been around that long. Now, since there's no evidence that cell phones are carcinogenic (how could there be if cancer takes longer to develop than cell phones have been around), why are we worrying?
Cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation at lower power levels. Compare this to the natural radioactivity and cosmic radiation which you're constantly exposed to (which is certainly ionizing). Now, without any reliable evidence to suggest a significant risk, why should we be concerned about cell phones? I think this whole scare has stemmed out of BYRS (Bourgeois Yuppie Resentment Syndrome), and not science.
Close only counts in horseshoes and thermonuclear warfare. When you're dealing with unhardened civilian targets and nuclear weapons, it doesn't matter if you're 5 metres or 500 metres off. Inertial guidance is probably good enough, let alone current civilian GPS.
"Gee, good thing that ICBM didn't have GPS. If it had been any closer, it would have hit and killed us... Why am I glowing?"
"Gosh, I'm glad that Anthrax bomb landed in Ned's backyard instead of mine. I wonder which way the wind is blowing..."
GPS actually would be useful for terrorist cruise missiles, but nobody else (other than our allies) really has the technology for that. On the other hand, good GPS could allow for us to finally realize the fantasy of flying cars, since it would be good enough for automatic landing...
...by darthpenguin. In another scientific breakthrough, researchers have discovered that darthpenguin is capable of doing thousands of calories of work while only taking in 600-800 calories.
"We believe he's some form of biological perpetual motion machine. We have already filed a patent." said lead scientist Dr. Benjamin Schwartz.
According to Dr. B.S., darthpenguin can eat less food than what all normal adults require for minimal subsistence living, and still be able to perform strenuous physical activity, all without losing weight.
"This is truly remarkable. We intend to harnass him to a giant hampster wheel and use him to solve the world's energy problems. He only produces a minute amount of methane and carbon dioxide a day." another scientist was heard to say.
Do you want to take the performance hit for indexing while you're using the computer (BeOS) or while you're not (MacOS)? There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.
What they're saying is wrong. Do consumers really care about those kinds of details (difference between MacOS and BeOS)? No. It's just techno-FUD.
Also, if BeOS stores the info in each file, how can it be true that you don't have to iterate through all the files to find something? There has to be some external data structure. Whether you call it a file or something else is just symantics.
Because BFS queries don't have to iterate over every file like Mac, Windows, or Linux queries do, search results would be instantaneous.
The MacOS has had index-based searching for years. Just now, it took me all of 5 seconds to search the contents of over 3 GB of files on my Mac for a certain keyword. I don't have a particularly fast system, either.
The whole basis for using Be for this seems to be that it's a "multimedia" OS, whatever that means, and that they have almost no other markets, so they will have to give all their attention to this one.
So what if Aqua is NeXT? Apple bought NeXT, so it owns their IP, too.
Apple lost their lawsuit with Microsoft because Apple had already licensed some of their GUI and related technology to Microsoft, and the court found that, in light of the agreement, Microsoft didn't infringe on Apple's copyrights, patents, and trade dress.
These themes do, howerver, infringe on Apple's trade dress, and Apple has a legal obligation to do something about them or lose its legal protection.
Please, please, please, could someone explain to us all the differences between patents, copyright, trademarks, trade dress, and other forms of intellectual property protection. Nobody here seems to get it.
Apple lost their suit against Microsoft, because Apple had already licensed some of their GUI and related technology to Microsoft, and the court found that the cross-over between Windows and MacOS was within the scope of this licensing agreement. Had Apple not licensed any technology to Microsoft, the outcome might have been much different. AFAIK, Apple has not licensed Aqua to anyone in Linux land.
Under trademark law, Apple is required to go after anyone infringing on its trade dress, or risk losing legal protection. Some of those theme developers might have been able to get Apple to license Aqua to them for free, but I can see why Apple would be reluctant to do so, considering how it got burned last time (with Microsoft)...
Please don't confuse trademark/trade dress with patents or copyrights. IANAL, so YMMV.
And then, you can turn the RBL off. Victims of Censorware can't turn it off because they aren't allowed to do so.
Only if you happen to be the head sys-admin for your ISP... If my ISP subscribes to MAPS, I might never even know that my content was being filtered, let alone have any control over it.
What I don't understand is why anybody is using MAPS for anything other than their mail server. I used to do IS at a software company, and we set up our mail server to reject mail from IPs on the RBL. Other than that, we didn't use RBL. The purpose of RBL is blocking spam, so why should we use it to block anything other than SMTP?
I'm getting to the state where I'm ashamed to be British.
From what I understand, you have to pay by the minute for local phone calls. You also have to get a license just to have a TV. Then there's all that insanity with the government being able to force you to give up your crypto keys (check out RubberHose--they may be able to help with that). Now your DSL is getting screwed.
I can see why you'd be ashamed. From the geek standpoint, Britain is a barbaric country.:-)
With disposable credit cards, you have to go to the bank/AmEx, get the number, then go back to the store... Too much trouble. Also, the store can still rip you off for the difference between the cost of the item, and the credit limit.
If Digital Cheques were integrated into browsers, it would be as easy or easier for customers than credit cards are now.
Configure your payment system to do realtime auth so you don't need to batch cc numbers for later capture. Thus the cc number lives on your site for only a few seconds.
If your system is cracked, what's to stop Mr. 1337 hAx0r from putting a sniffer or something like that on your network, then returning in a month to harvest the many credit card numbers? Sure, it's slightly more work for them, in that they have to make two visits instead of one, but any script kiddie can install a root kit to cover his tracks in just a few minutes.
The whole idea of using credit card numbers for online transactions is flawed. Why not have the purchaser write a "digital cheque" and sign it with his private key? The merchant could then present the cheque to a bank to verify that funds were available. Voila! Now, even unscrupulous merchants can't rip you off.
This insanity has got to stop, and it falls on us geeks to do something.
Your average citizen doesn't realize how software patents affect them (and will affect them). All they see is higher prices and less innovation, but they don't know why.
Write to your elected representatives, to industry leaders, and to news organizations. We need to make people aware of how patents are stifling innovation instead of rewarding it. If you're too lazy to do any of that, please please please at least join EFF. They even have student rates.
A recent study (read it in a newspaper, I think L.A. Times but unsure) shows a small $80 per year tax on all tax payers would go a long way to solving the United States poverty siuation.
If you took all the money that the US currently spends on social programs, and just GAVE it to poor people, there wouldn't be a single person left in America below the poverty line. So why is there still poverty?
1. Government doesn't do anything efficiently.
2. Poverty is more than just not having money; thus, throwing money at poverty won't necessarily solve the problem.
That said, if I invent some whizbang widget, IPO and make G$, and I donate millions to charity (or billions, in Bill Gates's case), why shouldn't I splurge a little on myself? What's the point if I can't?
For all you neo-communist whiners out there, every super-rich tech CEO is doing far more to help solve poverty than you are, just by paying their taxes. Most of them also donate more to charity in a year than you do in your life.
Finally, these CEOs have created an entire industry (which probably employs hundreds of slashdot-reading techies like us)--the high-end high-tech installer/system designer industry. The next best thing to having one of these setups has got to be building one...
Actually, EA Sports (a big player in the Sports Games field) is located in Vancouver, Canada.
I remember hearing a while ago how Japanese companies are buying all the American companies. But guess who's buying the Japanese companies? The British.
The Australians dominated the Olympics. The British are taking over the corporate world. The Canadians are plotting a military assault. The Commonwealth will rise again!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on. It's pretty obvious geographically that all of Alaska, especially the panhandle, should belong to Canada. We'll even give you Quebec if it makes you feel better.
:-)
Or we may just take it.
BC Ferries has three catamarans for sale. The PacifiCat Explorer, and the PacifiCat Discovery are currently in service in British Columbia. They're the second-largest aluminum-hulled catamarans in the world, and can do 34 knots. They'd probably run you about $200 million (Canadian) a piece.
$600 Million (Canadian, or about $400 million US) is a hell of a lot cheaper than $60 billion, and you can take your car onto the ferry... The ferries are almost new, and, while I don't like the decor too much, they're not bad.
Vertical Limit was boring. Here's the entire movie:
People, roped together, climbing dangerous terrain. One slips, pulls the rest down, everyone is hanging by one clip/ice axe.
The only difference between scenes is who is hanging from the cliff or whatever, how many people there are, and who (if anyone) dies. The terrain varies slightly, too. Oh yeah, people repeatedly get blown up by nitro.
Miss Congeniality was slightly better, although kind of formula...
I bet'cha all 226 of those were carcinogenic to humans - ranging from mild to severe. Remember, we're all mammals.
Rats are closely related to mice, yet the study found significant differences in their reactions to suspected carcinogens. Now are humans more closely related to rats than mice are? I don't think so. There are millions of years of evolution seperating us from Rodenta.
You can simulate YEARS of exposure over a course of a couple weeks.
This is so fucking stupid I can't believe it, especially since I explained why this was wrong in my last post. Here's another, simpler explanation for you.
Do you get it now? Many, many things are bad above a certain threshold, but harmless or even beneficial at lower levels (think vitamins). That's why claiming that low, normal levels of X are carcinogenic in humans based on rodent studies with super-high levels is Bad Science.
Examine their methodology.
They're using rodents. We want to know about humans. At best, their results should suggest an area for further research. They don't tell you how humans react to X.
Yes. Golly, I think we can indeed call them portable phones, even cellular phones if you like.
:-)
I thought it was obvious I was being sarcastic. I guess not. My point was that nobody used them nearly as much as people use cell phones now, and the technology is significantly different, so data from them isn't very relevant. Modern cell phones haven't been around as long.
The whole point is that lower power may not indicate less damaging when considering long-term cumulative effects. No question but that some cosmic ray muon zapping through you has more power than a photon from your cellphone, but you get a lot more of those photons and they interact with your tissues very differently. Long-period low-frequency EM exposure and periodic exposure to single high-energy particles are incommensurable quantities. We cannot make any conclusions about the former based on our knowledge of the latter.
Argh, where to start... You missed my point, and you made a few errors. I was trying to compare risks not the actual radiation. Given that background radiation is long-term, is always present, and is ionizing, whereas cell phone radiation is only occasional, it seems likely to be much less dangerous. Also, you confuse energy and power. Power is the rate of energy. Cell phone radiation probably has more power than background radiation, but the individual photons have much less energy, so much less, in fact, that they are not capable of ionizing anything. This means that they can probably only do damage through thermal effects, but half a watt isn't much heat...
Note [snip] that you cannot logically dismiss the possibility out-of-hand on the basis you're claiming.
I admit it is a possibilty, I'm just pointing out that it is so unlikely, and the risk so small, that it shouldn't concern anyone.
Hmm, makes me glad to sleep on a simple futon.
Just wait until you have to move with the damn thing. It will get you then
Need is a relative word. You only need food if you care about living. You only need shelter if the weather sucks. You only need a cell phone if you have to communicate from places where there are no phones. Many people need to do this as part of their jobs or for other reasons. If it's required for your job, then I think it's safe to use the word "need".
People have been distracted while driving by many things for many years. The same argument was used against radios, and could be applied to makeup, food, coffee... Funny how nobody's trying to ban drinking coffee while driving, or talking while driving.
As for people talking in public, what does it matter if people are talking on the phone or just to someone beside them?
Cell phones ringing in theatres, yes, that's evil, but that's just idiots who don't RTFM and put their phone on silent-vibrate mode (mine always is).
Funny, my first programming job was at a company that did consulting in the cell phone industry. That was 10 years ago.
Can you really call those bricks portable phones? Nobody used them anywhere near as much as people do now, and frequencies and power levels used have changed since then. I should have said modern cell phones, so sue me...
Yes, which is why you shouldn't compare the two.
Um, why not (your analogy sucks, BTW)? If the backround radiation is more damaging/higher power than what cell phones produce, than we can probably ignore the cell phones. There isn't any solid evidence for cell phones causing cancer, nor is there a reasonable mechanism by which low-level non-ionizing radiation could cause cancer. Until somebody comes up with a well-done study showing a strong correlation, I won't worry.
Risk analysis involves not only the odds of an incident, but the loss per incident. The odds of cell-phone related cancers may seem, based on available data, to be low, but a brain tumor loses real big.
A hundred or so people die every year by having their beds collapse on them or through some other mechanical failure while sleeping. Nobody stresses about that, but death is about the biggest loss you can take (and what a way to go). Once the odds of dying (over your lifetime) from a particular cause drop below 1 in 10,000, it's probably not going to worry you, especially since there are better things to stress about. Keep risks in perspective.
Say what you want, but nobody needs a cell phone,
:-)
Say what I want? OK, you're an arrogant prick for thinking you know other people's needs better than they do. That feels much better, thank you.
Your car breaks down on a remote road. Nobody is driving by. It's cold. You need a cell phone to call for help. A lot of people get phones to keep in their cars for emergency situations.
You could just as easily say nobody needs a phone, either. In some sense, all you really need is food and shelter, but that doesn't make all of modern civilization bad. I'd say you're a serious luddite, and are suffering from BYRS (Bourgeois Yuppie Resentment Syndrome).
I happen to have a cell phone instead of a regular phone, because it's about the same cost as a land line, and is more convenient. Radiation risks? Ha! I'm a physics student. I laugh at your 0.5 watts of non-ionizing radiation. If I have anything to worry about, it's working at the local particle accelerator for 4 months next summer.
Rodent studies are essentially useless. The human skull is much thicker than that of a rat, and so the amount of radiation transmitted is different. Also, rats don't live nearly as long as humans. Brain tumours that take 10 - 15 years to develop in humans are obviously going to behave differently (if they happen at all) in rodents. You could try to correct for all this, but then you're really getting onto thin ice...
Besides, what causes cancer in rats doesn't necessarily cause cancer in humans. I remember hearing about a study of 226 known rodent carcinogens. Each substance was tested on both rats and mice. Something like 96 were carcinogenic in mice but not in rats, and 50-odd were carcinogenic in rats but not mice. Kinda makes you wonder if rodent studies have any relevancy to humans.
You could also strap phones to monkey heads, but you'd probably run into a lot of trouble there, and it would still take 10 - 15 years. You can't increase power levels to "speed up" the tests or "amplify" the effect because, at some threshold, you start running into significant heating effects that simply aren't an issue at lower levels.
The study of 891 people did find a slightly increased risk for a rare type of brain cancer, but the researchers said it was not statistically significant.
:-). Science journalists should be required to take stats courses in journalism school.
Why the hell does the media report "effects" that aren't statistically significant? A study also has a 50% chance of finding a non-significant correlation between cell phone use and below-average penis size (assuming penis size and cell phone use are unrelated--if they are related, YMMV). This is just alarmism (kinda like my use of bolding above
"Since most solid tumors take 10 to 15 years to develop, it is probably too soon to see an effect"
If you did a study of the effect of smoking on people who have only been smoking for three years, it would be almost impossible for scientists to prove that smoking is harmful [snip] The same could apply to cell phones.
I am not an oncologist, but what you are saying sounds quite reasonable. Given that it takes 10 - 15 years for cancer to develop, any studies that do find a correlation between cell phone usage must be crap, since cell phones haven't been around that long. Now, since there's no evidence that cell phones are carcinogenic (how could there be if cancer takes longer to develop than cell phones have been around), why are we worrying?
Cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation at lower power levels. Compare this to the natural radioactivity and cosmic radiation which you're constantly exposed to (which is certainly ionizing). Now, without any reliable evidence to suggest a significant risk, why should we be concerned about cell phones? I think this whole scare has stemmed out of BYRS (Bourgeois Yuppie Resentment Syndrome), and not science.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here...
>open mailbox
You find a letter inside.
>read letter
...
Ah, those were the days.
Close only counts in horseshoes and thermonuclear warfare. When you're dealing with unhardened civilian targets and nuclear weapons, it doesn't matter if you're 5 metres or 500 metres off. Inertial guidance is probably good enough, let alone current civilian GPS.
"Gee, good thing that ICBM didn't have GPS. If it had been any closer, it would have hit and killed us... Why am I glowing?"
"Gosh, I'm glad that Anthrax bomb landed in Ned's backyard instead of mine. I wonder which way the wind is blowing..."
GPS actually would be useful for terrorist cruise missiles, but nobody else (other than our allies) really has the technology for that. On the other hand, good GPS could allow for us to finally realize the fantasy of flying cars, since it would be good enough for automatic landing...
...by darthpenguin. In another scientific breakthrough, researchers have discovered that darthpenguin is capable of doing thousands of calories of work while only taking in 600-800 calories.
"We believe he's some form of biological perpetual motion machine. We have already filed a patent." said lead scientist Dr. Benjamin Schwartz.
According to Dr. B.S., darthpenguin can eat less food than what all normal adults require for minimal subsistence living, and still be able to perform strenuous physical activity, all without losing weight.
"This is truly remarkable. We intend to harnass him to a giant hampster wheel and use him to solve the world's energy problems. He only produces a minute amount of methane and carbon dioxide a day." another scientist was heard to say.
Do you want to take the performance hit for indexing while you're using the computer (BeOS) or while you're not (MacOS)? There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.
What they're saying is wrong. Do consumers really care about those kinds of details (difference between MacOS and BeOS)? No. It's just techno-FUD.
Also, if BeOS stores the info in each file, how can it be true that you don't have to iterate through all the files to find something? There has to be some external data structure. Whether you call it a file or something else is just symantics.
Because BFS queries don't have to iterate over every file like Mac, Windows, or Linux queries do, search results would be instantaneous.
The MacOS has had index-based searching for years. Just now, it took me all of 5 seconds to search the contents of over 3 GB of files on my Mac for a certain keyword. I don't have a particularly fast system, either.
The whole basis for using Be for this seems to be that it's a "multimedia" OS, whatever that means, and that they have almost no other markets, so they will have to give all their attention to this one.
Why not just get one of those 750 GHz CPUs and run PlayStation II, DreamCast, GameCube, and XBox emulators? :-)
Really, PCs are more versatile. Why bother with consoles?
So what if Aqua is NeXT? Apple bought NeXT, so it owns their IP, too.
Apple lost their lawsuit with Microsoft because Apple had already licensed some of their GUI and related technology to Microsoft, and the court found that, in light of the agreement, Microsoft didn't infringe on Apple's copyrights, patents, and trade dress.
These themes do, howerver, infringe on Apple's trade dress, and Apple has a legal obligation to do something about them or lose its legal protection.
Please, please, please, could someone explain to us all the differences between patents, copyright, trademarks, trade dress, and other forms of intellectual property protection. Nobody here seems to get it.
Apple lost their suit against Microsoft, because Apple had already licensed some of their GUI and related technology to Microsoft, and the court found that the cross-over between Windows and MacOS was within the scope of this licensing agreement. Had Apple not licensed any technology to Microsoft, the outcome might have been much different. AFAIK, Apple has not licensed Aqua to anyone in Linux land.
Under trademark law, Apple is required to go after anyone infringing on its trade dress, or risk losing legal protection. Some of those theme developers might have been able to get Apple to license Aqua to them for free, but I can see why Apple would be reluctant to do so, considering how it got burned last time (with Microsoft)...
Please don't confuse trademark/trade dress with patents or copyrights. IANAL, so YMMV.
And then, you can turn the RBL off. Victims of Censorware can't turn it off because they aren't allowed to do so.
Only if you happen to be the head sys-admin for your ISP... If my ISP subscribes to MAPS, I might never even know that my content was being filtered, let alone have any control over it.
What I don't understand is why anybody is using MAPS for anything other than their mail server. I used to do IS at a software company, and we set up our mail server to reject mail from IPs on the RBL. Other than that, we didn't use RBL. The purpose of RBL is blocking spam, so why should we use it to block anything other than SMTP?
I'm getting to the state where I'm ashamed to be British.
:-)
From what I understand, you have to pay by the minute for local phone calls. You also have to get a license just to have a TV. Then there's all that insanity with the government being able to force you to give up your crypto keys (check out RubberHose--they may be able to help with that). Now your DSL is getting screwed.
I can see why you'd be ashamed. From the geek standpoint, Britain is a barbaric country.
With disposable credit cards, you have to go to the bank/AmEx, get the number, then go back to the store... Too much trouble. Also, the store can still rip you off for the difference between the cost of the item, and the credit limit.
If Digital Cheques were integrated into browsers, it would be as easy or easier for customers than credit cards are now.
Configure your payment system to do realtime auth so you don't need to batch cc numbers for later capture. Thus the cc number lives on your site for only a few seconds.
If your system is cracked, what's to stop Mr. 1337 hAx0r from putting a sniffer or something like that on your network, then returning in a month to harvest the many credit card numbers? Sure, it's slightly more work for them, in that they have to make two visits instead of one, but any script kiddie can install a root kit to cover his tracks in just a few minutes.
The whole idea of using credit card numbers for online transactions is flawed. Why not have the purchaser write a "digital cheque" and sign it with his private key? The merchant could then present the cheque to a bank to verify that funds were available. Voila! Now, even unscrupulous merchants can't rip you off.
This insanity has got to stop, and it falls on us geeks to do something.
Your average citizen doesn't realize how software patents affect them (and will affect them). All they see is higher prices and less innovation, but they don't know why.
Write to your elected representatives, to industry leaders, and to news organizations. We need to make people aware of how patents are stifling innovation instead of rewarding it. If you're too lazy to do any of that, please please please at least join EFF. They even have student rates.
A recent study (read it in a newspaper, I think L.A. Times but unsure) shows a small $80 per year tax on all tax payers would go a long way to solving the United States poverty siuation.
If you took all the money that the US currently spends on social programs, and just GAVE it to poor people, there wouldn't be a single person left in America below the poverty line. So why is there still poverty?
1. Government doesn't do anything efficiently.
2. Poverty is more than just not having money; thus, throwing money at poverty won't necessarily solve the problem.
That said, if I invent some whizbang widget, IPO and make G$, and I donate millions to charity (or billions, in Bill Gates's case), why shouldn't I splurge a little on myself? What's the point if I can't?
For all you neo-communist whiners out there, every super-rich tech CEO is doing far more to help solve poverty than you are, just by paying their taxes. Most of them also donate more to charity in a year than you do in your life.
Finally, these CEOs have created an entire industry (which probably employs hundreds of slashdot-reading techies like us)--the high-end high-tech installer/system designer industry. The next best thing to having one of these setups has got to be building one...
Actually, EA Sports (a big player in the Sports Games field) is located in Vancouver, Canada.
:-)
I remember hearing a while ago how Japanese companies are buying all the American companies. But guess who's buying the Japanese companies? The British.
The Australians dominated the Olympics. The British are taking over the corporate world. The Canadians are plotting a military assault. The Commonwealth will rise again!