I don't think NASA would put Cassini into any significant danger, considering that the probe is still doing a lot of good work.
The video on the JPL site explains that at the altitude at which they're passing through the plume, the only particles are micron-sized and don't threaten the craft at all. Larger particles can't get up that high.
Yeah, I get those Amazon ads all the time and am surprised that no one among the author, interviewees, NYT editor,/. editor and submitter saw this topic and immediately thought "Amazon!"
Anyway, while it freaked me out too the first (and still kind of does) it's not like they know anything that any other retailer with cookies doesn't know. It seems like unnecessarily off-putting advertising though.
Why do you feel that the DMCA would be irrelevant here? Reverse engineering could absolutely be prohibited under the DMCA, and this case would not seem to fit under the exemptions.
This case has nothing to do with the DMCA in the first place. (See iCEBaLM's comment.) Whether or not the exemptions apply is irrelevant, although the link you gave gives a completely dishonest picture of what the exemptions are.
And given that Apple does not by any conceivable stretch have a monopoly position in telephones, I don't see why antitrust regulators would have any say in the matter. (In the US, anyway. The EU has that Elliot Spitzer-ish woman running wild in their antitrust group, so all bets are off there, at least until some Spitzer-ish misfortune befalls her.)
The point is that while water and electricity are crucial to a business, and providing them more efficiently helps the bottom line, there's no way for a business to get a significant strategic advantage from having hotter hot water*. The argument being made is that improvements in IT *can* give you such an advantage. (Of course, there's that guy from Harvard who periodically gets linked here arguing the opposite -- I have no idea.)
* Yes, there might exist businesses that might benefit significantly from hotter hot water. Please spare me your nerdly nitpicking.
I'm minutes away from lunch, and am now suddenly craving Cool Ranch Doritos. So Frito-Lay (or whoever makes those things) is already seeing some return on their investment in this publicity stunt -- I expect the astronomers to discover something amazing in return!
If I disclose information to you, your power with respect to me increases. One way to address this power imbalance is for you to similarly disclose information to me. We both have less privacy, but the balance of power is maintained. But this mechanism fails utterly if you and I have different power levels to begin with.
That aside, who says the goal of privacy is to have power over people? If I hit you in the head with a brick and you hit me in the head with a rock, "the balance of power is maintained" but it seems like a suboptimal solution.
property in the layman terms of "it has an owner" as in the "copyright owner" but not "property" in the correct technical sense of the word.
1) I'm not sure who you think determines "in the correct technical sense of the word" for those who aren't Stallman Zombies. For most of us, having an "owner" and being "property" are the same thing. Certainly a copyright or patent is just as much "property" as a bond or a mortgage is.
2) Even if one were to concede 1), the fact remains that the guy holding forth on what is and isn't "intellectual" doesn't even know what "intellectual property" refers to.
The main reason why I have trouble with the "property" part isn't just the fact that it leads people to try to pretend it's just like tangible property, but because it automatically biases how people think about the concept. As I've written before, the very purpose of "property" and "property rights" was to better manage allocation of scarce resources...So, the entire rationale for "property rights" disappears.
I don't understand why this is so difficult for you idiots to comprehend. The "property" around that MP3 you're warezing isn't the file itself; it's the *copyright*, which can not be duplicated and which is scarce. Now, you may not think such a thing *should* exist in order to be property and Richard Stallman may have told you that it's thoughtcrime to think such a thing, but the fact is that in our legal system it *is* property. All this sophistry about scarcity is completely missing the point.
Anyway, the point is that Excel is reasonably well set up for doing the kind of math you need to do when making computer graphics and has vector output capabilities.
The novelty here isn't the computation, it's the use of the spreadsheet grid as a display.
(At least, if I'm understanding correctly despite giving up after three molasses-slow pages. Since when does Gamasutra get Slashdotted?)
Indeed. DVD sales in 2007 were down from 2006, and DVDs are where all the margin on motion pictures is.
No problem. Tomorrow we'll get the story about how DVD sales are down because of the MAFIAA's bullying of customers, terrible movies no one wants to see and rapidly growing demand for Creative Commons-licensed Ogg Theora videos.
Remarkably, the same conclusion is reached whenever sales go up or go down -- you don't think that when movie revenues were off in 2006 there was a story about how "Gee, maybe we'd better stop stealing movies!"?
He read about it here and, yeah, it's that stupid. The submitter seems to have heard of "property tax" and concluded that all property is taxed, doesn't know that patents have renewal fees, and concocted a theory around that.
What's really sad is that when we talk about the head of SCO or Microsoft, we require much more evil before we start throwing rocks....
I think you mean "throwing chairs"...
Anyway, putting aside your odd complaint that people here don't hate SCO and Microsoft with sufficient mindlessness and insanity, it should be completely clear that the GP wasn't comparing Wales to Hitler. If nothing else, the "Not that I'm equating Wales with Hitler..." should have clarified that.
1) In the sidebar on that page is "S.F. nonprofit fires CFO over missing $3.6 million", so a $1300 dinner tab and an angry ex-mistress seem relatively tame by comparison.
2) Even by blog standards, "All's Wool that Ends Wool" is a pretty awful name.
I don't understand why Wired insists on playing along with Potter's pretense of being an "unemployed psychologist". He's a PhD candidate in machine learning, has a masters in operations research, is ex-IBM and Pricewaterhouse, runs a VC firm -- he has plenty of quantitative and computational training and experience, probably more than most of the contestants.
Basically, Leung lost his job, posted on his blog that he was looking, someone at Sun read it and they made him an offer. I don't think this whole thing is nearly as elaborately crafted a strategy as people are making out.
There was a time when Tcl/Tk was the least excruciating way of making a simple GUI application on Unix. Once decent toolkits (and, eventually, excellent toolkits) became available, Tcl's main selling point was lost.
As well, while they do actually sell some items the majority of the "store" is simply to open drawers filled with appropriate bits (such as the artificial beards with a big mess of hair-like substance inside), read the amusing signs, and promote writing.
My understanding is that the location is zoned for business, and that their education program at that site wouldn't be legal if they didn't also operate the "store".
The real problem is people who board ahead of the current row that is boarding, like elite and first class passengers. These people interrupt traffic by stopping at row 10 to put their two oversized carry-ons into the upper bin, then fuss and fidget and take forever to get seated while a huge line of people waits to get past them to row 29.
In my experience, it's not the first class passengers (who are mostly heavy travelers on free upgrades) and certainly not the mileage elite who do that. It's the goofballs getting on a plane for the first time, boarding 20 rows ahead of when they're supposed to and trying to stuff an accordion and a cooked ham into the overhead bin.
I'll get modded troll, but I lay much of this at Microsoft's feet.
Truly, your courage is an inspiration to us all!
In fact, though, I can tell you that in the pre-Windows days, electricity had outages, television had outages, telephone service had outages, gas service had outages... For the same reason we have them today -- people aren't willing to accept the economic and aesthetic costs of providing those services at the level of reliability you and the author are demanding.
Incidentally, is it most people's experience that "We're so used [sic] cable and satellite television reception problems that we don't even notice them anymore"? There were some glitches in a broadcast of Zoolander on TBS last weekend, which I'll admit is cause for complaint. (Especially since one wiped out "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!") But on the whole, I can't say I've seen substantial problems when there wasn't a blizzard or hurricane, and if I'm forced to to stop watching TV for an hour or two, it's not the end of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
The video on the JPL site explains that at the altitude at which they're passing through the plume, the only particles are micron-sized and don't threaten the craft at all. Larger particles can't get up that high.
I'm not sure if that's a typo or a pun...
Incidentally, while TFA is interesting, the summary here is a mix of inaccurate and incoherent.
Anyway, while it freaked me out too the first (and still kind of does) it's not like they know anything that any other retailer with cookies doesn't know. It seems like unnecessarily off-putting advertising though.
This case has nothing to do with the DMCA in the first place. (See iCEBaLM's comment.) Whether or not the exemptions apply is irrelevant, although the link you gave gives a completely dishonest picture of what the exemptions are.
Yes, TFA's whole point is that IT shouldn't be treated as a utility!
And given that Apple does not by any conceivable stretch have a monopoly position in telephones, I don't see why antitrust regulators would have any say in the matter. (In the US, anyway. The EU has that Elliot Spitzer-ish woman running wild in their antitrust group, so all bets are off there, at least until some Spitzer-ish misfortune befalls her.)
* Yes, there might exist businesses that might benefit significantly from hotter hot water. Please spare me your nerdly nitpicking.
I'm minutes away from lunch, and am now suddenly craving Cool Ranch Doritos. So Frito-Lay (or whoever makes those things) is already seeing some return on their investment in this publicity stunt -- I expect the astronomers to discover something amazing in return!
That aside, who says the goal of privacy is to have power over people? If I hit you in the head with a brick and you hit me in the head with a rock, "the balance of power is maintained" but it seems like a suboptimal solution.
1) I'm not sure who you think determines "in the correct technical sense of the word" for those who aren't Stallman Zombies. For most of us, having an "owner" and being "property" are the same thing. Certainly a copyright or patent is just as much "property" as a bond or a mortgage is.
2) Even if one were to concede 1), the fact remains that the guy holding forth on what is and isn't "intellectual" doesn't even know what "intellectual property" refers to.
I don't understand why this is so difficult for you idiots to comprehend. The "property" around that MP3 you're warezing isn't the file itself; it's the *copyright*, which can not be duplicated and which is scarce. Now, you may not think such a thing *should* exist in order to be property and Richard Stallman may have told you that it's thoughtcrime to think such a thing, but the fact is that in our legal system it *is* property. All this sophistry about scarcity is completely missing the point.
The novelty here isn't the computation, it's the use of the spreadsheet grid as a display.
(At least, if I'm understanding correctly despite giving up after three molasses-slow pages. Since when does Gamasutra get Slashdotted?)
No problem. Tomorrow we'll get the story about how DVD sales are down because of the MAFIAA's bullying of customers, terrible movies no one wants to see and rapidly growing demand for Creative Commons-licensed Ogg Theora videos.
Remarkably, the same conclusion is reached whenever sales go up or go down -- you don't think that when movie revenues were off in 2006 there was a story about how "Gee, maybe we'd better stop stealing movies!"?
He read about it here and, yeah, it's that stupid. The submitter seems to have heard of "property tax" and concluded that all property is taxed, doesn't know that patents have renewal fees, and concocted a theory around that.
I think you mean "throwing chairs"...
Anyway, putting aside your odd complaint that people here don't hate SCO and Microsoft with sufficient mindlessness and insanity, it should be completely clear that the GP wasn't comparing Wales to Hitler. If nothing else, the "Not that I'm equating Wales with Hitler..." should have clarified that.
1) In the sidebar on that page is "S.F. nonprofit fires CFO over missing $3.6 million", so a $1300 dinner tab and an angry ex-mistress seem relatively tame by comparison.
2) Even by blog standards, "All's Wool that Ends Wool" is a pretty awful name.
I don't understand why Wired insists on playing along with Potter's pretense of being an "unemployed psychologist". He's a PhD candidate in machine learning, has a masters in operations research, is ex-IBM and Pricewaterhouse, runs a VC firm -- he has plenty of quantitative and computational training and experience, probably more than most of the contestants.
Basically, Leung lost his job, posted on his blog that he was looking, someone at Sun read it and they made him an offer. I don't think this whole thing is nearly as elaborately crafted a strategy as people are making out.
There was a time when Tcl/Tk was the least excruciating way of making a simple GUI application on Unix. Once decent toolkits (and, eventually, excellent toolkits) became available, Tcl's main selling point was lost.
That this is at least the second dupe of this story might be why it's so fresh in your memory...
My understanding is that the location is zoned for business, and that their education program at that site wouldn't be legal if they didn't also operate the "store".
In my experience, it's not the first class passengers (who are mostly heavy travelers on free upgrades) and certainly not the mileage elite who do that. It's the goofballs getting on a plane for the first time, boarding 20 rows ahead of when they're supposed to and trying to stuff an accordion and a cooked ham into the overhead bin.
Truly, your courage is an inspiration to us all!
In fact, though, I can tell you that in the pre-Windows days, electricity had outages, television had outages, telephone service had outages, gas service had outages... For the same reason we have them today -- people aren't willing to accept the economic and aesthetic costs of providing those services at the level of reliability you and the author are demanding.
Incidentally, is it most people's experience that "We're so used [sic] cable and satellite television reception problems that we don't even notice them anymore"? There were some glitches in a broadcast of Zoolander on TBS last weekend, which I'll admit is cause for complaint. (Especially since one wiped out "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!") But on the whole, I can't say I've seen substantial problems when there wasn't a blizzard or hurricane, and if I'm forced to to stop watching TV for an hour or two, it's not the end of the world.
When it's a question of antitrust law? Yeah, it pretty much is.
In any case, I'm not sure what "the kind of retaliation Microsoft has gotten" the submitter has in mind. What "retaliation"?