The only person who should have the right to decide what "too many rewards" are for a work is the copyright/patent holder. Otherwise we're talking about censorship and government control of industry.
Actually, the US Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power to give certain exclusive rights to copyright/patent holders for a limited amount of time, in order to advance the arts and sciences. The "letter of the Consitution", thus, is that it's the government that bestows these very artificial rights, for the good of society. That implies that the founders denied any "natural right" to copyright, but intended it as a limited system for society's benefit, not for the benefit of the copyright holder.
The relevant bit is section 8, clause 8:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
IP law is NOT fine. Measured against the US Constitution and the intentions of the founders, it is severely broken and dysfunctional. "Limited" is rapidly becoming "unlimited" (95 years?!) and "promote the progress" is becoming "secure perpetual revenue streams for corporations".
The iPod wheel does require more finger movement than any possible replacement, but that extra effort is traded for time and control. It's faster than any possible replacement, and offers better control, too.
A wheel on its edge would work better than buttons, and require a smaller range of motion (not necessarily less motion total) than the scroll wheel. But it has it's own limitation - the need to stay motionless when not being moved. A sideways wheel, by its nature, must be mechanical. To keep it from moving freely as you jiggle your iPod, it must either have reasonably strong resistance, or a catching mechanism. My scroll wheel mouse has a series of catches. The problem is that those catches quantize its movement. That's less than ideal for scrolling windows - you can only scroll a line at a time, never smoothly - although it would be OK for scrolling a text list. But if you want to scroll fast, you need to go through an awful lot of those catches. The motion is small but highly repetetive, and not very efficient - each motion can only turn the wheel by as much of the wheel as is protruding. That's almost always less than half a rotation. Even if it's got 100 catches per rotation, that means 20 longish finger twiches to get to the end of your 1000 songs - versus two sweeps of the iPod scroll wheel.
You could make the motion smooth, and have a little magnet or something that provides resistance so you don't get unwanted movement. You could even use the magnet to provide acceleration, so you get much faster scrolling with faster movement. And you even make it free-spinning with a strong enough push. But that would require an awfully sensitive and complex mechanical device, which would probably be a lot more expensive and easier to break than a tiny round trackpad with solid-state controls.
Sideways wheels also have to protrude from the device (if it doesn't protrude, how do you move it?). That ruins the smooth contours and makes it more awkward to put the device into a case, for example.
Sticks hardly seem ideal, either. Again, it has to protrude from the device, and to be useful it would have to protrude a LOT. You could store it flush, but then it only goes in one direction. Unless you store it flush sideways, but then you have to waste the time to "deploy" it every time you want to scroll. That'd seem a real pain to me. A stick would have to be fairly long to provide both fine control and smooth acceleration. Obviously, either extreme of movement (up or down) would provide the fastest scrolling - and it ought to be awfully fast, to quickly get to the bottom of that 1000 song list. The smallest movement would scroll just one element. But the smallest movement can't be too small, or it becomes hard to do without overshooting. But you still want some gradations between "one per touch" and "to the bottom in a second". You can design it so that anything up to, say, half-way moves it one element, while the far half of the movement spectrum gradually increases the speed of scrolling up to the maximum. But that requires a fairly long stick. Unless you ignore how far the stick moves, and say that a brief touch moves it one, and the longer you hold it the faster it goes. But then it's just like a button, with all the problems of button scrolls.
I can't believe I've written this much about the frikin iPod scroll wheel. I just think it's such a fabulously elegant peice of functional engineering, regardless of how novel it really is. And I consider my 3G wheel perfect; I never tried a 1G iPod.
I love the wheel. Really, how else are you going to navigate down a list with hundreds or thousands of elements? A "down one screen button"? Twenty lines per screen, you'd have to push it 50 times to get to the bottom. Or 25 to get the middle, if you add a "to the bottom" button, but now you have four buttons (up, down, top, bottom) instead of the wheel. Two "scroll buttons"? Not too bad, but it would have to be accelerated as a function how long you hold it down, but then you have the awkward issues of 1. having to wait until the acceleration kicks in and 2. having poor access to elements located right at the point where the acceleration kicks in. Scroll buttons sprout like weeds on scientific instruments, and I never found them pleasant to use.
The scroll wheel, OTOH, is simple, elegant, and perfectly functional. It accelerates as a function of how fast your finger moves around it. So with slow, small motions you get incredibly fine control; while fast, sweeping motions can scroll through the entire 1000-element list in a second. When you get near your destination, your finger slows and super-fine control is instantly returned. It's all so smooth it just feels totally natural. And having the "select" button in the middle is a no-brainer. Your thumb goes from wheel to button and back without hesitation.
When I first heard about it, I was skeptical about the scroll wheel (I never liked them on mice), but Apple's implementation is just perfect; it would be ideal for any application where you need to navigate a huge list of options.
You misunderstood the PP, although in a rather revealing way. The parent meant that in Windows (and Linux) you need to remember which modifier key goes with which shortcuts. Some use Alt, some use Control, some use no modifier at all. And not all apps allow the standard shortcuts. I'm especially bugged by terminal emulators in Linux, which can't use the standard copy-paste shortcuts because Control is reserved for in-terminal use.
In OS X, all shortcuts use Command. Period. Well, not "Period", just Command. So even in Terminal, no problems. Control is only for bringing up contextual menus. You cut the stuff you need to memorize by a factor of two or three. Yeah, it's not such a big deal, but little deals add up. Now if only I can remember if "Select All" in Linux-Firefox is Control-A or Alt-A? Damn.
But I feel compelled to point out that in trying to defend Robert Novak's publishing of the name of a CIA official, you're relying on Robert Novak to say that RObert Novak thinks her occupation was common knowledge among Robert Novak's social circle, and that Robert Novak talked to some unnamed source at the CIA who told Robert Novak that she was an analyst, not an operative. Also, Robert Novak insists that Robert Novak wasn't the target of a planned leak. I guess Robert Novak thought it was just a slip of the toungue, and who was Robert Novak to know better before letting Robert Novak publish?
If you're going to defend a position, you really ought not use a columnist's column to defend a previous column by the same columnist.
As for the bit about the CIA not objecting...does George Tenet really strike you as a fiercely independent director who was always looking out for the good of his people? Not exactly. He was a lapdog, and ever since 9/11 he knew he served at the pleasure of the White House. He did their bidding in the run-up to the war ("slam dunk", indeed) and then agreed to resign and let his agency fall on the sword of the intelligence and 9/11 commissions. If the White House ordered that link, there is zero chance he would hae batted an eye.
But then, that would be admitting the president was right all along.
You're completely missing the point, in exactly the way I was lampooning in the PP. It doesn't matter if the President was right or wrong. Either way, someone in his inner circle committed a crime by leaking the name of a CIA operative. If Joe Wilson lied, fine - investigate it, and if by lying he committed a crime, prosecute him. But that in no way excuses the honest-to-god crime of treason that was committed by someone in the administration. Two wrongs don't make a right - just two wrongs that ought to both be prosecuted.
Let's use an analogy. You go on the local cable access channel and claim on the air that I sleep with goats, and that you have pictures to prove it. I, in turn, go to your house and kill you. I then show that you, in fact, had no such pictures, and in your diary that I found while ransacking your house, you admit that you knew you were lying on the air. Does proving that you're a liar excuse my killing you? Why do I need to use such an idiotic example to illustrate that the President of the United States is not above the law?
(Regarding the other respondants) Don't you see, you silly liberal, that two wrongs make a right? That the end justifies the means? [waves hand] There was no treason here. [waves hand again] No disclosure of a covert CIA operative. We think Joe Wilson was wrong, and that's all that matters. Heck, we probably should have arranged a helicopter accident for him, and all we did was out his wife. He should be grateful that we're so gracious. Silly liberals. I'll bet that next you're going to claim that the President isn't above the law...
It is a well known fact that the UI in Cocoa apps are a little sluggish
At least some of that sluggishness is by design. I used to be rather frustrated at the glacially slow appearance and disappearance of sheets in OSX. It was most apparent when opening or saving files, and when using a certain spreadsheet that relies on sheets in all of its wizards. Just that one element made the whole UI feel slow, especially compared to Windows. Until I discovered that the speed of sheets is set by a system variable, which I immediately cut by three-quarters. Presto! Lightning-quick sheets, and a much-happier me.
So I think much of the perceived slowness of OSX's UI has nothing at all to do with how fast the machine is actually capable of performing the pretty functions, even on rather humble hardware (like my oldish iBook).
That and the "action-on-release" instead of "action-on-click" thing. It may make the UI feel less "snappy", since all actions are delayed by however long it takes you to take your finger off the mouse button, but it certainly makes for a more pleasant experience.
However, the correct phrase is not "chomping at the bit." I believe it is "champing at the bit."
As long as I'm not the only pedant...
Not only is it spelled wrong, but it really doesn't belong there at all. "Champing at the bit" means you're so eager to do/see something, you just can't wait...it has a positive connotation. Like, "I'm champing at the bit to get my hands on a copy of Tiger!" or "I'm champing at the bit to ski the backside of Blackcomb!"
The article implies a sense of fear and foreboding among admins, like "Oh god, I really don't want to see how badly SP2 is going to futz up all our workstations". They aren't champing at the bit at all...more like spitting it out and refusing to put in back in their mouths.
The real reason they dropped ADC was that they realized there was a limit to how much power you could push through the video card, and the 23" display was right about at that limit. If you check Apple's tech specs, you'll see that the 30" display has a 150W power supply - it simply needs a separate cord and brick. And once you're resigned to having two cables, it makes little sense to nitpick about having three. I like how they've at least bundled them at the monitor end, though.
Erm, right, but it's not exactly that easy. Yes, they'll see the IP of the router or gateway, and they'll be able to identify the establishment or home that hosts the hotspot you used. And then...? The whole point is that there is no IP addy which specifically identifies *you*, as the parent suggested.
Even if you go back to the same spot predictably, they'll effectively need to keep it under 24/7 surveillance, *and* monitor your account in realtime so they know when you log on, *and* be able to pick you out among the dozen people with laptops in that particular coffee house. Assuming you're using a laptop, and not a Palm hidden in your pocket. Assuming you're even actually in the coffee house, and not in a car in the parking lot. And assuming you're directly accessing your account, and not using any proxies.
If you were a little smarter, you'd use a dozen or so access points, or even better, just wardrive for a new one each time. Unless you're threatening to nuke a city, it's unlikely the FBI will devote the manpower to cover the dozen or more access points you've used in the past, many of which could probably be used from the proverbial car-in-the-parking lot for a fleeting moment while you receive or send email. If you're *really* smart, you'll put a proxy or ten between you and your account, making even your general location (city/country) difficult to figure out.
It reaches the point real quick where it's just not worth law enforcement's time, where they would be much better off waiting for you to screw up or following up traditional leads with traditional techniques. Like, who's the check supposed to be made out to?
As long as he was careful to only check that email account from public hotspots, the bug wouldn't report a useful IP address. And he'd be dumb to check the account from home anyway, since the authorities could just get the email provider's logs to see where the account was logged into from.
Since the parent's talking about logging on anonymously to unsecured public wifi hotspots, I assume you mean MAC address, not IP address. And even that you can change easily enough each time you use a hotspot.
Knowing that the emails were sent by "192.168.x.x" isn't going to help the cops much.
Unfortunately for the little guy, his patent is owned by the major university that employs him. He tries to make himself sound philanthropical, "giving" his patent rights to the school, but most of the money gained by any realization of the technology would have belonged to the school in any event.
In fact, the nutritional information states that there are 8 grams of fat per 43 gram serving(one half packet.) That's 18.6% fat. Sure, it's high, but what did you expect from fried noodles?
But fat has more than twice the calorie density as carbs, 9 cal per gram vs. 4 cal per gram. So the half-package serving has 140 calories from carbs (35*4) and 72 calories from fat (8*9). One-third of its calories are from fat, and that's supposed to be a "carb base"? If you throw oil-fried veggies on top of it, you're probably looking at 50% calories from fat altogether (especially eggplant, it really soaks up the oil).
And "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" is just about the worst form of fat you can stick in your mouth. That's code for "lots of saturated and trans fats that will give you heart disease". So even if you're being good and cooking the veggies in canola or olive oil, that awful grease the noodles were fried in is still going to clog up your arteries.
Running a studio environment with 20 or more Macs does cost money to keep everything working smoothly. It may be only an hour here or there, but this can easily balloon your IT support budget to over $10K a year.
Shh...do you want to send the IT profession into a death-spiral? If you say that any louder, companies might get the impression that maybe they don't need to staff a full-time MCSE-qualified IT worker at five to ten times that budget in order to keep a few dozen computers running happy. Maybe they just have to choose their platform more wisely. Goodbye, thousands of IT support jobs.
Except there's already another monopolistic group determined to make an obscene profit on the music sales, who will probably not appreciate being squeezed by MS. But if MS wants to get into a licensing brawl with the RIAA, part of me thinks "go for it".
Shows how much I'm not an EE. I knew of LORAN from the pre-GPS days in my family's sailboat, but figured it was some sort of line-of-sight radio triangulation system with dozens of transmitters up and down the coast. That's really pretty cool that, in reality, you can cover an entire seaboard with three of four stations. But it still seems conceptually odd that a radio wave can reliably propagate around the curvature of the earth for a good two thousand miles. Sort of a continuous, circular diffraction, I guess.
I guess it makes sense to put transmitters in the middle of nowhere, considering how powerful they must be. George definitely qualifies as the middle of nowhere, though I wonder if the strong EM pulses make any contribution to the antics of Gorge-goers.
I dunno, this kind of simple encryption doesn't seem too bad. Aside from social engineering, your two main worries are remote brute-force attacks and local unauthorized logins, right? The simple encryption makes any kind of brute-force dictionary attack very unlikely to succeed. Meanwhile, even with the chart in front of them, no one can just walk up and log on to his terminal. It's unlikely an attacker will sit in his chair for an hour and work out possible passwords.
The only potential problem is if someone walks up to his desk, swipes or photocopies the chart, then uses the code in a remote brute-force attempt (assuming he also knows the poster's log-in). Again, doesn't seem likely, and is anyway solved by the poster printing out a new chart once a month - much more painless for him than picking out a new password.
We claim to be one of the most scientifically advanced countries in the world, but we can't adopt a useful standard that the _rest_ of the scientific community uses.
That's a little over-the-top. The US scientific community obviously does use metric. Certainly in the life sciences, where I work, it has for a long time. It's only the popular mind that metric has had a hard time penetrating, and probably for some good reasons. Customary units are evenly divisible by more numbers and correspond to natural/body measurements, making them easier to visualize. Ease of interconverting units and calculating orders of magnitude doesn't matter much when you're measuring a couch, or cutting a string into thirds.
Why, the Roman people elected Octavian. Or at least, the Senate. The year traditionally given for the start of his imperial reign, 27BC, was actually the year he was elected Consul by the Senate. Yeah, the Senate was pretty corrupt by then, but probably no more than our own, and his election was at least as legitimate as Hitler's two millennia later.
Oh right, Hitler was elected, too. Maybe the lesson is to keep your eyes open for "imperial creep". Not all tyrants are considerate enough to look like Darth Vader.
Even Hitler tried to legitimize his power before dissolving democracy completely.
Funny thing, it wasn't until 1944 that Hitler finally assumed power above the law. 1944. Sure, democracy had pretty well eroded by then, but right up until almost the end, even Hitler pretended to respect the rule of law. I think the case the brought it to a head was about denying fired generals their lawful pensions.
Another funny thing, you could argue that modern US presidents, and especially this one, have more sweeping powers than Augustus Ceasar did. Augustus was CINC of the Roman armed forces (which were prohibited from being deployed in Italy), could propose but not enact legislation, and had personal control only over the frontier provinces, through military governors. Sound familiar?
After seeing your comment history, you're obviously no troll. Sorry about that. But there are still no frogs in this story, and I know I saw this exact comment last week, although maybe not from you...? Puzzling.
No, according to the Bible, works ("living a good life" in your words) don't count, no matter how great and wonderful you think you're being. Faith, and only faith gets the job done.
Bollocks. According to your sect, certainly, but that's not the only or the most accepted way to interpret the NT. How you live your life, even how you express your faith, clearly counted to Jesus. That's why it was harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. And why he constantly railed on the public showmanship of the Pharisees. And why he noted the great significance of the old beggar's gift of two pennies. And why he held up the despisd Samaritan as a model to be emulated. And on, and on, and on.
Personally, I think your point of view is dangerous, for two reasons. First, it gives you license to see all non-believers as heathens or even sub-humans. "They ain't going to heaven no mstter what, anyway, so I must be a better person than them." Second, it gives you license to behave however you want, so long as you "accept Jesus as your personal savior". I think our current President and many of his hard-right supporters have a bit of that "saved" complex going on. I'm not saying that you're personally a hypocritical, extremist zealot, but your belief system leaves the door wide open for them.
I realize you have the Calvinist loophole to fall back on. This is, if a person behaves badly, then he didn't really accept Jesus, and wasn't saved to begin with. Only those who behave good were saved to begin with. Besides being a logical fallacy, it implies that, since you can't trust a person to himself know whether he's been saved, you can see into God's mind to know for certain who's been saved. Most folks would consider that a bit presumptous for a human.
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The relevant bit is section 8, clause 8:IP law is NOT fine. Measured against the US Constitution and the intentions of the founders, it is severely broken and dysfunctional. "Limited" is rapidly becoming "unlimited" (95 years?!) and "promote the progress" is becoming "secure perpetual revenue streams for corporations".
The iPod wheel does require more finger movement than any possible replacement, but that extra effort is traded for time and control. It's faster than any possible replacement, and offers better control, too.
A wheel on its edge would work better than buttons, and require a smaller range of motion (not necessarily less motion total) than the scroll wheel. But it has it's own limitation - the need to stay motionless when not being moved. A sideways wheel, by its nature, must be mechanical. To keep it from moving freely as you jiggle your iPod, it must either have reasonably strong resistance, or a catching mechanism. My scroll wheel mouse has a series of catches. The problem is that those catches quantize its movement. That's less than ideal for scrolling windows - you can only scroll a line at a time, never smoothly - although it would be OK for scrolling a text list. But if you want to scroll fast, you need to go through an awful lot of those catches. The motion is small but highly repetetive, and not very efficient - each motion can only turn the wheel by as much of the wheel as is protruding. That's almost always less than half a rotation. Even if it's got 100 catches per rotation, that means 20 longish finger twiches to get to the end of your 1000 songs - versus two sweeps of the iPod scroll wheel.
You could make the motion smooth, and have a little magnet or something that provides resistance so you don't get unwanted movement. You could even use the magnet to provide acceleration, so you get much faster scrolling with faster movement. And you even make it free-spinning with a strong enough push. But that would require an awfully sensitive and complex mechanical device, which would probably be a lot more expensive and easier to break than a tiny round trackpad with solid-state controls.
Sideways wheels also have to protrude from the device (if it doesn't protrude, how do you move it?). That ruins the smooth contours and makes it more awkward to put the device into a case, for example.
Sticks hardly seem ideal, either. Again, it has to protrude from the device, and to be useful it would have to protrude a LOT. You could store it flush, but then it only goes in one direction. Unless you store it flush sideways, but then you have to waste the time to "deploy" it every time you want to scroll. That'd seem a real pain to me. A stick would have to be fairly long to provide both fine control and smooth acceleration. Obviously, either extreme of movement (up or down) would provide the fastest scrolling - and it ought to be awfully fast, to quickly get to the bottom of that 1000 song list. The smallest movement would scroll just one element. But the smallest movement can't be too small, or it becomes hard to do without overshooting. But you still want some gradations between "one per touch" and "to the bottom in a second". You can design it so that anything up to, say, half-way moves it one element, while the far half of the movement spectrum gradually increases the speed of scrolling up to the maximum. But that requires a fairly long stick. Unless you ignore how far the stick moves, and say that a brief touch moves it one, and the longer you hold it the faster it goes. But then it's just like a button, with all the problems of button scrolls.
I can't believe I've written this much about the frikin iPod scroll wheel. I just think it's such a fabulously elegant peice of functional engineering, regardless of how novel it really is. And I consider my 3G wheel perfect; I never tried a 1G iPod.
I love the wheel. Really, how else are you going to navigate down a list with hundreds or thousands of elements? A "down one screen button"? Twenty lines per screen, you'd have to push it 50 times to get to the bottom. Or 25 to get the middle, if you add a "to the bottom" button, but now you have four buttons (up, down, top, bottom) instead of the wheel. Two "scroll buttons"? Not too bad, but it would have to be accelerated as a function how long you hold it down, but then you have the awkward issues of 1. having to wait until the acceleration kicks in and 2. having poor access to elements located right at the point where the acceleration kicks in. Scroll buttons sprout like weeds on scientific instruments, and I never found them pleasant to use.
The scroll wheel, OTOH, is simple, elegant, and perfectly functional. It accelerates as a function of how fast your finger moves around it. So with slow, small motions you get incredibly fine control; while fast, sweeping motions can scroll through the entire 1000-element list in a second. When you get near your destination, your finger slows and super-fine control is instantly returned. It's all so smooth it just feels totally natural. And having the "select" button in the middle is a no-brainer. Your thumb goes from wheel to button and back without hesitation.
When I first heard about it, I was skeptical about the scroll wheel (I never liked them on mice), but Apple's implementation is just perfect; it would be ideal for any application where you need to navigate a huge list of options.
You misunderstood the PP, although in a rather revealing way. The parent meant that in Windows (and Linux) you need to remember which modifier key goes with which shortcuts. Some use Alt, some use Control, some use no modifier at all. And not all apps allow the standard shortcuts. I'm especially bugged by terminal emulators in Linux, which can't use the standard copy-paste shortcuts because Control is reserved for in-terminal use.
In OS X, all shortcuts use Command. Period. Well, not "Period", just Command. So even in Terminal, no problems. Control is only for bringing up contextual menus. You cut the stuff you need to memorize by a factor of two or three. Yeah, it's not such a big deal, but little deals add up. Now if only I can remember if "Select All" in Linux-Firefox is Control-A or Alt-A? Damn.
I should just let this die...
But I feel compelled to point out that in trying to defend Robert Novak's publishing of the name of a CIA official, you're relying on Robert Novak to say that RObert Novak thinks her occupation was common knowledge among Robert Novak's social circle, and that Robert Novak talked to some unnamed source at the CIA who told Robert Novak that she was an analyst, not an operative. Also, Robert Novak insists that Robert Novak wasn't the target of a planned leak. I guess Robert Novak thought it was just a slip of the toungue, and who was Robert Novak to know better before letting Robert Novak publish?
If you're going to defend a position, you really ought not use a columnist's column to defend a previous column by the same columnist.
As for the bit about the CIA not objecting...does George Tenet really strike you as a fiercely independent director who was always looking out for the good of his people? Not exactly. He was a lapdog, and ever since 9/11 he knew he served at the pleasure of the White House. He did their bidding in the run-up to the war ("slam dunk", indeed) and then agreed to resign and let his agency fall on the sword of the intelligence and 9/11 commissions. If the White House ordered that link, there is zero chance he would hae batted an eye.
Let's use an analogy. You go on the local cable access channel and claim on the air that I sleep with goats, and that you have pictures to prove it. I, in turn, go to your house and kill you. I then show that you, in fact, had no such pictures, and in your diary that I found while ransacking your house, you admit that you knew you were lying on the air. Does proving that you're a liar excuse my killing you? Why do I need to use such an idiotic example to illustrate that the President of the United States is not above the law?
(Regarding the other respondants)
Don't you see, you silly liberal, that two wrongs make a right? That the end justifies the means? [waves hand] There was no treason here. [waves hand again] No disclosure of a covert CIA operative. We think Joe Wilson was wrong, and that's all that matters. Heck, we probably should have arranged a helicopter accident for him, and all we did was out his wife. He should be grateful that we're so gracious. Silly liberals. I'll bet that next you're going to claim that the President isn't above the law...
So I think much of the perceived slowness of OSX's UI has nothing at all to do with how fast the machine is actually capable of performing the pretty functions, even on rather humble hardware (like my oldish iBook).
That and the "action-on-release" instead of "action-on-click" thing. It may make the UI feel less "snappy", since all actions are delayed by however long it takes you to take your finger off the mouse button, but it certainly makes for a more pleasant experience.
Not only is it spelled wrong, but it really doesn't belong there at all. "Champing at the bit" means you're so eager to do/see something, you just can't wait...it has a positive connotation. Like, "I'm champing at the bit to get my hands on a copy of Tiger!" or "I'm champing at the bit to ski the backside of Blackcomb!"
The article implies a sense of fear and foreboding among admins, like "Oh god, I really don't want to see how badly SP2 is going to futz up all our workstations". They aren't champing at the bit at all...more like spitting it out and refusing to put in back in their mouths.
The real reason they dropped ADC was that they realized there was a limit to how much power you could push through the video card, and the 23" display was right about at that limit. If you check Apple's tech specs, you'll see that the 30" display has a 150W power supply - it simply needs a separate cord and brick. And once you're resigned to having two cables, it makes little sense to nitpick about having three. I like how they've at least bundled them at the monitor end, though.
right-on rumor
Erm, right, but it's not exactly that easy. Yes, they'll see the IP of the router or gateway, and they'll be able to identify the establishment or home that hosts the hotspot you used. And then...? The whole point is that there is no IP addy which specifically identifies *you*, as the parent suggested.
Even if you go back to the same spot predictably, they'll effectively need to keep it under 24/7 surveillance, *and* monitor your account in realtime so they know when you log on, *and* be able to pick you out among the dozen people with laptops in that particular coffee house. Assuming you're using a laptop, and not a Palm hidden in your pocket. Assuming you're even actually in the coffee house, and not in a car in the parking lot. And assuming you're directly accessing your account, and not using any proxies.
If you were a little smarter, you'd use a dozen or so access points, or even better, just wardrive for a new one each time. Unless you're threatening to nuke a city, it's unlikely the FBI will devote the manpower to cover the dozen or more access points you've used in the past, many of which could probably be used from the proverbial car-in-the-parking lot for a fleeting moment while you receive or send email. If you're *really* smart, you'll put a proxy or ten between you and your account, making even your general location (city/country) difficult to figure out.
It reaches the point real quick where it's just not worth law enforcement's time, where they would be much better off waiting for you to screw up or following up traditional leads with traditional techniques. Like, who's the check supposed to be made out to?
As long as he was careful to only check that email account from public hotspots, the bug wouldn't report a useful IP address. And he'd be dumb to check the account from home anyway, since the authorities could just get the email provider's logs to see where the account was logged into from.
Since the parent's talking about logging on anonymously to unsecured public wifi hotspots, I assume you mean MAC address, not IP address. And even that you can change easily enough each time you use a hotspot.
Knowing that the emails were sent by "192.168.x.x" isn't going to help the cops much.
Unfortunately for the little guy, his patent is owned by the major university that employs him. He tries to make himself sound philanthropical, "giving" his patent rights to the school, but most of the money gained by any realization of the technology would have belonged to the school in any event.
And "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" is just about the worst form of fat you can stick in your mouth. That's code for "lots of saturated and trans fats that will give you heart disease". So even if you're being good and cooking the veggies in canola or olive oil, that awful grease the noodles were fried in is still going to clog up your arteries.
Except there's already another monopolistic group determined to make an obscene profit on the music sales, who will probably not appreciate being squeezed by MS. But if MS wants to get into a licensing brawl with the RIAA, part of me thinks "go for it".
Shows how much I'm not an EE. I knew of LORAN from the pre-GPS days in my family's sailboat, but figured it was some sort of line-of-sight radio triangulation system with dozens of transmitters up and down the coast. That's really pretty cool that, in reality, you can cover an entire seaboard with three of four stations. But it still seems conceptually odd that a radio wave can reliably propagate around the curvature of the earth for a good two thousand miles. Sort of a continuous, circular diffraction, I guess.
I guess it makes sense to put transmitters in the middle of nowhere, considering how powerful they must be. George definitely qualifies as the middle of nowhere, though I wonder if the strong EM pulses make any contribution to the antics of Gorge-goers.
I have to ask...
A Coast Guard LORAN station in the middle of the Nevada desert? Sounds a bit suspicious to me...
I dunno, this kind of simple encryption doesn't seem too bad. Aside from social engineering, your two main worries are remote brute-force attacks and local unauthorized logins, right? The simple encryption makes any kind of brute-force dictionary attack very unlikely to succeed. Meanwhile, even with the chart in front of them, no one can just walk up and log on to his terminal. It's unlikely an attacker will sit in his chair for an hour and work out possible passwords.
The only potential problem is if someone walks up to his desk, swipes or photocopies the chart, then uses the code in a remote brute-force attempt (assuming he also knows the poster's log-in). Again, doesn't seem likely, and is anyway solved by the poster printing out a new chart once a month - much more painless for him than picking out a new password.
Why, the Roman people elected Octavian. Or at least, the Senate. The year traditionally given for the start of his imperial reign, 27BC, was actually the year he was elected Consul by the Senate. Yeah, the Senate was pretty corrupt by then, but probably no more than our own, and his election was at least as legitimate as Hitler's two millennia later.
Oh right, Hitler was elected, too. Maybe the lesson is to keep your eyes open for "imperial creep". Not all tyrants are considerate enough to look like Darth Vader.
Another funny thing, you could argue that modern US presidents, and especially this one, have more sweeping powers than Augustus Ceasar did. Augustus was CINC of the Roman armed forces (which were prohibited from being deployed in Italy), could propose but not enact legislation, and had personal control only over the frontier provinces, through military governors. Sound familiar?
After seeing your comment history, you're obviously no troll. Sorry about that. But there are still no frogs in this story, and I know I saw this exact comment last week, although maybe not from you...? Puzzling.
Personally, I think your point of view is dangerous, for two reasons. First, it gives you license to see all non-believers as heathens or even sub-humans. "They ain't going to heaven no mstter what, anyway, so I must be a better person than them." Second, it gives you license to behave however you want, so long as you "accept Jesus as your personal savior". I think our current President and many of his hard-right supporters have a bit of that "saved" complex going on. I'm not saying that you're personally a hypocritical, extremist zealot, but your belief system leaves the door wide open for them.
I realize you have the Calvinist loophole to fall back on. This is, if a person behaves badly, then he didn't really accept Jesus, and wasn't saved to begin with. Only those who behave good were saved to begin with. Besides being a logical fallacy, it implies that, since you can't trust a person to himself know whether he's been saved, you can see into God's mind to know for certain who's been saved. Most folks would consider that a bit presumptous for a human.