Well, I infer from the evidence that we do in fact dump large amount of untreated waste into the oceans. I wasn't implying that doing so is a good idea. I think that Boston Harbor is a rather more pleasant place now that it doesn't smell of sewage.
Does anyone know if the DishPVR units (specifically the 501 or the 508) can be upgraded by installing a larger hard drive? I've googled a bit, but can't find any info on such a modification.
No doubt. The notion of a biotech/agribusiness corp suing some poor Zimbabwe subsistence farmer for patent infringment is comical. Can you say judgement proof?
Probably not, unless you could dump the case very very early on. Microsoft caliber lawyers probably bill $300-$500/hour for senior level associates and partners. Put together a litigation team (five to ten such people, minimum), add in legal research costs (Westlaw is not cheap) expenses, etc. and you can rack up $200K in fees and expenses very quickly.
This post is does not and is not intended to constitute legal advice. If you need such advice, see a lawyer, not slashdot.
That is a good point. The eBay transaction costs are much lower for (literally) lightweight hardware, collectibles like sports cards, stamps, and coins, hard-to-find music or DVDs, etc.
However, assuming that you can purchase a 486 laptop for $30 in the non-virtual world, and that the shipping cost on eBay is $15, then the maximum that anyone ought to bid for the laptop on eBay is $15. Are sellers setting the reserve price of heavy items so high that the reserve + shipping is greater than the hypothetical $30? (I honestly don't know -- I've never purchased anything on eBay that weighed more than a pound).
I disagree that sites selling "commerce" like eBay are "definitely not the best deal for the consumer" for two reasons:
First: what eBay is selling is a MASSIVE decrease in the transaction costs (including search costs) of the items bought and sold there. Without places like eBay, the transaction costs for many eBay transactions would be prohibitive.
Second: since buyers don't pay any fees to eBay, I'm not convinced that eBay is taking anything from them. While its true that sellers might raise their reserve prices in anticipation of the transaction fees, I've not seen this in practice. (Most items I bid on are unreserved or have a very low reserve).
As I said above, I agree that the community standards approach leaves something to be desired. But your characterization of it is just wrong -- it is not a test about whether the community agrees with the content of the speech. Rather, it judges whether material is "harmful to minors" by "community standards."
As an aside, there is considerable doubt about the constitutionality of COPA even after the Supreme Court's recent opinion. The Supremes said, in essence, that the fact that the statute employes the "community standards" test doesn't render COPA unconstitutionally overbroad. However, the court did not decide whether the statute might be invalid on other grounds.
If anyone is interested, you can find the relevant supreme court opinion here.
This post is not intended to constitute legal advice. If you need such advice, see a lawyer, not slashdot.
I sympathize with your dislike of the "community standards" approach to pr0n. However, the very point of the "overly broad" bit of the Court's opinion was to emphasize that the regulation didn't infringe on conduct protected by the First Amendment. In other words, a statute is "overbroad" if it prohibits protected speech in the course of regulating/prohibiting unprotected speech.
Explain how a statute "deprecates" the First Amendment? If it conflicts with the First Amendment it is a nulity. If it doesn't conflict, then the First Amendment never did protect the conduct at issue. Simple as that.
With the passage of the E-Sign Act (PDF) in 2000, it seems like this should be every bit as solid in court as a written signature. But while I've been able to find quite a lot of information on the web about the theoretical ramifications of this law, there's not much on practical implementations.
I appreciate that your ask slashdot involves technical rather than legal issues. However, based on this quote is doesn't look like you've talked with a legal advisor. Consider what would happen if the means that you selected to implement your digital signature solution turns out to be invalid -- you might have problems enforcing all of your digitally signed contracts. Obviously a bad thing. Fully understanding the implications of a statute involve a lot more than reading the staute and doing a quick Google search or two.
This post is not intended to constitute legal advice. If you need such advice, see an attorney, not slashdot.
Good point. My post was directed to the costs and benefits of switching user desktop machines, not file servers. Of course, one can switch the back office machines without changing the desktop setup.
A good point. However, there would be ongoing costs from training new employees how to use an open office (for better or worse, most employees know how to use Microsoft Word and Excel already), from ongoing document conversion headaches, and from (I'm guessing) increased support costs over time. Also, I think there would be a non-trivial productivity from using an open suite. From my most recent experiments with free office suites, I've found many features lacking that I use on a daily basis. While it is true that most users don't use most of the features of Word or Excel, some of those infrequently used features give users a substantial productivity bump. Plus, there are features that almost everyone uses, such as realtime spell and grammer checking that save substantial amounts of time. Are there any free programs that offer comparable features?
Even if you get stuck paying more for OS licensing, you'll save a huge bundle on the other licenses.
Are lincenses really that expensive? Conjecture: you can purchase Office + a Windows OS license for less than $1000/user (probably much less, but I'm not going to get into an argument about that). In a typical office environment, an employee's time is worth about $50/hr (averaged over all employees; includes non-cash compensation and costs, e.g. healthcare, time to manage the employee, etc.) Thus, the $1000 license fee is equivelant to about 20 hours of work (or 10 hours, if you assume that a set of licenses costs only $500 -- probably a more realistic assumption). Does anyone really think that switching to a new office suite (or a new office suite and a new OS) will cost less than 20 hours/usr in lost time? (Don't forget to add in the time that IT spends setting up the new OS, training, answering questions, etc.)
Software is not a significant part of most company's budgets. The OS community needs to concentrate on superior features/quality, not price. (And speakng of features: is there any non-MS office suite that comes close to Office in terms of features? Last time I checked -- admittitedly about a year ago -- there was not.)
Many ATMs and cash registers run OS/2, but you don't hear about it because there is no problem.
Yeah, I don't suspect that ATMs and cash registers get too many e-mail viruses. I think the orignal poster was making a point about OS/2 being an obscure desktop OS not a ATM/Cash Register OS.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but after I big of Googling, I've found that while identical twins do not have identical fingerprints, their finger prints are often very similar, according to this site and this site. this site even states that the close similarity between the fingerprints of identical twins was used (before the advent of genetic testing) to distinguish between identical and fraternal twins at birth.
How about "all natural" clones -- identical twins? Have a falling-out with your twin, and hello shopping spree. (Of course, I imagine that traditional forms of ID, like driver's licenses, are also susceptible to twin problems. But at least in that case you would actually have to steal the license).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I infer from the evidence that we do in fact dump large amount of untreated waste into the oceans. I wasn't implying that doing so is a good idea. I think that Boston Harbor is a rather more pleasant place now that it doesn't smell of sewage.
Of course, not all sediment has as many, ahem, "nutrients" as Boston Harbor sediment. . .
Do you still have to get a hepatitis shot if you fall in the harbor?
They can always come back on the soyuz capsule that is currently docked at the station . . .
Does anyone know if the DishPVR units (specifically the 501 or the 508) can be upgraded by installing a larger hard drive? I've googled a bit, but can't find any info on such a modification.
NASA put a support wire in the flags to make sure that they didn't hang limply on the flagpole.
As a somewhat interesting aside, the Apollo 11 flag actually fell over when the astronauts blasted off the moon.
Or ask a lawyer. His/Her answer is much more likely to be correct. Plus, unlike Slashdot, you can sue the lawyer if the answer is wrong.
Only problem: The south pole is ON A CONTINENT. You'd have to install an ocean first to run a undersea cable.
No doubt. The notion of a biotech/agribusiness corp suing some poor Zimbabwe subsistence farmer for patent infringment is comical. Can you say judgement proof?
Hello World
Probably not, unless you could dump the case very very early on. Microsoft caliber lawyers probably bill $300-$500/hour for senior level associates and partners. Put together a litigation team (five to ten such people, minimum), add in legal research costs (Westlaw is not cheap) expenses, etc. and you can rack up $200K in fees and expenses very quickly.
This post is does not and is not intended to constitute legal advice. If you need such advice, see a lawyer, not slashdot.
That is a good point. The eBay transaction costs are much lower for (literally) lightweight hardware, collectibles like sports cards, stamps, and coins, hard-to-find music or DVDs, etc.
However, assuming that you can purchase a 486 laptop for $30 in the non-virtual world, and that the shipping cost on eBay is $15, then the maximum that anyone ought to bid for the laptop on eBay is $15. Are sellers setting the reserve price of heavy items so high that the reserve + shipping is greater than the hypothetical $30? (I honestly don't know -- I've never purchased anything on eBay that weighed more than a pound).
I disagree that sites selling "commerce" like eBay are "definitely not the best deal for the consumer" for two reasons:
First: what eBay is selling is a MASSIVE decrease in the transaction costs (including search costs) of the items bought and sold there. Without places like eBay, the transaction costs for many eBay transactions would be prohibitive.
Second: since buyers don't pay any fees to eBay, I'm not convinced that eBay is taking anything from them. While its true that sellers might raise their reserve prices in anticipation of the transaction fees, I've not seen this in practice. (Most items I bid on are unreserved or have a very low reserve).
Except that you would have to redraft your will every time you changed your password!
Seriously, giving your password to a trusted lawyer for safekeeping sounds like as good a solution as any.
This post is not intended to constitute legal advice. If you need such advice, see a lawyer, not slashdot.
As I said above, I agree that the community standards approach leaves something to be desired. But your characterization of it is just wrong -- it is not a test about whether the community agrees with the content of the speech. Rather, it judges whether material is "harmful to minors" by "community standards."
As an aside, there is considerable doubt about the constitutionality of COPA even after the Supreme Court's recent opinion. The Supremes said, in essence, that the fact that the statute employes the "community standards" test doesn't render COPA unconstitutionally overbroad. However, the court did not decide whether the statute might be invalid on other grounds.
If anyone is interested, you can find the relevant supreme court opinion here.
This post is not intended to constitute legal advice. If you need such advice, see a lawyer, not slashdot.
I sympathize with your dislike of the "community standards" approach to pr0n. However, the very point of the "overly broad" bit of the Court's opinion was to emphasize that the regulation didn't infringe on conduct protected by the First Amendment. In other words, a statute is "overbroad" if it prohibits protected speech in the course of regulating/prohibiting unprotected speech.
Explain how a statute "deprecates" the First Amendment? If it conflicts with the First Amendment it is a nulity. If it doesn't conflict, then the First Amendment never did protect the conduct at issue. Simple as that.
With the passage of the E-Sign Act (PDF) in 2000, it seems like this should be every bit as solid in court as a written signature. But while I've been able to find quite a lot of information on the web about the theoretical ramifications of this law, there's not much on practical implementations.
I appreciate that your ask slashdot involves technical rather than legal issues. However, based on this quote is doesn't look like you've talked with a legal advisor. Consider what would happen if the means that you selected to implement your digital signature solution turns out to be invalid -- you might have problems enforcing all of your digitally signed contracts. Obviously a bad thing. Fully understanding the implications of a statute involve a lot more than reading the staute and doing a quick Google search or two.
This post is not intended to constitute legal advice. If you need such advice, see an attorney, not slashdot.
Good point. My post was directed to the costs and benefits of switching user desktop machines, not file servers. Of course, one can switch the back office machines without changing the desktop setup.
A good point. However, there would be ongoing costs from training new employees how to use an open office (for better or worse, most employees know how to use Microsoft Word and Excel already), from ongoing document conversion headaches, and from (I'm guessing) increased support costs over time. Also, I think there would be a non-trivial productivity from using an open suite. From my most recent experiments with free office suites, I've found many features lacking that I use on a daily basis. While it is true that most users don't use most of the features of Word or Excel, some of those infrequently used features give users a substantial productivity bump. Plus, there are features that almost everyone uses, such as realtime spell and grammer checking that save substantial amounts of time. Are there any free programs that offer comparable features?
Even if you get stuck paying more for OS licensing, you'll save a huge bundle on the other licenses.
Are lincenses really that expensive? Conjecture: you can purchase Office + a Windows OS license for less than $1000/user (probably much less, but I'm not going to get into an argument about that). In a typical office environment, an employee's time is worth about $50/hr (averaged over all employees; includes non-cash compensation and costs, e.g. healthcare, time to manage the employee, etc.) Thus, the $1000 license fee is equivelant to about 20 hours of work (or 10 hours, if you assume that a set of licenses costs only $500 -- probably a more realistic assumption). Does anyone really think that switching to a new office suite (or a new office suite and a new OS) will cost less than 20 hours/usr in lost time? (Don't forget to add in the time that IT spends setting up the new OS, training, answering questions, etc.)
Software is not a significant part of most company's budgets. The OS community needs to concentrate on superior features/quality, not price. (And speakng of features: is there any non-MS office suite that comes close to Office in terms of features? Last time I checked -- admittitedly about a year ago -- there was not.)
Answers the question about why someone would pay $20 mill for a shuttle ride, no?
Though I suppose you'd have a better chance parachuting from the balloon than you would from an exploding shuttle.
Many ATMs and cash registers run OS/2, but you don't hear about it because there is no problem.
Yeah, I don't suspect that ATMs and cash registers get too many e-mail viruses. I think the orignal poster was making a point about OS/2 being an obscure desktop OS not a ATM/Cash Register OS.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but after I big of Googling, I've found that while identical twins do not have identical fingerprints, their finger prints are often very similar, according to this site and this site. this site even states that the close similarity between the fingerprints of identical twins was used (before the advent of genetic testing) to distinguish between identical and fraternal twins at birth.
So neither would a clone.
Don't be a prick.
How about "all natural" clones -- identical twins? Have a falling-out with your twin, and hello shopping spree. (Of course, I imagine that traditional forms of ID, like driver's licenses, are also susceptible to twin problems. But at least in that case you would actually have to steal the license).