I'm not saying that it's not a ripoff, but CD ripping programs are not illegal. Even in the good 'ol USSA, they're legit, since you're not breaking any DRM to take the tracks off the disc (unlike a DVD ripper).
There are lots of CDs where I liked most or all of the songs on the disc, but I wouldn't have purchased them individually if I'd had a choice. That is, they're acceptable, but they're obviously filler. At $6-10 for the whole disc, I'll buy it, because the value of the songs I like makes up for the somewhat lower value of the filler songs, and I don't find them so offensive that I need to skip over them when I'm listening to a disc or anything... but if I was going to buy the music a la carte, I'd just pick out the handful of songs I want and discard the rest.
It's a question of alternatives. If I like three songs on a disc a lot, and the rest not quite so much, I'm only going to buy the three songs. It's not because I hate the other songs on the disc, but because I know I can save the money, and then turn around and spend it on the best few songs from three or four other albums. By doing that, the net quality of my music collection (in my own, totally subjective, estimation) is higher.
I know there's a virtually limitless quantity of music out there to discover; the limiting factor is going to be my money and time, not the available music. So therefore, it makes sense to only buy the best tracks from each disc, if that option is available.
No one cares about the pirates. They're fair game, and will probably either crack it or work around it somehow anyway. The point is we KNOW that legitimate users WILL be affected, and THAT should be against the law. Some countries in Asia where most of the computers are running pirated versions of Windows might care. On a national level, it might start to cause major productivity hits to have all the computers shut down periodically, as the pirates and Microsoft play cat-and-mouse.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine that some of those countries might get a bit ticked (particularly if someone dropped the government's VLK, or whatever the Vista equivalent is, onto Usenet and got all the government's systems disabled as a result) and pass a law against such behavior. Or maybe they'd threaten to invalidate Microsoft's copyrights in their country or something. I doubt they'd actually do anything significant, but it would be entertaining anyway.
But personally, I think this is great. I wish Microsoft much luck with this, uh, endeavor, and if they had a way to instantly destroy every pirated copy of Windows in the world, I'd hope they'd do it tomorrow. The world is a better place the fewer working installs of Windows are in it, regardless of whether they're pirated or not.
The world needs to realize the true cost of the Windows monoculture, and I can't think of a better way to demonstrate that, than for a large number of Windows installs to just suddenly seize up and stop working. Even better if they're a significant fraction of the IT infrastructure in a country, since that pretty much ensures that they'll never be that dependent on a single vendor ever again.
(On a more serious note, doesn't the term "reduced functionality" imply that something is still functional? The description makes it sound like it disables the system entirely.) It still blows warm air out the back?
If poor software is criminal, who do I get arrested for all those times I tried to install Linux only to be greeted with the inability to connect to the network, get X running, or use most of my peripherals?
So, what is going to happen when M$ screws up and starts blocking products that are 'genuine'? This will happen and I'll bet that the least painful thing that a customer will be able to do is purchase a new copy. I doubt that M$ will go out of their way to check to see if a blocked customer has a legit copy. This is going to be awesome. Personally, I hope that they enforce this with an iron fist. It's going to be great when some disgruntled employee decides to screw their ex-employer by posting their VLK on Usenet, and waits for Microsoft to pick it up and zap all their machines. Sure, they'll get back up and running eventually, but it'll be a hell of a mess. Or when people figure out the algorithm Microsoft uses to generate valid activation codes, and starts posting large blocks of already-used ones on the 'net just to cause problems.
It's like a virus or remote-triggerable malware that you don't need to actually introduce, because it's already there, waiting, on the machines. All you need to do is tell Microsoft, via the right channels (by giving the license key to pirates), and MS will do the dirty work for you. The possibilities for extortion are limitless.
Please, Microsoft... as someone who hates you so very much... show your customers no mercy.
Agreed. Also, the terminology has become confused. "Liberal" and "conservative" in modern American politics have very little to do with the traditional definitions of those words. If you want someone who is in favor of classical liberalism, you actually have to look somewhere over on the "conservative" side of the aisle, but you have to dodge around the authoritarians, neoconservatives, and theocrats. Similarly, true conservatives in the New Federalist school have become increasingly rare as well (particularly as 'states rights' has been co-opted by the pro-life crowd as a code word for overturning Roe v. Wade and driven the more libertarian-leaning conservatives away).
The differences between the Democrats and Republicans have become increasingly minor, as they both have attempted to woo the same block of voters while neglecting to maintain any coherent political philosophy other than what seems to get them elected.
I think this is correct. Much as I'd like it if the FCC did require the software in SDRs to be user-replaceable, in reality I think they want the opposite. They want to eliminate the ability for users to tinker with anything, and that's exactly what the GPL is designed to protect.
Your points would carry a lot more weight without the hyperbole. Having a military base in some country, with their permission, isn't "occupying" them.
The term 'occupation' indicates control over territory. We don't 'occupy' Cuba. We have a naval base there, but we don't control the rest of the country. (Unless you think that Castro is just a U.S. puppet. Or something.) To be honest, the world would probably be a significantly safer place if the U.S. did have significant control over several of the countries on that list, but we don't.
You undermine your own point through exaggeration and inflated rhetoric.
While I think that a USB hard drive is better than just keeping your data stored on your workstation's drive and no where else, it's not a great backup device. Hard drives, particularly when placed into el-cheapo external enclosures, can go south fast.
Case in point: earlier this year I bought a decent Seagate drive and put it in a plastic and aluminum FireWire/USB case from CompUSA. Worked fine, ran well. Then I went away on vacation for a week and didn't switch the thing off before I left (I hit my backup script just as I was walking out the door, figuring I'd let it run and not wait). I came back and the drive was making an awful screeching sound. I touched the drive case and nearly burned myself -- you could have fried an egg on it. The case hadn't let the platters spin down, and it didn't radiate enough heat (it was mounted vertically, free-standing, not touching anything else that produced heat). It had literally baked the drive. So much for that backup.
Those cheap drive boxes are OK for sneakernetting large quantities of data around, but I wouldn't use them for a backup unless you're absolutely religious about switching it off after the backup is done, or you have one of those rare (and expensive) drive enclosures that actually spins the drive down, and has a vent fan to keep it cool. They're better than nothing, but they can be very scary in their own way. As a backup solution for most people, I think they're too unreliable and easy to damage.
Overall, optical discs (provided you buy good ones) are a good solution for most important files. Backing up music collections onto them can be pretty obnoxious, but most things that are really irreplaceable fit easily. If the discs are stored in binders, you can fit quite a large amount of data into a small space. Also, you can mail the discs cheaply, which makes for a low-tech way of performing off-site backups: work out a deal with a friend or family member, and swap CD binders with them. Periodically mail them your latest backup disc, and they send you theirs, and each of you file it in the other guy's binder. (Encrypting it first, if you don't trust them completely.) Instant off-site backup, no bandwidth required; discs are good for probably a few decades at least.
On the other hand, like I said before, I think that kdawson may just be fulfilling a specific mandate from the "management" at Slashdot, which is to ensure that articles keep being posted when none others are showing up. In which case, even if kdawson was canned they would just find someone else to do the same thing, making the problem more endemic in Slashdot as a whole and less with a particular editor. I agree, and I'm not honestly sure that it's such a bad thing. Yes, it raises the S/N ratio. But it's not like bad stories automatically equal bad discussions. And really, who reads Slashdot for the articles, anyway? Most days you can read 90% of what's on Slashdot's front page by reading the "Geek" section of Fark, or Digg, or any number of other sites. (Yes, Slashdot does get the occasional scoop. But that's not what keeps me reading daily, and I doubt it's what attracts most other readers, either.)
If you don't have new topics up for discussion fairly frequently, then the discussions stagnate and die, and with it goes your readership. One of the reasons I don't comment as much on K5 as I used to, is that there are just too few articles (although we could argue for a while as to what the root cause of that is; the decline of K5 is fascinating in itself).
I look at kdawson's "grist mill" stories, and click through to the discussion most of the time, because sometimes it's the really boring and/or trite stories that provoke the most interesting (usually offtopic) discussions.
I have no idea about this company, but there are still a lot of web hosts around that don't provide SSH or rsync access. Basically they stick you with FTP and a few lame MySQL tools that you can access through a newbie-empowering management interface, and nothing else.
Combine that with the promises many hosting companies make about backups, and it's a setup for data loss. Particularly on sites that have a lot of user-driven content (meaning that the server's copy really is the original) stored in databases, all it takes is for the operator to get lax about sucking down a full copy of the site on a regular basis, and then the hosting company to go under (or have some sort of significant failure). Suddenly the content is just *gone*.
Lots of clueless people are in charge of web sites. Sadly, this isn't going to change in the future, and it's probably going to get a whole lot worse. As companies have scrambled to make it easier for the clueless to use their services, they often cut corners on features that would make data safety easier (like shell/rsync access).
And worse, they become less self-sufficient and have to import all their food. Food aid programs already guarantee this in many parts of Africa. When you stop people from starving by importing food, you've created a 'customer' for life.
It's like I RTFA, but then again I don't feel like I RTFA. Anyone else notice that? Is there some "Page 2" button I'm missing? Nope. The article really was that terrible.
Unfortunately though, the WinModems were never as serious a problem as the current crop of Wifi cards are (and the upcoming driver-based Ethernet cards may be, if some of the predictions I've read come true). With modems, you could always go out and buy an external, serial-interface unit. They weren't hard to find, and every retard at a big-box computer store understood what you were talking about when you asked for an "external modem."
You only ran into trouble with modems if you started getting internal, PCI card ones. (Okay, and there was that weird Apple external thing, the Geoport. But to their great credit, they never called it a modem.) With Wifi cards, you can be just as screwed regardless of what kind of card -- PCI, PCMCIA, USB -- you choose. Even if you try to buy a particular model, you can still get something that doesn't work because the manufacturer has changed the hardware without any indication on the box.
About the only 'guaranteed' way to get wireless working on a Linux machine is to eschew traditional interface cards and go for something that's an Ethernet-to-Wifi bridge instead (usually called 'game adapters'). Like external modems, these use a standard, well-documented interface for both data and control. But they're expensive and I predict that as more game consoles ship with integrated wireless, they're going to be increasingly hard to find.
The key part of that part of the Constitution is "in Suits at common law". That's not just some grandoise, excessive verbiage. That phrase has a very specific meaning. Remember: the Constitution was written by a bunch of lawyers. They didn't say "common law" there by accident.
Contracts are not "suits at common law." Breach of contracts usually falls under "equity," rather than "law." That might seem like a pedantic distinction, but at the time the Constitution was written, IIRC they were handled by two separate courts (and may still be, in parts of the Commonwealth). It was traditional to have a "Court of Law" and a "Court of Equity," with separate judges, etc. In the U.S. we have eliminated some of the distinctions -- at least in most states, we don't have separate 'courts of equity' anymore -- but the two types of cases are still handled quite differently.
This is a case of EQUITY, and thus doesn't get a jury trial.
Um, you realize that ntpd is rejecting the server that disagrees with the others by ~19 milliseconds, right? It's using the top one as its source, backed up by the bottom two.
Yes. There are lots of time-sensitive tasks that require at least second-accuracy, some that require accuracy that's greater than that.
The first thing that comes to mind is remote logging. If I have several machines logging to some remote machine somewhere (as you should on any non-trivial system, to make a log falsification more difficult), it makes log analysis a lot easier if I know that the timestamps in the log are accurate and consistent across machines. Particularly if you ever have to dig through a break-in (or what you think might be a break-in), or just user stupidity, where you want to match actions taken on one machine to results on another.
At the very least, you want to make sure that all the clocks on the machines are accurate to at least the smallest interval of time that you might have two timestamps on the log apart by. Or if that's not possible, at least within a span so that the same human-initiated command will be discernible across the system at the same time in the logs.
Other things that involve remote data-collection have the same issue. At the very least, you need to have all your computers set so that they're accurate to some factor that's less than the time between data collections. While "data collection" sounds esoteric, it could be something as simple as sending emails from one computer to another, or combining two stacks of digital photos taken from some webcams (if they're portables, that's a separate ball of wax).
Now, do most of these things require all of the computers in your home network to be individually pinging a Level 2 timeserver? No. It would work just as well to have your gateway router get the time from a timeserver, and then offer NTP broadcasts to your network, so that everything could just synchronize itself. You'd have high precision local time, for synchronization, and reasonable accuracy time to a national standard. But that's beyond most users, so most OSes just have each workstation take care of things on its own.
I think they used to do this on some very old drives. (Big ones, not 3.5" AFAIK.) Also, when you think about the evolution of hard drives, remember that they came from drum systems where there was one head for every track on the drum, so it wouldn't have been a particularly foreign concept to the guys designing the earliest ones.
IIRC, it's not as effective as you might think it would be at first glance. Although it does help some workloads (ones that are seek-limited), I don't think the improvements were enough to justify the technical complexity, which is fairly significant -- especially when it comes to writing or doing simultaneous read/writes (and I don't know how you'd handle cache). Also, apparently you might run into problems maintaining head alignment between multiple servo/head assemblies working on the same platter [1].
The fact that the drive manufacturers gave up on it, and didn't bring it back out back when people were paying much more for fast storage than they do today (relative to consumer/mass-market equipment), makes me think there must have been multiple levels of 'gotchas' involved.
[1] Someone who sounds more knowledgeable than I responding to a similar question: here.
Streetlights were intended to reduce crime, and I'd say they do a pretty good job of that. Do you want people to carry a flashlight that would be like a lit sign saying "MUG ME!!!". You, sir, are an idiot.
Someone standing in the pool of light cast by a streetlight is a great crime target. They're a target because of the way most streetlights are designed, which over-illuminates patches of ground while creating solid shadows (because essentially they act like a point source) elsewhere. Someone standing in the lit area can't see a damn thing that's in the dark areas; someone that's hiding in a shadow can see everything. Short of lighting our cities like that Terminex commercial (you know, the one where the people in the house had the snow-blindness goggles on?), you're better off going for less illumination: lower-intensity, even lighting, or lights that are triggered by motion, IR, or sound sensors.
Also, you don't mug someone carrying a hefty club in their hand. Even if they don't know what they're doing, it's easy to get clocked in the head with a MagLite and end up in a world of hurt. Someone walking around, talking on a cellphone would be a much better target.
That doesn't make it any harder than the current situation, which requires the download of an entirely separate piece of software (iPlayer), not just a codec.
Plus, doesn't WMP try to go and find the codec automatically, the first time you open some piece of media that you've never played before?
As much as I'd like to be on speaking terms with anything in low-earth orbit, I was referring to Law Enforcement Officers, a sort of blanket term for anyone operating in a police/investigative role. Basically anyone who routinely carries a badge and a gun, which includes some 60+ agencies at the Federal level and who knows how many state ones.
Apple Mail will do this; just go into the View menu (I think it's in the View menu) and choose "View by thread," then sort the list by Date. (You can also have a threaded view where each thread is listed alphabetically or by author, but this makes less sense to me than viewing each by the date of the newest message.) When you click on a thread, you'll see a list of the messages in the thread in the viewing pane.
Most other MUAs will do something similar. Off the top of my head, I think both Mutt and Pine will, and probably even (gag) Outlook. I know old versions of Outlook Express would.
Frankly, you'd have to have a pretty crummy MUA, whether web or real, to not support threading.
Avoiding that is the whole point of agriculture in the first place! I'm not sure that I'd agree with this. The major benefit of agriculture is that it allows for specialization: when you stop hunting-and-gathering and start farming, not everyone needs to spend their entire day involved in food production. This allows for civilization. A side-effect of this is that you can support much higher populations, but the real difference is in the specialization of roles. (Since a tribe of hunter-gatherers working off of some very good land can have a large population relative to those in poor land, it's nothing really new.)
We've been pretty good, historically, at wringing greater and greater efficiencies out of our food-production apparatus, so that we can support continually increasing population, but it's not population increase that's the hallmark of civilization. It's the specialization.
To be perfectly frank, the thing that's going to prevent ecological collapse (since it's plainly not sustainable to have an ever-increasing population; eventually you run out of room if nothing else), is birth control and increased life-spans through medical care. When people have the ability to choose when to reproduce or not, they do a pretty good job of only doing it when there are sufficient resources available for their offspring. Additionally, when people know that they'll be able to reproduce well into middle age (what would, in earlier societies, have been considered old age), a lot of the pressure to pop 'em out early and often disappears.
The real problem is trying to bring all the societies on the planet up to the technological and social level where they begin to flatten or decline their populations, before we either reach (a) environmental collapse, or (b) economic pressures make it no longer desirable to produce enough food for increasing populations in the non-industrialized world. I think option B is more likely than A, personally, since we're seeing it already. As much as people in the industrialized world love to talk about the high value of human life, in practice we don't do very much when the lives in question are poor and on the other side of the planet. Eventually the opportunity cost of land currently being used for agriculture will exceed the amount that poor people can pay for food, the land will be transformed for other purposes, and the poor people will starve (or be killed when they try to take food from people with more wealth and power).
What is sad to me is that agriculture is shrinking at the same time the demand for food world-wide is increasing. In the anything but the short term, they balance each other out nicely.
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I'm not saying that it's not a ripoff, but CD ripping programs are not illegal. Even in the good 'ol USSA, they're legit, since you're not breaking any DRM to take the tracks off the disc (unlike a DVD ripper).
I'm in that camp, sort of.
... but if I was going to buy the music a la carte, I'd just pick out the handful of songs I want and discard the rest.
There are lots of CDs where I liked most or all of the songs on the disc, but I wouldn't have purchased them individually if I'd had a choice. That is, they're acceptable, but they're obviously filler. At $6-10 for the whole disc, I'll buy it, because the value of the songs I like makes up for the somewhat lower value of the filler songs, and I don't find them so offensive that I need to skip over them when I'm listening to a disc or anything
It's a question of alternatives. If I like three songs on a disc a lot, and the rest not quite so much, I'm only going to buy the three songs. It's not because I hate the other songs on the disc, but because I know I can save the money, and then turn around and spend it on the best few songs from three or four other albums. By doing that, the net quality of my music collection (in my own, totally subjective, estimation) is higher.
I know there's a virtually limitless quantity of music out there to discover; the limiting factor is going to be my money and time, not the available music. So therefore, it makes sense to only buy the best tracks from each disc, if that option is available.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine that some of those countries might get a bit ticked (particularly if someone dropped the government's VLK, or whatever the Vista equivalent is, onto Usenet and got all the government's systems disabled as a result) and pass a law against such behavior. Or maybe they'd threaten to invalidate Microsoft's copyrights in their country or something. I doubt they'd actually do anything significant, but it would be entertaining anyway.
But personally, I think this is great. I wish Microsoft much luck with this, uh, endeavor, and if they had a way to instantly destroy every pirated copy of Windows in the world, I'd hope they'd do it tomorrow. The world is a better place the fewer working installs of Windows are in it, regardless of whether they're pirated or not.
The world needs to realize the true cost of the Windows monoculture, and I can't think of a better way to demonstrate that, than for a large number of Windows installs to just suddenly seize up and stop working. Even better if they're a significant fraction of the IT infrastructure in a country, since that pretty much ensures that they'll never be that dependent on a single vendor ever again.
If poor software is criminal, who do I get arrested for all those times I tried to install Linux only to be greeted with the inability to connect to the network, get X running, or use most of my peripherals?
In that case, you're entitled to a full refund.
It's like a virus or remote-triggerable malware that you don't need to actually introduce, because it's already there, waiting, on the machines. All you need to do is tell Microsoft, via the right channels (by giving the license key to pirates), and MS will do the dirty work for you. The possibilities for extortion are limitless.
Please, Microsoft
Agreed. Also, the terminology has become confused. "Liberal" and "conservative" in modern American politics have very little to do with the traditional definitions of those words. If you want someone who is in favor of classical liberalism, you actually have to look somewhere over on the "conservative" side of the aisle, but you have to dodge around the authoritarians, neoconservatives, and theocrats. Similarly, true conservatives in the New Federalist school have become increasingly rare as well (particularly as 'states rights' has been co-opted by the pro-life crowd as a code word for overturning Roe v. Wade and driven the more libertarian-leaning conservatives away).
The differences between the Democrats and Republicans have become increasingly minor, as they both have attempted to woo the same block of voters while neglecting to maintain any coherent political philosophy other than what seems to get them elected.
I think this is correct. Much as I'd like it if the FCC did require the software in SDRs to be user-replaceable, in reality I think they want the opposite. They want to eliminate the ability for users to tinker with anything, and that's exactly what the GPL is designed to protect.
Your points would carry a lot more weight without the hyperbole. Having a military base in some country, with their permission, isn't "occupying" them.
The term 'occupation' indicates control over territory. We don't 'occupy' Cuba. We have a naval base there, but we don't control the rest of the country. (Unless you think that Castro is just a U.S. puppet. Or something.) To be honest, the world would probably be a significantly safer place if the U.S. did have significant control over several of the countries on that list, but we don't.
You undermine your own point through exaggeration and inflated rhetoric.
While I think that a USB hard drive is better than just keeping your data stored on your workstation's drive and no where else, it's not a great backup device. Hard drives, particularly when placed into el-cheapo external enclosures, can go south fast.
Case in point: earlier this year I bought a decent Seagate drive and put it in a plastic and aluminum FireWire/USB case from CompUSA. Worked fine, ran well. Then I went away on vacation for a week and didn't switch the thing off before I left (I hit my backup script just as I was walking out the door, figuring I'd let it run and not wait). I came back and the drive was making an awful screeching sound. I touched the drive case and nearly burned myself -- you could have fried an egg on it. The case hadn't let the platters spin down, and it didn't radiate enough heat (it was mounted vertically, free-standing, not touching anything else that produced heat). It had literally baked the drive. So much for that backup.
Those cheap drive boxes are OK for sneakernetting large quantities of data around, but I wouldn't use them for a backup unless you're absolutely religious about switching it off after the backup is done, or you have one of those rare (and expensive) drive enclosures that actually spins the drive down, and has a vent fan to keep it cool. They're better than nothing, but they can be very scary in their own way. As a backup solution for most people, I think they're too unreliable and easy to damage.
Overall, optical discs (provided you buy good ones) are a good solution for most important files. Backing up music collections onto them can be pretty obnoxious, but most things that are really irreplaceable fit easily. If the discs are stored in binders, you can fit quite a large amount of data into a small space. Also, you can mail the discs cheaply, which makes for a low-tech way of performing off-site backups: work out a deal with a friend or family member, and swap CD binders with them. Periodically mail them your latest backup disc, and they send you theirs, and each of you file it in the other guy's binder. (Encrypting it first, if you don't trust them completely.) Instant off-site backup, no bandwidth required; discs are good for probably a few decades at least.
If you don't have new topics up for discussion fairly frequently, then the discussions stagnate and die, and with it goes your readership. One of the reasons I don't comment as much on K5 as I used to, is that there are just too few articles (although we could argue for a while as to what the root cause of that is; the decline of K5 is fascinating in itself).
I look at kdawson's "grist mill" stories, and click through to the discussion most of the time, because sometimes it's the really boring and/or trite stories that provoke the most interesting (usually offtopic) discussions.
I have no idea about this company, but there are still a lot of web hosts around that don't provide SSH or rsync access. Basically they stick you with FTP and a few lame MySQL tools that you can access through a newbie-empowering management interface, and nothing else.
Combine that with the promises many hosting companies make about backups, and it's a setup for data loss. Particularly on sites that have a lot of user-driven content (meaning that the server's copy really is the original) stored in databases, all it takes is for the operator to get lax about sucking down a full copy of the site on a regular basis, and then the hosting company to go under (or have some sort of significant failure). Suddenly the content is just *gone*.
Lots of clueless people are in charge of web sites. Sadly, this isn't going to change in the future, and it's probably going to get a whole lot worse. As companies have scrambled to make it easier for the clueless to use their services, they often cut corners on features that would make data safety easier (like shell/rsync access).
Unfortunately though, the WinModems were never as serious a problem as the current crop of Wifi cards are (and the upcoming driver-based Ethernet cards may be, if some of the predictions I've read come true). With modems, you could always go out and buy an external, serial-interface unit. They weren't hard to find, and every retard at a big-box computer store understood what you were talking about when you asked for an "external modem."
You only ran into trouble with modems if you started getting internal, PCI card ones. (Okay, and there was that weird Apple external thing, the Geoport. But to their great credit, they never called it a modem.) With Wifi cards, you can be just as screwed regardless of what kind of card -- PCI, PCMCIA, USB -- you choose. Even if you try to buy a particular model, you can still get something that doesn't work because the manufacturer has changed the hardware without any indication on the box.
About the only 'guaranteed' way to get wireless working on a Linux machine is to eschew traditional interface cards and go for something that's an Ethernet-to-Wifi bridge instead (usually called 'game adapters'). Like external modems, these use a standard, well-documented interface for both data and control. But they're expensive and I predict that as more game consoles ship with integrated wireless, they're going to be increasingly hard to find.
The key part of that part of the Constitution is "in Suits at common law". That's not just some grandoise, excessive verbiage. That phrase has a very specific meaning. Remember: the Constitution was written by a bunch of lawyers. They didn't say "common law" there by accident.
Contracts are not "suits at common law." Breach of contracts usually falls under "equity," rather than "law." That might seem like a pedantic distinction, but at the time the Constitution was written, IIRC they were handled by two separate courts (and may still be, in parts of the Commonwealth). It was traditional to have a "Court of Law" and a "Court of Equity," with separate judges, etc. In the U.S. we have eliminated some of the distinctions -- at least in most states, we don't have separate 'courts of equity' anymore -- but the two types of cases are still handled quite differently.
This is a case of EQUITY, and thus doesn't get a jury trial.
Um, you realize that ntpd is rejecting the server that disagrees with the others by ~19 milliseconds, right? It's using the top one as its source, backed up by the bottom two.
Yes. There are lots of time-sensitive tasks that require at least second-accuracy, some that require accuracy that's greater than that.
The first thing that comes to mind is remote logging. If I have several machines logging to some remote machine somewhere (as you should on any non-trivial system, to make a log falsification more difficult), it makes log analysis a lot easier if I know that the timestamps in the log are accurate and consistent across machines. Particularly if you ever have to dig through a break-in (or what you think might be a break-in), or just user stupidity, where you want to match actions taken on one machine to results on another.
At the very least, you want to make sure that all the clocks on the machines are accurate to at least the smallest interval of time that you might have two timestamps on the log apart by. Or if that's not possible, at least within a span so that the same human-initiated command will be discernible across the system at the same time in the logs.
Other things that involve remote data-collection have the same issue. At the very least, you need to have all your computers set so that they're accurate to some factor that's less than the time between data collections. While "data collection" sounds esoteric, it could be something as simple as sending emails from one computer to another, or combining two stacks of digital photos taken from some webcams (if they're portables, that's a separate ball of wax).
Now, do most of these things require all of the computers in your home network to be individually pinging a Level 2 timeserver? No. It would work just as well to have your gateway router get the time from a timeserver, and then offer NTP broadcasts to your network, so that everything could just synchronize itself. You'd have high precision local time, for synchronization, and reasonable accuracy time to a national standard. But that's beyond most users, so most OSes just have each workstation take care of things on its own.
I think they used to do this on some very old drives. (Big ones, not 3.5" AFAIK.) Also, when you think about the evolution of hard drives, remember that they came from drum systems where there was one head for every track on the drum, so it wouldn't have been a particularly foreign concept to the guys designing the earliest ones.
IIRC, it's not as effective as you might think it would be at first glance. Although it does help some workloads (ones that are seek-limited), I don't think the improvements were enough to justify the technical complexity, which is fairly significant -- especially when it comes to writing or doing simultaneous read/writes (and I don't know how you'd handle cache). Also, apparently you might run into problems maintaining head alignment between multiple servo/head assemblies working on the same platter [1].
The fact that the drive manufacturers gave up on it, and didn't bring it back out back when people were paying much more for fast storage than they do today (relative to consumer/mass-market equipment), makes me think there must have been multiple levels of 'gotchas' involved.
[1] Someone who sounds more knowledgeable than I responding to a similar question: here.
Someone standing in the pool of light cast by a streetlight is a great crime target. They're a target because of the way most streetlights are designed, which over-illuminates patches of ground while creating solid shadows (because essentially they act like a point source) elsewhere. Someone standing in the lit area can't see a damn thing that's in the dark areas; someone that's hiding in a shadow can see everything. Short of lighting our cities like that Terminex commercial (you know, the one where the people in the house had the snow-blindness goggles on?), you're better off going for less illumination: lower-intensity, even lighting, or lights that are triggered by motion, IR, or sound sensors.
Also, you don't mug someone carrying a hefty club in their hand. Even if they don't know what they're doing, it's easy to get clocked in the head with a MagLite and end up in a world of hurt. Someone walking around, talking on a cellphone would be a much better target.
That doesn't make it any harder than the current situation, which requires the download of an entirely separate piece of software (iPlayer), not just a codec.
Plus, doesn't WMP try to go and find the codec automatically, the first time you open some piece of media that you've never played before?
As much as I'd like to be on speaking terms with anything in low-earth orbit, I was referring to Law Enforcement Officers, a sort of blanket term for anyone operating in a police/investigative role. Basically anyone who routinely carries a badge and a gun, which includes some 60+ agencies at the Federal level and who knows how many state ones.
Apple Mail will do this; just go into the View menu (I think it's in the View menu) and choose "View by thread," then sort the list by Date. (You can also have a threaded view where each thread is listed alphabetically or by author, but this makes less sense to me than viewing each by the date of the newest message.) When you click on a thread, you'll see a list of the messages in the thread in the viewing pane.
Most other MUAs will do something similar. Off the top of my head, I think both Mutt and Pine will, and probably even (gag) Outlook. I know old versions of Outlook Express would.
Frankly, you'd have to have a pretty crummy MUA, whether web or real, to not support threading.
We've been pretty good, historically, at wringing greater and greater efficiencies out of our food-production apparatus, so that we can support continually increasing population, but it's not population increase that's the hallmark of civilization. It's the specialization.
To be perfectly frank, the thing that's going to prevent ecological collapse (since it's plainly not sustainable to have an ever-increasing population; eventually you run out of room if nothing else), is birth control and increased life-spans through medical care. When people have the ability to choose when to reproduce or not, they do a pretty good job of only doing it when there are sufficient resources available for their offspring. Additionally, when people know that they'll be able to reproduce well into middle age (what would, in earlier societies, have been considered old age), a lot of the pressure to pop 'em out early and often disappears.
The real problem is trying to bring all the societies on the planet up to the technological and social level where they begin to flatten or decline their populations, before we either reach (a) environmental collapse, or (b) economic pressures make it no longer desirable to produce enough food for increasing populations in the non-industrialized world. I think option B is more likely than A, personally, since we're seeing it already. As much as people in the industrialized world love to talk about the high value of human life, in practice we don't do very much when the lives in question are poor and on the other side of the planet. Eventually the opportunity cost of land currently being used for agriculture will exceed the amount that poor people can pay for food, the land will be transformed for other purposes, and the poor people will starve (or be killed when they try to take food from people with more wealth and power).