It's been years since I was in Torts class, but this is a product liability suit... NOT a patent suit. The only reason the "patent" is being bandied about is because this guy's argument boils down to this: Riyobi knew (or should have known) that there was a safer way to make the saw. Riyobi presumably did not choose the safer way. Therefore, Riyobi should be liable for my injury.
Note that this argument by itself is nowhere near sufficient to win a product liability lawsuit. For example, it's easy to say that you could make any car safer by preventing it from going over 5mph, but just throwing that fact out in court by itself will never win a product liability case. Usually there are lots of extra factors like industry standards and cost-benefit analyzes that are argued over by lots of expert witnesses. Could Riyobi have "reasonably" adopted the improved design? etc. etc.
The ONLY reason that a patent has anything important to do with this case is that patents are, by definition, publicly available and it makes an easy argument to show that Riyobi knew or could have known about what was disclosed in the patent. Also, there is NO REQUIREMENT that Riyobi would HAVE to use the safety system described in the patent. Instead, the safety system is just an example of what is known, and Riyobi could argue that its own systems were just as good or even better. The patent was likely just one data point of MANY data points used to establish what a "reasonable" safety system would look like. One interesting point would be to see if Riyobi itself is the assignee of the patent....
In a nutshell: Don't read too much into this case. Like most legal cases discussed on Slashdot, somebody saw a buzzword like "patent" and wanted to score points with the mouthbreathing site admins.
That's the problem.. the article is slashdotted and I don't trust a summary. In a legal case the term "third party" is not necessarily what you think it means. If a plaintiff is suing a defendant then a "third party" could be anyone the plaintiff chose to send an email to.
This is from memory so it may be a little inaccurate but here is what I remember of Federal law on the subject: The stored communications act puts email in different categories depending upon whether it has been "read" or not, with stored email being considered "read" after 180 days. Basically, before the email is "read" it is a communication that is protected with a very strong expectation of privacy (think Title III, you need to have a wiretap order to intercept it which is much stricter than the requirement for a normal search warrant). However, once the communication has been "read" if it is stored long-term, the level of expected privacy drops quite a bit. Your ISP may choose to give the information over the police once it is considered a "stored" communication, whereas the ISP would not be allowed to "volunteer" the information otherwise.
Once again, I have no way of knowing that the "third party" is an ISP in this case. The law is more complex than most Slashdotters make it out to be and I'm a little hesitant to jump to a conclusion before knowing the actual facts of the case.
I need to actually read the case, but: 1. Alice sends Bob a message 2. Bob decides to post the message on Facebook or even, the police ask Bob for the message and Bob says: Sure here you go! 3. Alice has no expectation of privacy from Bob because she chose to send him the message.
The above situation is already well established as being perfectly fine from long before the time of the Internet. The meaning of the term "Third Party" is at issue here, and third party does *not* necessarily mean your ISP. Look at the stored communications act for the rules on how email is treated by law enforcement. If you send your email to somebody (the "third party") that somebody can choose to hand it over to anyone. However, this isn't any different than sending a letter over the Pony Express and having the person you sent the letter to read it in the town square for everyone to here. Moral of the story: If you don't trust a third party, don't send them information!
IAAL, but the issues here are complex so this is NOT advice for any particular person in any particular situation:
If what you are interested in is owning a copyright to source code there are two ways for a "customer" to get the copyright:
1. If the software is a work made for hire. "Work for hire" is a legal definition (see 17 U.S.C. 101), with two different paths. The first path is for the software to be written by an employee within the scope of employment of the organization claiming copyright. Employee specifically does NOT mean an independent contractor, and code written by a contractor is NOT a work for hire! The definition of an employee goes into all sorts of common-law factors a court will look at, but the shorthand is the tax status of an employee with the IRS.... merely calling a contractor an employee is not enough. Also, the work has to be made within the normal scope of employment, so no, the employer cannot claim copyright as a work for hire for something the employee did outside of work. In fact, even if the employee works for the organization as a regular employee, if writing code is not within the normal scope of employment it still might not be a work for hire (up to the courts to decide if things go south). While some works for hire can be done by an independent contractors along with a specific written agreement, software code generally does not fall into any of the specifically enumerated categories where these written agreements work (see 17 U.S.C. 101 for more details).
Interesting: Technically, code written for a big company like MS or IBM by the armies of independent contractors are NOT works made for hire. See point 2 for how the companies can still get rights.
2. Assignment of Copyright: This is much more common for any work not directly made by an employee. There is a written agreement assigning ownership of the copyright to the contracting organization. The usual rules of contract law cover what is and is not within the scope of the assignment. Assignments can be non-exclusive (we can do what we want with the code, but the developer is also free to do what he wants), or more commonly, exclusive (the assignee getting rights to the code has full control, the original developer loses his rights to that specific work). So is there any difference from a work made for hire? YES! In a work made for hire, the organization OWNS the copyright for the entire length of the copyright term. However, in an assignment, Copyright law specifically splits the copyright term into two parts. An assignment made when the work is created transfers rights to the assignee (usually the company) for about 1/2 the term (the time varies depending upon whether the author dies and some other factors, but it is usually a long time > 30 years). The copyright automatically reverts back to the original author, and the assignment agreement cannot override this rule. The law is written this way to give the authors a "second bite at the apple" in case a work they assign away for peanuts becomes very valuable later. The author can extend the copyright to the second half of its term by paying a nominal fee, and can then go out and the assignee loses all previously held rights.
The upshot for the software industry: Any assigned copyrights will eventually revert to the authors. Now, by the time the reversion occurs most software will be long out of date, but as we all know there is plenty of software out there that lingers for a LONG time, and non-employees DO get there rights to the underlying code back.
One other point: Binary code gets a separate copyright from the underyling source code. But binary code is a derivative work of the underyling source code, so even if the developer never compiles code he writes, the binary distribution using that code would violate the copyright of the original code if ther
Wow... the bottom 2 elements out of a possible 5 ALMOST 50% of the time.. talk about a massive skew by those evil MS guys....
BTW... did you ever see the Dilbert cartoon with the PHB complaining that a full 40% of employee sick days were taken on Mondays and Fridays? You weren't possibly the same PHB were you?
I actually posted an Ask-Slashdot about running a headless Linux Box that didn't have any serial ports... my question was about what happened in the 5% of cases where I couldn't SSH to the box (like if a kernel upgrade goes south). The basic answer was that I still needed a serial terminal. Oh, I know that USB can be used as a substitute, but the problem was that USB required a booted & functional kernel with a working USB stack to emulate the serial line. I recently saw a similar discussion in comments about how bad the old-school serial terminal code that is still in the Linux kernel is. Many people incorrectly thought the poster was saying that Linux shouldn't have a command line interface, which was completely wrong. The poster instead raised the (excellent) point that complicated and buggy software emulating long-obsolete device interfaces may not be good for the Kernel (CLI is NOT the same as a terminal interface).
Are there damn good reasons why RS-232 serial ports should be dropped from modern hardware? Hell yes, not the least of which is a 3-15 volt swing signalling protocol is an invitation to fry the low-voltage electronics on modern systems. However, the CONCEPT of having a box that does not require any type of graphics, or even a working network interface, is still very useful. So... what are the better technologies to accomplish the same goal without having to rely on antiquated hardware implementations?
I'm not an Obama fan, but when he does something right he deserves credit for it, so good job Mr. President. I just hope this doesn't get bogged down in too much bureaucracy and lawsuits by "environmentalists." Note how "environmentalists" is in quotes because anyone rational who claims to care about air pollution, global warming, deforestation, etc. etc. should love the idea of new, very safe nuclear power plants. A back of the napkin calculation means a 1.1 Gigawatt reactor can put out the peak energy of 110 of the big 10 Megawatt wind turbine... and the wind turbine can't output at peak energy all the time. Take into account the fact that the land footprint for a nuclear power plant is tiny compared to wind or solar and you have a solution that is a very good thing for the environment.
As for nuclear waste, it's a political problem not a technological problem. Despite the fear-mongering you hear about "10,000 years of waste" the truly nasty stuff actually has a much shorter half-life, and the stuff that is radioactive for 10,000 years is dangerous... but not any more dangerous than the chemicals that get spewed from Coal-fired plants or the chemicals that are used in manufacturing photo-voltaic solar panels. One other thing.. if reprocessing were actually used in the US the amount of this nasty waste would be much much lower to boot. Once again, politics trumps technology in preventing solutions to problems from actually being implemented.
Fact... before the big anti-trust trial against MS in the 90's MS had exactly 0 lobbyists in all of DC. People on Slashdot were so happy when the Gov. went after their favorite target, but in the long run they unleashed a much worse monster. I'd rather have a company that doesn't play nice in the corporate world than a company that doesn't play nice in the corporate world and has its manacles in DC.
Wow... looks like the AMD fanboys are modding up anything anti-Intel today! So for the past 5 years it's been a big deal to improve power consumption and everyone in the industry has known this... so all of the sudden Intel is "copying" AMD by making a CPU that fits into existing power envelopes on existing platforms???? The only "copying" going on here is marketing BS. Oh since AMD's own 6-core server CPU's came out after Intel's (Dunnington was out first) and AMD's 6 core desktop parts will come out after Gulftown will you say "yawn, AMD is just copying Intel's idea"? Somehow I think not.
Face it, AMD on the CPU side only beats the Core 2 by clocking higher and selling at a loss right now. Bulldozer had better beat the ever loving crap out of Westmere because by the time it finally arrives late next year it's going to have to contend with Sandy Bridge. The only bright spot at AMD is the graphics division... which AMD just bought for way too much money and likely will require massive profits for the next 10 years to recoup the takeover prices.
While this rule may seem silly there is one good thing about the USPTO... NONE of your tax money is being wasted. The USPTO is 100% self funded by fees paid by customers. In fact, Congress has actually stolen money that the USPTO gets from customers and used it for other (probably more wasteful) spending in the past, although this practice has been greatly reduced in recent years.
Open source had 0 to do with finding this bug... the (paid Google employees) who wrote the bug found the bug. The update won't be available until December 11th either, although the bug seems to be on hiatus on my own Droid phone. The barcode scanner apps work about 10x better with functional autofocus.
Thanks for telling us that those claims are too complicated for you to read. Please make sure to put that on your resume, because if I was a potential employer looking to hire you for anything even remotely technical, I'd want to know that you give up whenever a discussion gets remotely above the complexity of "M$ sux0rz."
Anyone else like PinkDead, please post too so we can winnow the chaff.
It comes down to carriers, and Verizon Wireless does have excellent coverage. I'm on an expired contract so I could have jumped to AT&T without any penalties, but the Droid has got what I've always wanted: a phone that's open enough to let me hack for fun, while also polished enough that I don't have to hack it just to make the basics work.
You're wrong. However, while you are infringing on a patent (it doesn't matter WHY you are infringing), remember that somebody has to actually sue you, and if you are only doing something for educational purposes and it does not harm the patent holder economically, there's a good chance the patent holder won't bother to sue.
Another thing: as a poster above noted, there is no such thing as "fair use" for patents, that's only a defense for copyright infringement.
You're wrong. USB is and was for hooking up peripherals like keyboard/mice/printers/low-bandwidth devices to effectively replace the old RS-232 serial and parallel ports of yore. USB was never intended to replace the interface that goes to your monitor, your hard drives*, and your ethernet.
* Yes, we're all aware of USB storage, but see all the comments above about how even low-end devices today can swamp USB... if USB was so great for this then eSATA never would have come into existence.
This new standard appears to be point-to-point and with all the knowledge we have now it will hopefully be efficient. Additionally, 10Gbps is the starter speed... Intel was talking about scaling it to 100Gbps without too much difficulty.
But does it have hardware acceleration for.mkv out of the box?
You don't understand what MKV is... it's not a codec, it's a container format for holding the video & audio stream along with assorted other information. This could mean multiple video and audio streams as is common for many movies dubbed in different languages or alternate video scenes. The hardware acceleration applies to whatever codec is used to create the streams held within the MKV file.. and that could be many different things from MPEG2, h.264, VC1, etc. etc.
While the fast booting for Ubuntu is very impressive, I'm not sure if those statistics take into account the BIOS startup time before GRUB actually starts the OS booting. If the 10 seconds time in this story is from the time the power button is pushed until boot is completed, then this truly is a big improvement. Of course, the Ubuntu guys could take advantage of the UEFI spec too using a boot loader that handles EFI (I know of eLILO and I assume new versions of GRUB handle EFI too...).
The BIOS/EFI manufacturers need to get on the ball, because the fast bootloaders coupled with SSDs mean than the firmware startup time may begin to dominate the overall boot time on consumer devices.
A paper bill is a legal document. An online bill carries no legal power whatsoever
Wrong. The rest of your post falls into irrelevance.
For those of you who have never taken a Contract Law class, throw out the notion that documents have to be stamped and signed with fancy fonts on just the right kind of paper to be valid for normal business, that went out of style in the 19th century. Note that some other transactions that are not private contracts may still require notarization and other enhanced forms of evidence like a recording of title, but we are talking about online bills for normal services not transferring title to your house. The online record of your bill has exactly the same legal power as if the record were printed out onto a sheet of paper... in fact if there ever was a legal challenge over the accuracy of the bill, that is exactly what would happen, it would be printed out and submitted as evidence. The form of storage for the information contained in the bill has zero relevance to the legal rights and responsibilities of the parties. For those of you who've heard about the Statute of Frauds, any digital record held by your cable/cell/whatever provider is a "writing" just as if it was hand carved into a block of Italian marble.
Hi, original question-poster here. Thanks for the information, but I was wondering if GRUB would work over a USB serial console as well. I've heard that serial console support works fine after the kernel is up and the USB drivers are in place, but can GRUB run over a USB serial adapter as well?
Hi, original poster here. Thanks for the info, especially with the wear on PCI connectors which I was not actually aware of. I'm hopefully in a situation which will not require me to plug-unplug stuff often (if at all). From what I've seen, you are right with the USB serial adapters, since they do work but you don't actually get to see the GRUB menu due to the extra kernel drivers needed.
I actually wrote my question for situations where my "experimentation" leads to an OS configuration that's broken and requires me to jump in starting at the GRUB menu to start fixing things. That's my main problem with the USB-TTY solution, but thanks for the info.
That's funny... nspluginwrapper tended to cause most of the problems I had with flash... since Adobe came out with the 64 bit Linux releases, I can't remember the last time the browser crashed due to Flash issues.
Yeah except for one big problem: Despite the fact that some posters who have self-persecution delusions think so, the Bush administration did not go around yanking down every insult and parody against him on the Internet. If he had, then 90% of the posts from most/. stories that pass as "politics" would have been taken down by those evil Bushies... last time I checked they were all still there. As other posters have pointed out there are all kinds of nasty photoshop pictures of Bush that were put up while he was president and never taken down.
The stupid lines you parroted above are not what your evil "neocon" enemies were saying, but rather what other liberals parroted to make themselves feel more oppressed and therefore more self righteous. Hell, George Bush had protesters right outside of his private home in the middle of Texas and nothing happened to them except Cindy Sheehan made bags of money and got her own cult following. When Bush was asked about Cindy Sheehan, he didn't call her a Nazi (See Nancy Pelosi insulting people who have done more honest work than she ever will for that), instead he said that he understood that she felt hurt and that she had a right to protest, but that he still believed in what he was doing. Now you can disagree with Bush, but I'm getting REALLY sick of the liberal mantra that all anti-Bush speech was suppressed for the last 8 years because it couldn't be farther from the truth.
I've been a 99% Linux user since 2000, including 3 years of law school where I really only used Windows during exams because of Exam4 requirements. However, I'm starting a job at a (small) law firm and my laptop has Win 7 all loaded up and running. My prognosis so far: I can live with 7, especially because it runs Firefox and Cygwin runs Bash and basic UNIX utilities OK as well. I can even use VIM.
Is it particularly fast? No, but it is not insanely slow. My laptop is recent but not super-high end, 2.2Ghz Core2 with 4GB of RAM is the good part, the Intel graphics are the bad part. Frankly, the Aero effects on Windows 7 work just as well as the compositing effects from KDE 4.3, meaning that they do work, but not blazingly fast like on my desktop with the Nvidia card. As for memory usage... despite claims to the contrary, Linux using a modern, fully featured desktop uses a little bit less RAM, but not significantly less. I'm not even close to filling up my 4GB even with office, firefox, and miscellaneous junk running, so no biggies there.
I'm not a fan of Windows, I think that Windows 7 is somewhat boring for a "huge" release, but it does get the job done. My new job is concerned with me being able to write office documents and access Exchange + a small windows network, which Win7 makes stupidly simple. Do I miss virtual desktops? Sure. Am I annoyed that Windows still doesn't have very good window management and that I can't get rid of the annoying borders on my windows that the Bespin KDE theme lets me annihilate? You bet. At the same time, Windows does make certain configuration tasks easier (especially graphics & wireless even though I can and do use graphical utilities under Linux).
I'm not saying that I couldn't do this just as well in Linux, but I am saying that I don't have the time to get my system tweaked to the rest of the office... at least immediately. This is a small law firm with technically proficient lawyers, and being the most junior associate I won't be shocked if I get some IT related tasks from time to time, but my day job is to be able to use nice boring office software, which Windows 7 allows for in a reasonably secure way.
As for the XP part of this... I had an old XP license that I did purchase fair & square (for $10 from my University back in the day). It could have gotten the job done for a while, but Win7 really does have better security and like it or not it is the path forward. One major feature that Win7 has over XP is the find option in the start menu. Since MS keeps screwing with the Control Panel and everything else, I almost never bother to hunt through menus. Instead I just type in what I want to do in the search bar and it does a very good job of finding what I want. In fact, it's likely faster that me clicking menus even if I did know where stuff was. I'm not sure if XP even had this feature but Win7 makes it very easy to use by default and I've saved quite a bit of time with it... so there ya go, one actual reason to upgrade!
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot and the Law: Unsafe at any speed.
It's been years since I was in Torts class, but this is a product liability suit... NOT a patent suit. The only reason the "patent" is being bandied about is because this guy's argument boils down to this: Riyobi knew (or should have known) that there was a safer way to make the saw. Riyobi presumably did not choose the safer way. Therefore, Riyobi should be liable for my injury.
Note that this argument by itself is nowhere near sufficient to win a product liability lawsuit. For example, it's easy to say that you could make any car safer by preventing it from going over 5mph, but just throwing that fact out in court by itself will never win a product liability case. Usually there are lots of extra factors like industry standards and cost-benefit analyzes that are argued over by lots of expert witnesses. Could Riyobi have "reasonably" adopted the improved design? etc. etc.
The ONLY reason that a patent has anything important to do with this case is that patents are, by definition, publicly available and it makes an easy argument to show that Riyobi knew or could have known about what was disclosed in the patent. Also, there is NO REQUIREMENT that Riyobi would HAVE to use the safety system described in the patent. Instead, the safety system is just an example of what is known, and Riyobi could argue that its own systems were just as good or even better. The patent was likely just one data point of MANY data points used to establish what a "reasonable" safety system would look like. One interesting point would be to see if Riyobi itself is the assignee of the patent....
In a nutshell: Don't read too much into this case. Like most legal cases discussed on Slashdot, somebody saw a buzzword like "patent" and wanted to score points with the mouthbreathing site admins.
Mod parent up... oh and the USAA app supports Android too.
That's the problem.. the article is slashdotted and I don't trust a summary. In a legal case the term "third party" is not necessarily what you think it means. If a plaintiff is suing a defendant then a "third party" could be anyone the plaintiff chose to send an email to.
This is from memory so it may be a little inaccurate but here is what I remember of Federal law on the subject: The stored communications act puts email in different categories depending upon whether it has been "read" or not, with stored email being considered "read" after 180 days. Basically, before the email is "read" it is a communication that is protected with a very strong expectation of privacy (think Title III, you need to have a wiretap order to intercept it which is much stricter than the requirement for a normal search warrant). However, once the communication has been "read" if it is stored long-term, the level of expected privacy drops quite a bit. Your ISP may choose to give the information over the police once it is considered a "stored" communication, whereas the ISP would not be allowed to "volunteer" the information otherwise.
Once again, I have no way of knowing that the "third party" is an ISP in this case. The law is more complex than most Slashdotters make it out to be and I'm a little hesitant to jump to a conclusion before knowing the actual facts of the case.
I need to actually read the case, but:
1. Alice sends Bob a message
2. Bob decides to post the message on Facebook or even, the police ask Bob for the message and Bob says: Sure here you go!
3. Alice has no expectation of privacy from Bob because she chose to send him the message.
The above situation is already well established as being perfectly fine from long before the time of the Internet. The meaning of the term "Third Party" is at issue here, and third party does *not* necessarily mean your ISP. Look at the stored communications act for the rules on how email is treated by law enforcement. If you send your email to somebody (the "third party") that somebody can choose to hand it over to anyone. However, this isn't any different than sending a letter over the Pony Express and having the person you sent the letter to read it in the town square for everyone to here.
Moral of the story: If you don't trust a third party, don't send them information!
IAAL, but the issues here are complex so this is NOT advice for any particular person in any particular situation:
If what you are interested in is owning a copyright to source code there are two ways for a "customer" to get the copyright:
1. If the software is a work made for hire. "Work for hire" is a legal definition (see 17 U.S.C. 101), with two different paths. The first path is for the software to be written by an employee within the scope of employment of the organization claiming copyright. Employee specifically does NOT mean an independent contractor, and code written by a contractor is NOT a work for hire! The definition of an employee goes into all sorts of common-law factors a court will look at, but the shorthand is the tax status of an employee with the IRS.... merely calling a contractor an employee is not enough. Also, the work has to be made within the normal scope of employment, so no, the employer cannot claim copyright as a work for hire for something the employee did outside of work. In fact, even if the employee works for the organization as a regular employee, if writing code is not within the normal scope of employment it still might not be a work for hire (up to the courts to decide if things go south). While some works for hire can be done by an independent contractors along with a specific written agreement, software code generally does not fall into any of the specifically enumerated categories where these written agreements work (see 17 U.S.C. 101 for more details).
Interesting: Technically, code written for a big company like MS or IBM by the armies of independent contractors are NOT works made for hire. See point 2 for how the companies can still get rights.
2. Assignment of Copyright: This is much more common for any work not directly made by an employee. There is a written agreement assigning ownership of the copyright to the contracting organization. The usual rules of contract law cover what is and is not within the scope of the assignment. Assignments can be non-exclusive (we can do what we want with the code, but the developer is also free to do what he wants), or more commonly, exclusive (the assignee getting rights to the code has full control, the original developer loses his rights to that specific work). So is there any difference from a work made for hire? YES! In a work made for hire, the organization OWNS the copyright for the entire length of the copyright term. However, in an assignment, Copyright law specifically splits the copyright term into two parts. An assignment made when the work is created transfers rights to the assignee (usually the company) for about 1/2 the term (the time varies depending upon whether the author dies and some other factors, but it is usually a long time > 30 years). The copyright automatically reverts back to the original author, and the assignment agreement cannot override this rule. The law is written this way to give the authors a "second bite at the apple" in case a work they assign away for peanuts becomes very valuable later. The author can extend the copyright to the second half of its term by paying a nominal fee, and can then go out and the assignee loses all previously held rights.
The upshot for the software industry: Any assigned copyrights will eventually revert to the authors. Now, by the time the reversion occurs most software will be long out of date, but as we all know there is plenty of software out there that lingers for a LONG time, and non-employees DO get there rights to the underlying code back.
One other point: Binary code gets a separate copyright from the underyling source code. But binary code is a derivative work of the underyling source code, so even if the developer never compiles code he writes, the binary distribution using that code would violate the copyright of the original code if ther
Wow... the bottom 2 elements out of a possible 5 ALMOST 50% of the time.. talk about a massive skew by those evil MS guys....
BTW... did you ever see the Dilbert cartoon with the PHB complaining that a full 40% of employee sick days were taken on Mondays and Fridays? You weren't possibly the same PHB were you?
I actually posted an Ask-Slashdot about running a headless Linux Box that didn't have any serial ports... my question was about what happened in the 5% of cases where I couldn't SSH to the box (like if a kernel upgrade goes south). The basic answer was that I still needed a serial terminal. Oh, I know that USB can be used as a substitute, but the problem was that USB required a booted & functional kernel with a working USB stack to emulate the serial line. I recently saw a similar discussion in comments about how bad the old-school serial terminal code that is still in the Linux kernel is. Many people incorrectly thought the poster was saying that Linux shouldn't have a command line interface, which was completely wrong. The poster instead raised the (excellent) point that complicated and buggy software emulating long-obsolete device interfaces may not be good for the Kernel (CLI is NOT the same as a terminal interface).
Are there damn good reasons why RS-232 serial ports should be dropped from modern hardware? Hell yes, not the least of which is a 3-15 volt swing signalling protocol is an invitation to fry the low-voltage electronics on modern systems. However, the CONCEPT of having a box that does not require any type of graphics, or even a working network interface, is still very useful. So... what are the better technologies to accomplish the same goal without having to rely on antiquated hardware implementations?
I'm not an Obama fan, but when he does something right he deserves credit for it, so good job Mr. President. I just hope this doesn't get bogged down in too much bureaucracy and lawsuits by "environmentalists." Note how "environmentalists" is in quotes because anyone rational who claims to care about air pollution, global warming, deforestation, etc. etc. should love the idea of new, very safe nuclear power plants. A back of the napkin calculation means a 1.1 Gigawatt reactor can put out the peak energy of 110 of the big 10 Megawatt wind turbine... and the wind turbine can't output at peak energy all the time. Take into account the fact that the land footprint for a nuclear power plant is tiny compared to wind or solar and you have a solution that is a very good thing for the environment.
As for nuclear waste, it's a political problem not a technological problem. Despite the fear-mongering you hear about "10,000 years of waste" the truly nasty stuff actually has a much shorter half-life, and the stuff that is radioactive for 10,000 years is dangerous... but not any more dangerous than the chemicals that get spewed from Coal-fired plants or the chemicals that are used in manufacturing photo-voltaic solar panels. One other thing.. if reprocessing were actually used in the US the amount of this nasty waste would be much much lower to boot. Once again, politics trumps technology in preventing solutions to problems from actually being implemented.
Fact... before the big anti-trust trial against MS in the 90's MS had exactly 0 lobbyists in all of DC. People on Slashdot were so happy when the Gov. went after their favorite target, but in the long run they unleashed a much worse monster. I'd rather have a company that doesn't play nice in the corporate world than a company that doesn't play nice in the corporate world and has its manacles in DC.
Wow... looks like the AMD fanboys are modding up anything anti-Intel today!
So for the past 5 years it's been a big deal to improve power consumption and everyone in the industry has known this... so all of the sudden Intel is "copying" AMD by making a CPU that fits into existing power envelopes on existing platforms???? The only "copying" going on here is marketing BS. Oh since AMD's own 6-core server CPU's came out after Intel's (Dunnington was out first) and AMD's 6 core desktop parts will come out after Gulftown will you say "yawn, AMD is just copying Intel's idea"? Somehow I think not.
Face it, AMD on the CPU side only beats the Core 2 by clocking higher and selling at a loss right now. Bulldozer had better beat the ever loving crap out of Westmere because by the time it finally arrives late next year it's going to have to contend with Sandy Bridge.
The only bright spot at AMD is the graphics division... which AMD just bought for way too much money and likely will require massive profits for the next 10 years to recoup the takeover prices.
While this rule may seem silly there is one good thing about the USPTO... NONE of your tax money is being wasted. The USPTO is 100% self funded by fees paid by customers. In fact, Congress has actually stolen money that the USPTO gets from customers and used it for other (probably more wasteful) spending in the past, although this practice has been greatly reduced in recent years.
Open source had 0 to do with finding this bug... the (paid Google employees) who wrote the bug found the bug. The update won't be available until December 11th either, although the bug seems to be on hiatus on my own Droid phone. The barcode scanner apps work about 10x better with functional autofocus.
Thanks for telling us that those claims are too complicated for you to read. Please make sure to put that on your resume, because if I was a potential employer looking to hire you for anything even remotely technical, I'd want to know that you give up whenever a discussion gets remotely above the complexity of "M$ sux0rz."
Anyone else like PinkDead, please post too so we can winnow the chaff.
It comes down to carriers, and Verizon Wireless does have excellent coverage. I'm on an expired contract so I could have jumped to AT&T without any penalties, but the Droid has got what I've always wanted: a phone that's open enough to let me hack for fun, while also polished enough that I don't have to hack it just to make the basics work.
You're wrong. However, while you are infringing on a patent (it doesn't matter WHY you are infringing), remember that somebody has to actually sue you, and if you are only doing something for educational purposes and it does not harm the patent holder economically, there's a good chance the patent holder won't bother to sue.
Another thing: as a poster above noted, there is no such thing as "fair use" for patents, that's only a defense for copyright infringement.
You're wrong. USB is and was for hooking up peripherals like keyboard/mice/printers/low-bandwidth devices to effectively replace the old RS-232 serial and parallel ports of yore. USB was never intended to replace the interface that goes to your monitor, your hard drives*, and your ethernet.
* Yes, we're all aware of USB storage, but see all the comments above about how even low-end devices today can swamp USB... if USB was so great for this then eSATA never would have come into existence.
This new standard appears to be point-to-point and with all the knowledge we have now it will hopefully be efficient. Additionally, 10Gbps is the starter speed... Intel was talking about scaling it to 100Gbps without too much difficulty.
But does it have hardware acceleration for .mkv out of the box?
You don't understand what MKV is... it's not a codec, it's a container format for holding the video & audio stream along with assorted other information. This could mean multiple video and audio streams as is common for many movies dubbed in different languages or alternate video scenes. The hardware acceleration applies to whatever codec is used to create the streams held within the MKV file.. and that could be many different things from MPEG2, h.264, VC1, etc. etc.
While the fast booting for Ubuntu is very impressive, I'm not sure if those statistics take into account the BIOS startup time before GRUB actually starts the OS booting. If the 10 seconds time in this story is from the time the power button is pushed until boot is completed, then this truly is a big improvement. Of course, the Ubuntu guys could take advantage of the UEFI spec too using a boot loader that handles EFI (I know of eLILO and I assume new versions of GRUB handle EFI too...).
The BIOS/EFI manufacturers need to get on the ball, because the fast bootloaders coupled with SSDs mean than the firmware startup time may begin to dominate the overall boot time on consumer devices.
A paper bill is a legal document. An online bill carries no legal power whatsoever
Wrong. The rest of your post falls into irrelevance.
For those of you who have never taken a Contract Law class, throw out the notion that documents have to be stamped and signed with fancy fonts on
just the right kind of paper to be valid for normal business, that went out of style in the 19th century. Note that some other transactions that are not private contracts may still require notarization and other enhanced forms of evidence like a recording of title, but we are talking about online bills for normal services not transferring title to your house. The online record of your bill has exactly the same legal power as if the record were printed out onto a sheet of paper... in fact if there ever was a legal challenge over the accuracy of the bill, that is exactly what would happen, it would be printed out and submitted as evidence. The form of storage for the information contained in the bill has zero relevance to the legal rights and responsibilities of the parties. For those of you who've heard about the Statute of Frauds, any digital record held by your cable/cell/whatever provider is a "writing" just as if it was hand carved into a block of Italian marble.
Hi, original question-poster here. Thanks for the information, but I was wondering if GRUB would work over a USB serial console as well. I've heard that serial console support works fine after the kernel is up and the USB drivers are in place, but can GRUB run over a USB serial adapter as well?
Hi, original poster here. Thanks for the info, especially with the wear on PCI connectors which I was not actually aware of. I'm hopefully in a situation which will not require me to plug-unplug stuff often (if at all). From what I've seen, you are right with the USB serial adapters, since they do work but you don't actually get to see the GRUB menu due to the extra kernel drivers needed.
I actually wrote my question for situations where my "experimentation" leads to an OS configuration that's broken and requires me to jump in starting at the GRUB menu to start fixing things. That's my main problem with the USB-TTY solution, but thanks for the info.
That's funny... nspluginwrapper tended to cause most of the problems I had with flash... since Adobe came out with the 64 bit Linux releases, I can't remember the last time the browser crashed due to Flash issues.
Yeah except for one big problem: Despite the fact that some posters who have self-persecution delusions think so, the Bush administration did not go around yanking down every insult and parody against him on the Internet. If he had, then 90% of the posts from most /. stories that pass as "politics" would have been taken down by those evil Bushies... last time I checked they were all still there. As other posters have pointed out there are all kinds of nasty photoshop pictures of Bush that were put up while he was president and never taken down.
The stupid lines you parroted above are not what your evil "neocon" enemies were saying, but rather what other liberals parroted to make themselves feel more oppressed and therefore more self righteous. Hell, George Bush had protesters right outside of his private home in the middle of Texas and nothing happened to them except Cindy Sheehan made bags of money and got her own cult following. When Bush was asked about Cindy Sheehan, he didn't call her a Nazi (See Nancy Pelosi insulting people who have done more honest work than she ever will for that), instead he said that he understood that she felt hurt and that she had a right to protest, but that he still believed in what he was doing. Now you can disagree with Bush, but I'm getting REALLY sick of the liberal mantra that all anti-Bush speech was suppressed for the last 8 years because it couldn't be farther from the truth.
I've been a 99% Linux user since 2000, including 3 years of law school where I really only used Windows during exams because of Exam4 requirements. However, I'm starting a job at a (small) law firm and my laptop has Win 7 all loaded up and running. My prognosis so far: I can live with 7, especially because it runs Firefox and Cygwin runs Bash and basic UNIX utilities OK as well. I can even use VIM.
Is it particularly fast? No, but it is not insanely slow. My laptop is recent but not super-high end, 2.2Ghz Core2 with 4GB of RAM is the good part, the Intel graphics are the bad part. Frankly, the Aero effects on Windows 7 work just as well as the compositing effects from KDE 4.3, meaning that they do work, but not blazingly fast like on my desktop with the Nvidia card. As for memory usage... despite claims to the contrary, Linux using a modern, fully featured desktop uses a little bit less RAM, but not significantly less. I'm not even close to filling up my 4GB even with office, firefox, and miscellaneous junk running, so no biggies there.
I'm not a fan of Windows, I think that Windows 7 is somewhat boring for a "huge" release, but it does get the job done. My new job is concerned with me being able to write office documents and access Exchange + a small windows network, which Win7 makes stupidly simple. Do I miss virtual desktops? Sure. Am I annoyed that Windows still doesn't have very good window management and that I can't get rid of the annoying borders on my windows that the Bespin KDE theme lets me annihilate? You bet. At the same time, Windows does make certain configuration tasks easier (especially graphics & wireless even though I can and do use graphical utilities under Linux).
I'm not saying that I couldn't do this just as well in Linux, but I am saying that I don't have the time to get my system tweaked to the rest of the office... at least immediately. This is a small law firm with technically proficient lawyers, and being the most junior associate I won't be shocked if I get some IT related tasks from time to time, but my day job is to be able to use nice boring office software, which Windows 7 allows for in a reasonably secure way.
As for the XP part of this... I had an old XP license that I did purchase fair & square (for $10 from my University back in the day). It could have gotten the job done for a while, but Win7 really does have better security and like it or not it is the path forward. One major feature that Win7 has over XP is the find option in the start menu. Since MS keeps screwing with the Control Panel and everything else, I almost never bother to hunt through menus. Instead I just type in what I want to do in the search bar and it does a very good job of finding what I want. In fact, it's likely faster that me clicking menus even if I did know where stuff was. I'm not sure if XP even had this feature but Win7 makes it very easy to use by default and I've saved quite a bit of time with it... so there ya go, one actual reason to upgrade!
Give me a free pony and I'll have little hate for you!
Oh wait.. you mean that the fiber doesn't grow up to my door all by itself?
"You dont get something for nothing
You dont get freedom for free"
-- Rush