How nice it is to see DNA give his respects to Pan Stanislaw - and his translator, Michael Kandel, though not by name. I've read Lem in Russian, a language very close to his native Polish, which makes the translator's job significantly easier, and still some places are better in English. Go get yourself a copy of the "Cyberiad".
Ascorbic acid costs literally pennies; you can pick up a pound of the stuff retail at less than 15 dollars, and we're talking 7 milligrams in each bottle. What the heck were they thinking?
This statement (about change of ownership not affecting accessibility) is clearly wrong for those people who use Windows. I am predicting a networking patch through WindowsUpdate soon after the deal is completed which, among other effects, suddenly makes the computer fail to acknowledge your "127.0.0.1 www.doubleclick.com" entry in hosts.
There's an old story about Coleman Hawkins, a noted jazz saxophonist. Once he was assembling a band for several gigs, and decided to give a call to an acquaintance in another city, also a sax player, to invite him in. "How much is the pay?" - the guy asked. Hawkins told him. "C'mon, Hawk, that's barely enough for a bus ticket to New York!" "You know, young man", said Hawkins, "there are jobs worth saving money for". And hung up.
My point is - "what should Wikimedia do about the financial situation of the Wikipedia" is the wrong question and needs to be unasked. Wikimedia should spend money on Wikipedia. They can raise that money from whatever sources they like, but quietly. That is their purpose. Blackmailing Wikipedia and its community (and its founder) into profitability is not their purpose.
The guy patented the molecule. The one we all have in our ears. And he patented it. Did I mention he's got the actual patent on it?
Sorry, got carried away a little. So, this guy, who actually patented the naturally occurring protein which generates electricity in response to vibration, and so presumably knows what he's talking about, has no earthly clue how this power could be utilized. What is the article about then, exactly? Is it to draw attention to an interesting peculiarity of some organic compound? That's nice. But why is it covered in bad CG depicting people and machinery in vaguely otherplanetary landscapes?
that you get from shuffling on the carpet and then grounding through someone's nose are on the order of thousands of volts. The numbers in the article are useless unless there is an appreciable current flowing.
Also, the guy in question appears to be using non-grounded plugs and sockets. That's asking for it in my book.
why it increases in powers of two? Maybe, then, it should be mibijoules, so that we know for sure that we're getting our money's worth for each kibidollar of taxes?
So Verizon made a business decision which makes sense for them (unless their beancounters are terminally stupid). Most probably they consulted the myriad rules and regulations which our government put in their way, to make sure they are allowed to do that. Surely the/. crowd does not propose that we need to regulate them some more? If not, I don't see this to be deserving of more discussion than the crappy weather we've been having up here lately. It's part of natural environment: water falls from the sky, companies care about their bottom line.
'I arst you civil enough, didn't I?' said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. 'You telling me you ain't got a pint mug in the 'ole bleeding boozer?' 'And what in hell's name IS a pint?' said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter. ''Ark at 'im! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what a pint is! Why, a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four quarts to the gallon. 'Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.' 'Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly. 'Litre and half litre--that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the shelf in front of you.'
And if you are ever stumped, the nice people at Google have enabled you to enter a query like "55 mph in km/h" and get an answer right away.
DRM, in whatever form, is intrinsically self-contradictory; remember the analogy with handing someone both the lock and the key and then expecting them to only use what they've been given in the approved manner. I therefore would (and do) object to it on the grounds that it is a bloody boneheaded thing to spend efforts and money on. We've got enough stupidity in the world as it is.
That's provided, of course, that we are not talking about hardware-based DRM, but the question seems to exclude that.
Apart from all the things that might be said about this, look at it this way: the entire story is mostly about bunches of electrons moving this way and that. Programmer puts bytes in a certain order on a disk; cracker takes them off of it and tweaks some; they scoot over the backbone to the server; browsers suck them out, organizing hard drive space in interesting ways, and some more electrons move, but these are now money going from one account to the other. No physical things get disturbed in any way.
And then out of the aether come all those planes and go-fast cars.
This was just an attempt to answer the (unasked) submitter's question in the last sentence: data retention laws do not square with losses, because they deal not with losses, but with their consequences. Your data center does not, by itself, become better if there is a law that says it must possess properties of x and y; in this case, it's not even clear from the law how you should go about achieving x, for the values of x in "do not lose data" - it just provides a disincentive for a certain event (data loss) after it occured.
Data retention laws do not facilitate or even mandate data retention, nor are they designed to. All they say is that when (not even if) you lose, misplace or destroy data, the government will come and kick your butt into next Sunday. Which is what shall now unfold.
With that many people fighting tooth and nail the service reps who are bent on not letting them go, it's no wonder that the world is so full of negative karma.
"I have been predicting that MSFT is going nowhere, and now that MSFT is actually going nowhere, I am about to tell you that I have been predicting that MSFT was going to go nowhere. And predicting for quite some time. Honest. Just ask the people which I had been predicting this to. In private. People I am not going to name. And I'll throw in some words which are supposed to justify my predictions that I am now making of this thing which is now happening."
1. People with too much time on their hands get an.info domain and fill the site with violently uninteresting second-hand information, while dressing themselves as rebels. Good for them. 2. Someone thinks that/. community would treat this non-event as they do other non-events: that is, by composing witty comments. 3. The site is slahdotted, so the initial problem (if it was that) solves itself;./ crowd undaunted, because who clicks those blue underlined words anyway - all they do is undercut the wittiness.
This leaves only one question: who did click on the links? And the answer: it was not necessary;/. effect is not caused by any conscious action, it just happens.
Slashdot Mirror
How nice it is to see DNA give his respects to Pan Stanislaw - and his translator, Michael Kandel, though not by name. I've read Lem in Russian, a language very close to his native Polish, which makes the translator's job significantly easier, and still some places are better in English. Go get yourself a copy of the "Cyberiad".
Ascorbic acid costs literally pennies; you can pick up a pound of the stuff retail at less than 15 dollars, and we're talking 7 milligrams in each bottle. What the heck were they thinking?
This statement (about change of ownership not affecting accessibility) is clearly wrong for those people who use Windows. I am predicting a networking patch through WindowsUpdate soon after the deal is completed which, among other effects, suddenly makes the computer fail to acknowledge your "127.0.0.1 www.doubleclick.com" entry in hosts.
Or, more likely, someone in the PD got clued in to impending PR disaster and changed his mind for him.
There's an old story about Coleman Hawkins, a noted jazz saxophonist. Once he was assembling a band for several gigs, and decided to give a call to an acquaintance in another city, also a sax player, to invite him in. "How much is the pay?" - the guy asked. Hawkins told him. "C'mon, Hawk, that's barely enough for a bus ticket to New York!" "You know, young man", said Hawkins, "there are jobs worth saving money for". And hung up.
My point is - "what should Wikimedia do about the financial situation of the Wikipedia" is the wrong question and needs to be unasked. Wikimedia should spend money on Wikipedia. They can raise that money from whatever sources they like, but quietly. That is their purpose. Blackmailing Wikipedia and its community (and its founder) into profitability is not their purpose.
The guy patented the molecule. The one we all have in our ears. And he patented it. Did I mention he's got the actual patent on it?
Sorry, got carried away a little. So, this guy, who actually patented the naturally occurring protein which generates electricity in response to vibration, and so presumably knows what he's talking about, has no earthly clue how this power could be utilized. What is the article about then, exactly? Is it to draw attention to an interesting peculiarity of some organic compound? That's nice. But why is it covered in bad CG depicting people and machinery in vaguely otherplanetary landscapes?
that you get from shuffling on the carpet and then grounding through someone's nose are on the order of thousands of volts. The numbers in the article are useless unless there is an appreciable current flowing.
Also, the guy in question appears to be using non-grounded plugs and sockets. That's asking for it in my book.
mebi-, sorry about that.
why it increases in powers of two? Maybe, then, it should be mibijoules, so that we know for sure that we're getting our money's worth for each kibidollar of taxes?
So Verizon made a business decision which makes sense for them (unless their beancounters are terminally stupid). Most probably they consulted the myriad rules and regulations which our government put in their way, to make sure they are allowed to do that. Surely the /. crowd does not propose that we need to regulate them some more? If not, I don't see this to be deserving of more discussion than the crappy weather we've been having up here lately. It's part of natural environment: water falls from the sky, companies care about their bottom line.
Never get a government to decide such things.
'I arst you civil enough, didn't I?' said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. 'You telling me you ain't got a pint mug in the 'ole bleeding boozer?'
'And what in hell's name IS a pint?' said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.
''Ark at 'im! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what a pint is! Why, a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four quarts to the gallon. 'Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.'
'Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly. 'Litre and half litre--that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the shelf in front of you.'
And if you are ever stumped, the nice people at Google have enabled you to enter a query like "55 mph in km/h" and get an answer right away.
DRM, in whatever form, is intrinsically self-contradictory; remember the analogy with handing someone both the lock and the key and then expecting them to only use what they've been given in the approved manner. I therefore would (and do) object to it on the grounds that it is a bloody boneheaded thing to spend efforts and money on. We've got enough stupidity in the world as it is.
That's provided, of course, that we are not talking about hardware-based DRM, but the question seems to exclude that.
Apart from all the things that might be said about this, look at it this way: the entire story is mostly about bunches of electrons moving this way and that. Programmer puts bytes in a certain order on a disk; cracker takes them off of it and tweaks some; they scoot over the backbone to the server; browsers suck them out, organizing hard drive space in interesting ways, and some more electrons move, but these are now money going from one account to the other. No physical things get disturbed in any way.
And then out of the aether come all those planes and go-fast cars.
This was just an attempt to answer the (unasked) submitter's question in the last sentence: data retention laws do not square with losses, because they deal not with losses, but with their consequences. Your data center does not, by itself, become better if there is a law that says it must possess properties of x and y; in this case, it's not even clear from the law how you should go about achieving x, for the values of x in "do not lose data" - it just provides a disincentive for a certain event (data loss) after it occured.
Data retention laws do not facilitate or even mandate data retention, nor are they designed to. All they say is that when (not even if) you lose, misplace or destroy data, the government will come and kick your butt into next Sunday. Which is what shall now unfold.
With that many people fighting tooth and nail the service reps who are bent on not letting them go, it's no wonder that the world is so full of negative karma.
Man, I'd sure love me the complete PDF of a book that I just bought embedded into the back cover.
No work is big enough for a very small script.
Oh, and
It's. "It's".
Between Computer and chair. Yes, K is the preferred variation, but the anonymity of that one was pretty much rendered dead by finger scanners.
Gone are the days of the generic PEBCAC - now computers will know exactly who is there between them and chairs.
This is how I read it:
"I have been predicting that MSFT is going nowhere, and now that MSFT is actually going nowhere, I am about to tell you that I have been predicting that MSFT was going to go nowhere. And predicting for quite some time. Honest. Just ask the people which I had been predicting this to. In private. People I am not going to name. And I'll throw in some words which are supposed to justify my predictions that I am now making of this thing which is now happening."
Just have Microsoft set up a monthly transfer of some suitably large amount from MSN division to IE division.
Can anyone be sure that what Google gives Dell is cold hard cash and not a credit in adword funny money?
So:
.info domain and fill the site with violently uninteresting second-hand information, while dressing themselves as rebels. Good for them. /. community would treat this non-event as they do other non-events: that is, by composing witty comments. ./ crowd undaunted, because who clicks those blue underlined words anyway - all they do is undercut the wittiness.
/. effect is not caused by any conscious action, it just happens.
1. People with too much time on their hands get an
2. Someone thinks that
3. The site is slahdotted, so the initial problem (if it was that) solves itself;
This leaves only one question: who did click on the links? And the answer: it was not necessary;
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers".
Attributed to one Mr. Watson, president of International Business Machines corporation, in 1943.
Insert the word "quantum", shake, repeat (history).