It doesn't matter if they invented it, only if they patented it. Which is what's wrong with the whole system.
Not true. The U.S. patent system is based on a "first to invent" doctrine, not "first to file."
Applying for a patent often serves as proof that you had indeed invented something at a certain time (at least the filing date), and creates a bit of a barrier for someone else to prove that they invented it earlier (since they'd need to conclusively demonstrate that they had done it before you had), but it's not unheard of or even especially uncommon historically.
That's the whole idea behind 'prior art' in the U.S.: if you can demonstrate that you, or somebody else, had invented something and published it before the person who got the patent for it did, then the patent can be ruled invalid.
There are some (IMO, really poorly thought-out) proposals that would change the U.S. system to a "first to file" one, which is more common throughout the rest of the world, but it hasn't happened yet.
As I'm sure many people will point out, the "life in prison" part is for situation "where the defendant knowingly or recklessly causes or attempts to cause death." That doesn't seem so unreasonable now, does it?
It's still unnecessary. Killing someone, or trying to kill someone, or being so negligent as to cause someone's death, are already illegal. There's no reason why death-by-counterfeit-pharmaceuticals should carry a harsher penalty than death by any other means.
We already have a legal system that can cope with these situations quite well, based on a number of general principles and long-established precedent; there's no reason to overburden it with tons and tons of special-case legislation.
Why don't we just reorganize the RIAA as another extension of the federal government? They're practically there anyway, and they'd be able to add an RIAA Piracy tax to our paychecks.
Because then they'd have to pay lip service to things like Due Process and the Freedom of Information Act. They're much happier as a private organization that simply gets the government to do its bidding for it.
No, wait! I've got it! Goddamn, I'm a genius. Why not put the INNOCENT people in prison. That way there'll be plenty of room for the law abiding and plenty of room for us copyright infringing, foreigner associating, freedom valuing, evolution accepting, internet surfing no-goodniks in the hellbound moral cesspit that is society today. Problem solved.
Why not kill them? It guarantees that they'll go straight to Heaven -- no chance for the rest of us in the Satan-bait section to tempt them with our sex, drugs, rock-and-roll music, and, apparently, unlicensed software.
If this is to pass, what immoral act would next be prosecuted? Being gay? Being obese? Being lazy?
Well, there's an election coming up; it wouldn't surprise me.
Although I doubt they'd make obesity illegal -- too many of their constituents are fat. But as long as it's something that only a minority of the population is engaged in, history has shown there's lots of political capital in viciously oppressing unpopular behavior.
They won't like Japan moving away from their products. If Japan does it, then South Korea may follow, and then who knows what the future will hold in the Asian market? Microsoft has had an overwhelming market share in these countries for very long, and even though Japanese designers do use Macintosh computers, there's simply no way to get by without access to a Windows PC, due to the governmental reliance and the huge amount of Internet applications that require IE6. It will take quite some time for businesses to follow, but imagine if they lost a fair chunk of their share in those markets: it would mean a big loss, both in business potential and in PR, since it's certainly not doing your company any good when an entire country is moving away from it (especially when it's a big and important one in the field of technology like Japan).
Although I agree this move is definitely a Good Thing, it seems to be all about eliminating the reliance on Windows as a server platform. It's still quite possible to move a web page from IIS to Apache2 and have it require IE as a client-side browser. Apache will serve up shitty HTML just as easily as good, standards-compliant HTML.
I don't know what the computing/OS market is like in Japan, but if they have a Windows monoculture on servers then it sounds like they're even deeper into the MS quicksand than we are in general here in the U.S., where there's at least some diversity in server platforms, if not much on the client side.
What it sounds like they're doing is a good start, but it's just a start. They have a ways to go before they'll really free end users from being tied to the Internet Explorer ball-and-chain. I can tell you from experience that's even harder than just switching server OSes, because in some cases it can involve a complete redesign of the web site in order to remove the IE-only stupidity that someone coded in.
No; however, I did have to look up bow shock, which frankly I think probably should have been linked in the summary.
Basically it's the 'wave' that precedes the sun or a planet as it passes through space, somewhat similar to the standing wave that you'd see in front of a big tanker ship going through the water. (Particularly one without a bulbous bow.) Rather than water, it's the solar wind that's being disrupted by the body's passage.
The problem is that the article writer thinks that useful things like router status and numlock lights (you'll agree if you actually use the keypad) are useless. He just hates lights.
Well, you could get rid of the lights on the keyboard, but not with the crappy membrane-switch keyboards that most people use. My ancient IBM Selectric typewriter doesn't have a pilot light for Caps Lock (or anything else), and doesn't need one, because the Caps Lock key actually locks down when you press it. It's pretty trivial to feel whether it's down or not, in fact you can do it when touch-typing just by sliding your little finger over a little. Likewise, it doesn't have a pilot light for power, because the power switch is a huge thing that locks into position, so you can see or feel which way it's turned (and also, because it produces the most wonderful low hum and vibration from the motor when it's ready to go -- so just by resting your hand on it, you know whether it's on or not).
There's no particular reason why you couldn't build a keyboard that was like a Selectric's -- it would probably just cost $500 and require periodic maintenance with a can of light machine oil. Personally, I think that would be awesome, but I doubt too many other (non-Slashdot-types) would. [1] Caps-Lock lights are a compromise; a way of making a $9.99, virtually non-mechanical membrane-switch keyboard that doesn't leave you totally in the dark as to whether your next letter is going to be capitalized or not.
[1] Actually I think the Selectric is the pinnacle of man-machine interfaces, in terms of intuitiveness and using almost all of the human senses at once (okay, 4 out of 5; if you're licking your Selectric you're probably doing something wrong, or at least inadvisable), and it's been all downhill from there.
I think crappy USB hubs are about the worst offenders in terms of having completely unnecessary, hugely overbright, non-indicator-"indicator" lights.
Unlike an Ethernet switch, where you want at least one LED per port, to show whether there's a complete connection to another device, and then some idea of how much traffic is going to it, a USB hub only needs one LED, to show that it's receiving power from the host. Optionally, if it's a hub that can either use external power or bus power, there could be some sort of indicator to show bus vs external power -- but you still only have to have one LED on at a time. Putting 4 ultra-bright blue-white LEDs on a 4-port USB hub is just excessive; they don't show anything.
The problem is devices that were designed for appearance, versus designed for function. If you design for function, it doesn't preclude having an attractive appearance, but you can't let it get in the way of whatever the device's purpose is. If each LED has a purpose and function, I don't see that as a problem. It's when they're put on there by someone in the marketing department that they're really obnoxious.
Pachysandra is also good as a grass-alternative, if you're less into the 7-Eleven look for your front yard. Takes a few years to establish, but it's incredibly hardy and never needs mowing.
(I'm sure the eco-bunnies probably still don't like it, because it's a non-native species, but at least it's CO2-absorbing and green.)
Agreed. This is one of the reasons why I've always wished Apple would add disk-access lights to its systems, or maybe figure out a way to integrate disk-access into the one "master LED" that they like to put on the front of the Power Macs.
My IBM workstation has 4 LEDs on the front of it: power/status (solid for 'on,' off for 'off,' blinking for 'standby'), hard drive (seemingly any I/O on the primary IDE controller), network access (from the internal NIC), and an error light (triggered if it fails POST, I think, but I've never seen it on). I think they're all pretty defensible as things that ought to be displayed on the front of the CPU; I use the HD and eth0 lights a lot since I have a KVM switch -- I can start something on that machine, flip back to my other machine, and just keep an eye on the blinkenlights and know when it's probably done. (Are there other ways to do this? Sure; I could probably redirect its log to another machine, but this is a whole lot simpler.)
Computers are mysterious, sealed boxes to most people; when you pull all the indicator lights off of the front, you run the risk of making that perception worse. I like to know what the hell's going on inside mine, and chassis lights are an important part of that, particularly as cooling systems have gotten louder (tougher to hear the HD churn in many systems).
I've found out by experience though, that electrical tape isn't 100% opaque; put a bright enough LED under it, and stretch the tape a bit (as you might if you're putting it tightly over an protruding LED), and it'll shine through.
For really bright lights, a small square of aluminum foil works well, and is absolutely opaque.
One light I particularly enjoy is on my television. The indicator LED is ON when the tv is OFF, and OFF when the tv is ON.
That's because it's a standby light. It's ON when the television is in standby (modern televisions aren't "off" unless you unplug them), and otherwise OFF. Since it's not in standby when you're watching TV, it's quite properly off.
As other people have pointed out, it also lets you see where the power switch is, shows that the TV is receiving power when it's plugged in (as a diagnostic tool). Also, having an LED on right near the screen when it was on would be annoying, not to mention redundant.
Personally I find Apple's throb-effect standby lights a whole lot less obnoxious than standard blinking ones. I can't get to sleep in a room where there's a light blinking, but the throbbing ones don't bother me nearly as much.
But anyway, I don't really mind LEDs as long as they're actually indicative of something. Just cramming lights into a device for no particular reason is stupid; however, HD-access or network-access lights are pretty useful, although I'd support some way of turning them off for people who don't like them.
A router that didn't have a traffic LED on each port would be fairly annoying, and certainly not something that'd I'd buy; I use those things all the time. They serve a distinct purpose, and I'd much rather be able to see the status of the router immediately by looking at it, then have to bring up some sort of software status-page or program.
Looking at my equipment, the only really unnecessary use of LEDs that I can see is on USB hubs. There's no reason why those things need to have one LED for every port, when they're all just wired together and just serve to show whether the hub itself is connected. One LED, or at most two (one for "on, bus power" another for "on, external power"), with only one on at a time, would be totally sufficient.
Aside from that, the only other thing that bugs me is the unnecessary use of high-power blue LEDs. Unless you're building a flashlight, leave those things out; I can only imagine that they cost more than low-power green or red ones, and there's just no reason to have a status indicator light that's powerful enough to shine a distinct circle on the 8' ceiling. That's just excessive. White and blue-white LEDs do look neat, but they should be used in moderation and at the minimum brightness required.
Although not perfectly accurate, computing your mileage using the reading from the gas pump and the odometer doesn't rely on running the gas tank "bone dry." All that it relies on, is that you fill the gas tank back up to the same level as you did the previous fillup. Since gas nozzles are basically standardized and tend to click off at the same point, this isn't a terrible assumption. It's probably accurate at least to a few tenths of a gallon, in my experience of doing it in a small car.
Basically you fill the tank until the pump shuts it off, and reset the odo. This is your start point. You drive for a while, generally until you need gas again, and then you refill the gas tank until it again shuts off automatically, and note the amount of fuel added. You look at the odometer, and simply take the mileage there, and divide by the reading on the pump.
As long as you never fill your tank halfway, and you don't top off or otherwise force the gas pump to keep going after it shuts off automatically, and you reset the odo every time you fill up, you can get pretty good mileage estimates this way.
It's a different method than what I assume the car's computer is using (I'd think it's using some sort of reading from the engine's sensors) but it's not an inherently terrible methodology. If you use the same gas pump/nozzle to fill up each time, I'd imagine it could probably be quite accurate. At no time does it require you to run your car out of gas.
I prefer to have technology outside my body, not inside. Thank you.
So, um, you take any drugs lately? (I don't mean the 'fun' kind, I mean of the CVS kind.) If you have, I know a couple of good ChemE's who'd like to have a word with you about chemicals not being "technology."
If you really are consistent and don't ingest any type of technology (well, you're going to have to bite the bullet and accept some level of hypocrisy somewhere -- there aren't enough unmodified edible plant species left for most people to eat), then kudos, but realize that you're in a basically-insignificant fringe minority. Most people don't think twice before popping a Benadryl or a Tylenol, and there's no reason that a pill filled with nanomachines or something even more exotic would be any different from a user's standpoint.
Second world? You are aware, of course, that the second world ceased to exist in 1989? Or perhaps you just are using a phrase without knowing what it means?
Since the Soviet Union is gone, and a whole generation of people have grown up (or are in the process of growing up) without it, the term "Second World" has an alternate, perfectly logical definition: it's those countries that are somewhere between, on a vaguely but genuinely perceived economic/quality-of-life/PCGDP scale, those that are definitely First World and those that are definitely Third World (where the latter is basically a synonym for 'poor').
You can debate whether this is the technically correct definition all you want, but ultimately it's a doomed endeavor; if enough people use a term in some way, that's what it means.
Advancement is great, but if you start meddling with what makes us human, it doesn't matter how good, noble or ethically correct your intentions are. You will lose.
Spoken like a true Luddite. However, what I think you don't take into account is that "what makes us human" is always changing -- it's always just beyond our ability to change at any given moment.
E.g.: in the mid-19th century, the idea of swapping blood with someone else was pretty macabre. After all, "the blood is the life," right? Hence, it got used as a plot device in Dracula (among other novels), as a way of showing the 'human essence.'
But, once it became possible to routinely pump blood from one person to another, so that they didn't always die, and their personality didn't change, the criteria of 'what makes us human' got pushed back a little further. Okay, so we can now swap blood -- nope, that doesn't make us human; it's not what makes us unique. Suddenly, a blood transfusion doesn't seem so bizarre anymore.
Not too many years later, you have people getting their organs swapped. Although not too many rational folks really thought this would change one's personality, there was still some squeamishness on the part of the public, initially. But over time, it became accepted. Just because you have someone else's liver inside you, and maybe somebody else's heart and lungs, you're not them. Whatever makes you human? Not sure, but haven't hit it yet.
What about brains? We know that can cause personality changes. Seems pretty ghoulish. But there are thousands of people in the world today running around with implanted electrodes in their brains, allowing them to hear better, or not have seizures, or see -- are they still human? Yep.
The fear that we'll change "what makes us human" is the same sort of vague uneasiness that caused cartographers to draw giant sea creatures at the edges of their maps. It's a fear of the unknown, of change. But when you get close to it, suddenly it doesn't seem quite so scary anymore. That's how change happens. We'll make a change, realize we're still human, still here, afterwards, and push the "what makes us human" mark out a little beyond our current grasp. Repeat, over and over, and even if the end product isn't recognizable as a "person" to us today (just like Steven Hawking would probably be written off as some sort of carnival freak by anyone born in the 18th or early 19th century), people will never really question their humanity.
That thing that "makes us human" will always be one or two discoveries away, just like the sea monsters were always a little beyond the edge of the known map.
Living in a cabin in Montana and purchasing bullets does not count!
Actually, if you're living in a cabin in Montana, you probably already know that you can cast your own bullets, preferably from the ones recovered from yesterday's dinner.
Now, modern gunpowder... that's a little more difficult.
Unfortunately, the "wiki is not paper" guideline is, in my opinion, one of the most often-forgotten guidelines by the Wikipedia editors and Wikipedians generally. I can't even begin to count the number of unnecessary merges and deletions that I've seen, which seem driven by people combating what they perceive to be a "waste of space."
I really like Wikipedia. I like the concept, and I like the execution insofar as I think it's probably the best effort anyone's done so far on a sort of "universal library." Unfortunately, it's strayed pretty far from the 'encyclopedia of all knowledge' -- information is frequently deleted (and I don't just mean logically deleted, I mean actually expunged, removed forever) because some small-minded person or group of persons thinks it's unimportant. This is sad, because one of Wikipedia's great draws, to many people, is its breadth of information. The fact that you can go into it, and read lengthy, authoritative articles on what might otherwise be considered ridiculously trivial matters, is why it's superior to anything else.
Unfortunately, too many people on Wikipedia, including some editors and administrators, seem to think that anything that doesn't have an article in other encyclopedias, doesn't belong in Wikipedia -- or even worse, anything that they haven't heard about, doesn't belong in Wikipedia. This is terrible, because it means WP will always be a "Britannica" wanna-be, rather than something far greater, eventually transcending and defining what it means to be an "encyclopedia."
It's frustrating, because I suspect almost everyone has an article or two that they could write for Wikipedia -- something that they're an expert on like no other -- but who wants to spend that much time and effort writing an article, if there's a significant risk that some two-bit admin on a power trip, sometime down the road, could decide that it's "too trivial," and delete the page: destroying your work and that information just as thoroughly as tearing some pages out of a physical book and burning them would. (And, perhaps most offensively, in my opinion: Wikipedia even makes use of the 'nocache' tags in its robots.txt files to make sure that systems like Archive.org don't save material that they delete -- so when a Wikipedia page is deleted, unless you or someone else has a personal archive, it's pretty much gone forever.)
No one pays for Microsofts products now how do they expect anyone to pay M$ for the products that aren't theirs in the first place?
Uh, not sure what planet you're from, but I don't think many companies run pirated and cracked versions of Windows and Office. Whether you bother to shell out a few bucks for a legit copy, or just Bittorrent it, hardly matters. Your retail-box purchase, or lack thereof, is a piddly little nothing compared to the real money, which is in the corporate userbase, and OEM pre-installs.
You pay for Microsoft every time you go to a store that uses Windows-based POS terminals. You pay for it every time you go to a doctor's office with Windows PCs for running their scheduling. When you order something from a web site that ships goods from a warehouse that uses Windows on the pickers' terminals. Microsoft has insinuated itself into the "cost of doing business," and you pay for it, in fractions of a cent, every time you do anything.
Oh, and you also pay for them when you pay your taxes (or when your employer pays your taxes for you, because you're not trusted to actually do it), because the U.S. Federal government, like most other countries, is essentially a Microsoft shop through and through.
You only think that you're not paying for Microsoft's products, and that's exactly how they like it.
Even if all the patents Microsoft has can be worked around, OSS still loses, in a slightly less dramatic fashion. Suddenly you've created an asymmetric war between Microsoft and open-source software generally: Microsoft will continually be able to produce bad or over-broad patents, and use them to harass OSS users, and force OSS developers to code around them. At the same time, since their source code is closed, the reverse can't happen. It's a lot easier for Microsoft to go after Linux, than it is for IBM to go after Microsoft, simply because Microsoft's codebase is closed and only revealed under NDA.
I'm not sure what the endgame is here, but once you allow for software patents, you put open-source software at a huge disadvantage.
Is that really the case where you live? Where I live it's _always_ the fault of the driver unable to stop. You rear-end someone, you were following too close and it's your fault. Never, ever would it be the fault of the driver stopped. As a driver, you have the responsibility to drive at such a speed and distance to other traffic that you can safely avoid any (sudden) obstacles.
Well, in the U.S. I think it varies by state, but as a general rule you'd be correct -- if you rear-end someone, you're probably at fault. However, there are a bunch of exceptions that sometimes come into play. Basically, it can be the fault of the driver in front of you if they swerved out in front of you in such a way that there wasn't any possible way for you to stop.
This is easier to imagine on a secondary road; if you're moving along and someone pulls out from a side street right in front of you, even if you're driving at a safe speed they could pull out in the "kill zone" right in front of your vehicle, the area in which even if you mash down on the brake immediately, there's no stopping the car. That would be their fault, for pulling into traffic when they didn't have a sufficient opening to get in the lane and up to speed. However -- it could still be the colliding driver's fault if they were speeding (e.g. if Driver A is coming up at 70MPH on a 45MPH road and hits Driver B who was pulling out, Driver B might not be at fault because they would have been OK had Driver A not been speeding... of course, B's probably dead in that situation, so small consolation).
In general, judges tend to find fault with whoever was being the biggest jackass in any particular situation. Usually this means that if you rear-end someone, it's on you for driving too fast or following too closely. But every once in a while, if the driver who got rear-ended was doing something really egregious, then they might seem like the bigger jackass, and be found at some degree of fault (generally it's illegal to stop in a lane of traffic without some sort of reason, so they have a legal basis to find fault).
Also, it's generally not your fault if you rear-end someone because you're pushed by the driver behind you; an important consideration in multiple-vehicle pileups. This seems obvious, but it's another situation where blanket "you hit it, it's your fault" rule wouldn't produce a very just outcome.
But anyway, in the absence of extenuating circumstances, you're right in that it's almost always the fault of the driver whose car hits another car from the rear, for not being in control of their vehicle; the law basically requires you to always drive as if there's a stopped car / fallen tree / parked ambulance right behind the next hill, and if you're driving so fast that you can't stop in time, then the result's on you. However, there are always exceptions, which is why I didn't state it as an absolute.
Sue Linux or a batch of participating FOSS projects ...
They're not going to "sue Linux" or even sue OSS projects directly; they're going to go after people who actually use OSS in their businesses, just like SCO did. They'll probably just go down a list of people who are known to be using Linux and who haven't bought dubious licenses from MS/Novell, and who don't have a lot of resources to spare on a legal battle, and let the milking begin.
The real question is whether IBM or some of the other big patent-holders, who maintain big "defensive portfolios" that Microsoft presumably violates, are going to get involved and go after Microsoft even if they themselves aren't being sued. One would assume that IBM has a lot to lose by an attack on Linux-using businesses, but doubtless Microsoft has already considered this... maybe they have found some way to neuter IBM, or believes IBM won't involve itself, for some reason -- without inside knowledge, we can only speculate.
But more than once, people have likened the patent portfolios of the major tech companies to the nuclear arsenals held by the superpower nations; they're not something you use, they're something you have. If Microsoft is seriously contemplating using its patents, they could potentially be touching off something very ugly.
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It doesn't matter if they invented it, only if they patented it. Which is what's wrong with the whole system.
Not true. The U.S. patent system is based on a "first to invent" doctrine, not "first to file."
Applying for a patent often serves as proof that you had indeed invented something at a certain time (at least the filing date), and creates a bit of a barrier for someone else to prove that they invented it earlier (since they'd need to conclusively demonstrate that they had done it before you had), but it's not unheard of or even especially uncommon historically.
That's the whole idea behind 'prior art' in the U.S.: if you can demonstrate that you, or somebody else, had invented something and published it before the person who got the patent for it did, then the patent can be ruled invalid.
There are some (IMO, really poorly thought-out) proposals that would change the U.S. system to a "first to file" one, which is more common throughout the rest of the world, but it hasn't happened yet.
As I'm sure many people will point out, the "life in prison" part is for situation "where the defendant knowingly or recklessly causes or attempts to cause death." That doesn't seem so unreasonable now, does it?
It's still unnecessary. Killing someone, or trying to kill someone, or being so negligent as to cause someone's death, are already illegal. There's no reason why death-by-counterfeit-pharmaceuticals should carry a harsher penalty than death by any other means.
We already have a legal system that can cope with these situations quite well, based on a number of general principles and long-established precedent; there's no reason to overburden it with tons and tons of special-case legislation.
Why don't we just reorganize the RIAA as another extension of the federal government? They're practically there anyway, and they'd be able to add an RIAA Piracy tax to our paychecks.
Because then they'd have to pay lip service to things like Due Process and the Freedom of Information Act. They're much happier as a private organization that simply gets the government to do its bidding for it.
No, wait! I've got it! Goddamn, I'm a genius. Why not put the INNOCENT people in prison. That way there'll be plenty of room for the law abiding and plenty of room for us copyright infringing, foreigner associating, freedom valuing, evolution accepting, internet surfing no-goodniks in the hellbound moral cesspit that is society today. Problem solved.
Why not kill them? It guarantees that they'll go straight to Heaven -- no chance for the rest of us in the Satan-bait section to tempt them with our sex, drugs, rock-and-roll music, and, apparently, unlicensed software.
If this is to pass, what immoral act would next be prosecuted? Being gay? Being obese? Being lazy?
Well, there's an election coming up; it wouldn't surprise me.
Although I doubt they'd make obesity illegal -- too many of their constituents are fat. But as long as it's something that only a minority of the population is engaged in, history has shown there's lots of political capital in viciously oppressing unpopular behavior.
They won't like Japan moving away from their products. If Japan does it, then South Korea may follow, and then who knows what the future will hold in the Asian market? Microsoft has had an overwhelming market share in these countries for very long, and even though Japanese designers do use Macintosh computers, there's simply no way to get by without access to a Windows PC, due to the governmental reliance and the huge amount of Internet applications that require IE6. It will take quite some time for businesses to follow, but imagine if they lost a fair chunk of their share in those markets: it would mean a big loss, both in business potential and in PR, since it's certainly not doing your company any good when an entire country is moving away from it (especially when it's a big and important one in the field of technology like Japan).
Although I agree this move is definitely a Good Thing, it seems to be all about eliminating the reliance on Windows as a server platform. It's still quite possible to move a web page from IIS to Apache2 and have it require IE as a client-side browser. Apache will serve up shitty HTML just as easily as good, standards-compliant HTML.
I don't know what the computing/OS market is like in Japan, but if they have a Windows monoculture on servers then it sounds like they're even deeper into the MS quicksand than we are in general here in the U.S., where there's at least some diversity in server platforms, if not much on the client side.
What it sounds like they're doing is a good start, but it's just a start. They have a ways to go before they'll really free end users from being tied to the Internet Explorer ball-and-chain. I can tell you from experience that's even harder than just switching server OSes, because in some cases it can involve a complete redesign of the web site in order to remove the IE-only stupidity that someone coded in.
No; however, I did have to look up bow shock, which frankly I think probably should have been linked in the summary.
Basically it's the 'wave' that precedes the sun or a planet as it passes through space, somewhat similar to the standing wave that you'd see in front of a big tanker ship going through the water. (Particularly one without a bulbous bow.) Rather than water, it's the solar wind that's being disrupted by the body's passage.
Neat diagram on Wikipedia, too.
The problem is that the article writer thinks that useful things like router status and numlock lights (you'll agree if you actually use the keypad) are useless. He just hates lights.
Well, you could get rid of the lights on the keyboard, but not with the crappy membrane-switch keyboards that most people use. My ancient IBM Selectric typewriter doesn't have a pilot light for Caps Lock (or anything else), and doesn't need one, because the Caps Lock key actually locks down when you press it. It's pretty trivial to feel whether it's down or not, in fact you can do it when touch-typing just by sliding your little finger over a little. Likewise, it doesn't have a pilot light for power, because the power switch is a huge thing that locks into position, so you can see or feel which way it's turned (and also, because it produces the most wonderful low hum and vibration from the motor when it's ready to go -- so just by resting your hand on it, you know whether it's on or not).
There's no particular reason why you couldn't build a keyboard that was like a Selectric's -- it would probably just cost $500 and require periodic maintenance with a can of light machine oil. Personally, I think that would be awesome, but I doubt too many other (non-Slashdot-types) would. [1] Caps-Lock lights are a compromise; a way of making a $9.99, virtually non-mechanical membrane-switch keyboard that doesn't leave you totally in the dark as to whether your next letter is going to be capitalized or not.
[1] Actually I think the Selectric is the pinnacle of man-machine interfaces, in terms of intuitiveness and using almost all of the human senses at once (okay, 4 out of 5; if you're licking your Selectric you're probably doing something wrong, or at least inadvisable), and it's been all downhill from there.
I think crappy USB hubs are about the worst offenders in terms of having completely unnecessary, hugely overbright, non-indicator-"indicator" lights.
Unlike an Ethernet switch, where you want at least one LED per port, to show whether there's a complete connection to another device, and then some idea of how much traffic is going to it, a USB hub only needs one LED, to show that it's receiving power from the host. Optionally, if it's a hub that can either use external power or bus power, there could be some sort of indicator to show bus vs external power -- but you still only have to have one LED on at a time. Putting 4 ultra-bright blue-white LEDs on a 4-port USB hub is just excessive; they don't show anything.
The problem is devices that were designed for appearance, versus designed for function. If you design for function, it doesn't preclude having an attractive appearance, but you can't let it get in the way of whatever the device's purpose is. If each LED has a purpose and function, I don't see that as a problem. It's when they're put on there by someone in the marketing department that they're really obnoxious.
Pachysandra is also good as a grass-alternative, if you're less into the 7-Eleven look for your front yard. Takes a few years to establish, but it's incredibly hardy and never needs mowing.
(I'm sure the eco-bunnies probably still don't like it, because it's a non-native species, but at least it's CO2-absorbing and green.)
Agreed. This is one of the reasons why I've always wished Apple would add disk-access lights to its systems, or maybe figure out a way to integrate disk-access into the one "master LED" that they like to put on the front of the Power Macs.
My IBM workstation has 4 LEDs on the front of it: power/status (solid for 'on,' off for 'off,' blinking for 'standby'), hard drive (seemingly any I/O on the primary IDE controller), network access (from the internal NIC), and an error light (triggered if it fails POST, I think, but I've never seen it on). I think they're all pretty defensible as things that ought to be displayed on the front of the CPU; I use the HD and eth0 lights a lot since I have a KVM switch -- I can start something on that machine, flip back to my other machine, and just keep an eye on the blinkenlights and know when it's probably done. (Are there other ways to do this? Sure; I could probably redirect its log to another machine, but this is a whole lot simpler.)
Computers are mysterious, sealed boxes to most people; when you pull all the indicator lights off of the front, you run the risk of making that perception worse. I like to know what the hell's going on inside mine, and chassis lights are an important part of that, particularly as cooling systems have gotten louder (tougher to hear the HD churn in many systems).
I've found out by experience though, that electrical tape isn't 100% opaque; put a bright enough LED under it, and stretch the tape a bit (as you might if you're putting it tightly over an protruding LED), and it'll shine through.
For really bright lights, a small square of aluminum foil works well, and is absolutely opaque.
One light I particularly enjoy is on my television. The indicator LED is ON when the tv is OFF, and OFF when the tv is ON.
That's because it's a standby light. It's ON when the television is in standby (modern televisions aren't "off" unless you unplug them), and otherwise OFF. Since it's not in standby when you're watching TV, it's quite properly off.
As other people have pointed out, it also lets you see where the power switch is, shows that the TV is receiving power when it's plugged in (as a diagnostic tool). Also, having an LED on right near the screen when it was on would be annoying, not to mention redundant.
Personally I find Apple's throb-effect standby lights a whole lot less obnoxious than standard blinking ones. I can't get to sleep in a room where there's a light blinking, but the throbbing ones don't bother me nearly as much.
But anyway, I don't really mind LEDs as long as they're actually indicative of something. Just cramming lights into a device for no particular reason is stupid; however, HD-access or network-access lights are pretty useful, although I'd support some way of turning them off for people who don't like them.
A router that didn't have a traffic LED on each port would be fairly annoying, and certainly not something that'd I'd buy; I use those things all the time. They serve a distinct purpose, and I'd much rather be able to see the status of the router immediately by looking at it, then have to bring up some sort of software status-page or program.
Looking at my equipment, the only really unnecessary use of LEDs that I can see is on USB hubs. There's no reason why those things need to have one LED for every port, when they're all just wired together and just serve to show whether the hub itself is connected. One LED, or at most two (one for "on, bus power" another for "on, external power"), with only one on at a time, would be totally sufficient.
Aside from that, the only other thing that bugs me is the unnecessary use of high-power blue LEDs. Unless you're building a flashlight, leave those things out; I can only imagine that they cost more than low-power green or red ones, and there's just no reason to have a status indicator light that's powerful enough to shine a distinct circle on the 8' ceiling. That's just excessive. White and blue-white LEDs do look neat, but they should be used in moderation and at the minimum brightness required.
Although not perfectly accurate, computing your mileage using the reading from the gas pump and the odometer doesn't rely on running the gas tank "bone dry." All that it relies on, is that you fill the gas tank back up to the same level as you did the previous fillup. Since gas nozzles are basically standardized and tend to click off at the same point, this isn't a terrible assumption. It's probably accurate at least to a few tenths of a gallon, in my experience of doing it in a small car.
Basically you fill the tank until the pump shuts it off, and reset the odo. This is your start point. You drive for a while, generally until you need gas again, and then you refill the gas tank until it again shuts off automatically, and note the amount of fuel added. You look at the odometer, and simply take the mileage there, and divide by the reading on the pump.
As long as you never fill your tank halfway, and you don't top off or otherwise force the gas pump to keep going after it shuts off automatically, and you reset the odo every time you fill up, you can get pretty good mileage estimates this way.
It's a different method than what I assume the car's computer is using (I'd think it's using some sort of reading from the engine's sensors) but it's not an inherently terrible methodology. If you use the same gas pump/nozzle to fill up each time, I'd imagine it could probably be quite accurate. At no time does it require you to run your car out of gas.
I prefer to have technology outside my body, not inside. Thank you.
So, um, you take any drugs lately? (I don't mean the 'fun' kind, I mean of the CVS kind.) If you have, I know a couple of good ChemE's who'd like to have a word with you about chemicals not being "technology."
If you really are consistent and don't ingest any type of technology (well, you're going to have to bite the bullet and accept some level of hypocrisy somewhere -- there aren't enough unmodified edible plant species left for most people to eat), then kudos, but realize that you're in a basically-insignificant fringe minority. Most people don't think twice before popping a Benadryl or a Tylenol, and there's no reason that a pill filled with nanomachines or something even more exotic would be any different from a user's standpoint.
Have you ever made a real-life mistake where your first instinct was "undo!"?
Yes, except I call that button "Oh, Shit."
Second world? You are aware, of course, that the second world ceased to exist in 1989? Or perhaps you just are using a phrase without knowing what it means?
Since the Soviet Union is gone, and a whole generation of people have grown up (or are in the process of growing up) without it, the term "Second World" has an alternate, perfectly logical definition: it's those countries that are somewhere between, on a vaguely but genuinely perceived economic/quality-of-life/PCGDP scale, those that are definitely First World and those that are definitely Third World (where the latter is basically a synonym for 'poor').
You can debate whether this is the technically correct definition all you want, but ultimately it's a doomed endeavor; if enough people use a term in some way, that's what it means.
Advancement is great, but if you start meddling with what makes us human, it doesn't matter how good, noble or ethically correct your intentions are. You will lose.
Spoken like a true Luddite. However, what I think you don't take into account is that "what makes us human" is always changing -- it's always just beyond our ability to change at any given moment.
E.g.: in the mid-19th century, the idea of swapping blood with someone else was pretty macabre. After all, "the blood is the life," right? Hence, it got used as a plot device in Dracula (among other novels), as a way of showing the 'human essence.'
But, once it became possible to routinely pump blood from one person to another, so that they didn't always die, and their personality didn't change, the criteria of 'what makes us human' got pushed back a little further. Okay, so we can now swap blood -- nope, that doesn't make us human; it's not what makes us unique. Suddenly, a blood transfusion doesn't seem so bizarre anymore.
Not too many years later, you have people getting their organs swapped. Although not too many rational folks really thought this would change one's personality, there was still some squeamishness on the part of the public, initially. But over time, it became accepted. Just because you have someone else's liver inside you, and maybe somebody else's heart and lungs, you're not them. Whatever makes you human? Not sure, but haven't hit it yet.
What about brains? We know that can cause personality changes. Seems pretty ghoulish. But there are thousands of people in the world today running around with implanted electrodes in their brains, allowing them to hear better, or not have seizures, or see -- are they still human? Yep.
The fear that we'll change "what makes us human" is the same sort of vague uneasiness that caused cartographers to draw giant sea creatures at the edges of their maps. It's a fear of the unknown, of change. But when you get close to it, suddenly it doesn't seem quite so scary anymore. That's how change happens. We'll make a change, realize we're still human, still here, afterwards, and push the "what makes us human" mark out a little beyond our current grasp. Repeat, over and over, and even if the end product isn't recognizable as a "person" to us today (just like Steven Hawking would probably be written off as some sort of carnival freak by anyone born in the 18th or early 19th century), people will never really question their humanity.
That thing that "makes us human" will always be one or two discoveries away, just like the sea monsters were always a little beyond the edge of the known map.
Living in a cabin in Montana and purchasing bullets does not count!
... that's a little more difficult.
Actually, if you're living in a cabin in Montana, you probably already know that you can cast your own bullets, preferably from the ones recovered from yesterday's dinner.
Now, modern gunpowder
Unfortunately, the "wiki is not paper" guideline is, in my opinion, one of the most often-forgotten guidelines by the Wikipedia editors and Wikipedians generally. I can't even begin to count the number of unnecessary merges and deletions that I've seen, which seem driven by people combating what they perceive to be a "waste of space."
I really like Wikipedia. I like the concept, and I like the execution insofar as I think it's probably the best effort anyone's done so far on a sort of "universal library." Unfortunately, it's strayed pretty far from the 'encyclopedia of all knowledge' -- information is frequently deleted (and I don't just mean logically deleted, I mean actually expunged, removed forever) because some small-minded person or group of persons thinks it's unimportant. This is sad, because one of Wikipedia's great draws, to many people, is its breadth of information. The fact that you can go into it, and read lengthy, authoritative articles on what might otherwise be considered ridiculously trivial matters, is why it's superior to anything else.
Unfortunately, too many people on Wikipedia, including some editors and administrators, seem to think that anything that doesn't have an article in other encyclopedias, doesn't belong in Wikipedia -- or even worse, anything that they haven't heard about, doesn't belong in Wikipedia. This is terrible, because it means WP will always be a "Britannica" wanna-be, rather than something far greater, eventually transcending and defining what it means to be an "encyclopedia."
It's frustrating, because I suspect almost everyone has an article or two that they could write for Wikipedia -- something that they're an expert on like no other -- but who wants to spend that much time and effort writing an article, if there's a significant risk that some two-bit admin on a power trip, sometime down the road, could decide that it's "too trivial," and delete the page: destroying your work and that information just as thoroughly as tearing some pages out of a physical book and burning them would. (And, perhaps most offensively, in my opinion: Wikipedia even makes use of the 'nocache' tags in its robots.txt files to make sure that systems like Archive.org don't save material that they delete -- so when a Wikipedia page is deleted, unless you or someone else has a personal archive, it's pretty much gone forever.)
No one pays for Microsofts products now how do they expect anyone to pay M$ for the products that aren't theirs in the first place?
Uh, not sure what planet you're from, but I don't think many companies run pirated and cracked versions of Windows and Office. Whether you bother to shell out a few bucks for a legit copy, or just Bittorrent it, hardly matters. Your retail-box purchase, or lack thereof, is a piddly little nothing compared to the real money, which is in the corporate userbase, and OEM pre-installs.
You pay for Microsoft every time you go to a store that uses Windows-based POS terminals. You pay for it every time you go to a doctor's office with Windows PCs for running their scheduling. When you order something from a web site that ships goods from a warehouse that uses Windows on the pickers' terminals. Microsoft has insinuated itself into the "cost of doing business," and you pay for it, in fractions of a cent, every time you do anything.
Oh, and you also pay for them when you pay your taxes (or when your employer pays your taxes for you, because you're not trusted to actually do it), because the U.S. Federal government, like most other countries, is essentially a Microsoft shop through and through.
You only think that you're not paying for Microsoft's products, and that's exactly how they like it.
I think you miss another point, though.
Even if all the patents Microsoft has can be worked around, OSS still loses, in a slightly less dramatic fashion. Suddenly you've created an asymmetric war between Microsoft and open-source software generally: Microsoft will continually be able to produce bad or over-broad patents, and use them to harass OSS users, and force OSS developers to code around them. At the same time, since their source code is closed, the reverse can't happen. It's a lot easier for Microsoft to go after Linux, than it is for IBM to go after Microsoft, simply because Microsoft's codebase is closed and only revealed under NDA.
I'm not sure what the endgame is here, but once you allow for software patents, you put open-source software at a huge disadvantage.
Is that really the case where you live? Where I live it's _always_ the fault of the driver unable to stop. You rear-end someone, you were following too close and it's your fault. Never, ever would it be the fault of the driver stopped. As a driver, you have the responsibility to drive at such a speed and distance to other traffic that you can safely avoid any (sudden) obstacles.
... of course, B's probably dead in that situation, so small consolation).
Well, in the U.S. I think it varies by state, but as a general rule you'd be correct -- if you rear-end someone, you're probably at fault. However, there are a bunch of exceptions that sometimes come into play. Basically, it can be the fault of the driver in front of you if they swerved out in front of you in such a way that there wasn't any possible way for you to stop.
This is easier to imagine on a secondary road; if you're moving along and someone pulls out from a side street right in front of you, even if you're driving at a safe speed they could pull out in the "kill zone" right in front of your vehicle, the area in which even if you mash down on the brake immediately, there's no stopping the car. That would be their fault, for pulling into traffic when they didn't have a sufficient opening to get in the lane and up to speed. However -- it could still be the colliding driver's fault if they were speeding (e.g. if Driver A is coming up at 70MPH on a 45MPH road and hits Driver B who was pulling out, Driver B might not be at fault because they would have been OK had Driver A not been speeding
In general, judges tend to find fault with whoever was being the biggest jackass in any particular situation. Usually this means that if you rear-end someone, it's on you for driving too fast or following too closely. But every once in a while, if the driver who got rear-ended was doing something really egregious, then they might seem like the bigger jackass, and be found at some degree of fault (generally it's illegal to stop in a lane of traffic without some sort of reason, so they have a legal basis to find fault).
Also, it's generally not your fault if you rear-end someone because you're pushed by the driver behind you; an important consideration in multiple-vehicle pileups. This seems obvious, but it's another situation where blanket "you hit it, it's your fault" rule wouldn't produce a very just outcome.
But anyway, in the absence of extenuating circumstances, you're right in that it's almost always the fault of the driver whose car hits another car from the rear, for not being in control of their vehicle; the law basically requires you to always drive as if there's a stopped car / fallen tree / parked ambulance right behind the next hill, and if you're driving so fast that you can't stop in time, then the result's on you. However, there are always exceptions, which is why I didn't state it as an absolute.
Sue Linux or a batch of participating FOSS projects ...
... maybe they have found some way to neuter IBM, or believes IBM won't involve itself, for some reason -- without inside knowledge, we can only speculate.
They're not going to "sue Linux" or even sue OSS projects directly; they're going to go after people who actually use OSS in their businesses, just like SCO did. They'll probably just go down a list of people who are known to be using Linux and who haven't bought dubious licenses from MS/Novell, and who don't have a lot of resources to spare on a legal battle, and let the milking begin.
The real question is whether IBM or some of the other big patent-holders, who maintain big "defensive portfolios" that Microsoft presumably violates, are going to get involved and go after Microsoft even if they themselves aren't being sued. One would assume that IBM has a lot to lose by an attack on Linux-using businesses, but doubtless Microsoft has already considered this
But more than once, people have likened the patent portfolios of the major tech companies to the nuclear arsenals held by the superpower nations; they're not something you use, they're something you have. If Microsoft is seriously contemplating using its patents, they could potentially be touching off something very ugly.