About 2,800 of the comments were form letters -- both pro- and anti-Microsoft groups offered their supporters a way to sign on to a prewritten document.
I wonder what percentage of those were pro? I also wonder what percentage of the 7,500 pro were from microsoft.com domains, or from the domains of Microsoft's various hangers-on?
Non-sequitur. Evolution has nothing to do with "good" and "bad," "advanced" and "less-advanced," "civilized" and "uncivilized," or, frankly, "fair" and "unfair" - only "more likely to survive in current circumstances" and "less likely to survive in current circumstances."
We have created the circumstances we live in, and we will reap what we've sown.
BTW, how good your health care is in the UK or Canada (or other "Western" countries with national health) is still dependant upon your wealth (or more precisely the wealth of your country) relative to the less fortunate. Watch out - the hypocrisy you decry may be your own.
Reading the comments in this thread is a little like reading an MSCE's comments on the latest kernel changes. Great swathes of ignorance coated with a veneer of superficial knowledge.
Humanity is not immune from natural selection. True, we no longer have predators to worry about, but we do have a number of other factors in our environment which act differently on different individual members of our species.
In the developed world, there's pollution, random violence (from gang shootings in the inner city to kids with psychological problems in the suburbs), affordability of medical care (how many folks who make $18K/year can afford in vitro fertilization?) - all of these might select for cerain traits (mostly for sociability and intelligence). In the developing world, there're still the old standbys, famine, disease, warfare, natural disaster. And in the interactions between the two there are factors (war, affordability of medical care, etc.).
Others in this thread have a few bright ideas about evolution: for instance, should we colonize other planets (or even more so, other planetary systems), the colony effect will almost certainly apply. (Look to the genetic variation on Galapagos for examples; small island colonies in the Americas shown interesting genetic variations from the main population).
At the heart of this argument is a little something called the anthropic fallacy - the idea that things are the way they are because they should be, when the reality is that thing are the way they are because if they weren't, we wouldn't be in a position to wonder about why things are the way they are. Writers who assume that evolution has ended do so because they see themselves as the pinnacle of evolution, and cannot imagine a being superior to themselves.
One imagines that the queen bee feels the same way.
Is that you could no longer have satellites in any orbit other than geosynchronous unless their orbits were very carefully tuned to avoid hitting the cable.
Easy enough. The station at the center of mass would be an obvious target, and the cable would be rather thin and so easy to avoid. This is not a problem - for the purposes of orbital mechanics, the cable is basically two-dimensional and orbits could easily be planned around it. Besides, I doubt that a satellite collision would do much, other than slice the satellite in half.
Nope. For surface-to-orbit, rocket propusion is no more than a short-term solution. And remember, the "elevator" doesn't just go up to geosynchronous orbit; its anchor is in geosynchronous orbit - the top of the elevator is even further out (the elevator's center of gravity must be in geosynchronous orbit).
This thing would make travel to the moon something you could afford for the weekend. Rockets will never manage that.
All DCC players and recorders can playback traditional analog cassettes.
All DCC players have music searching capabilities. As far as I know this goes for ACC as well on most recorders and players (it works by searching silences there). On prerecorded cassettes you can search by title and the player will know which side it is on.
DCC equipment is cheaper than DAT or MD. [substitute miniDV or DVD-R)
And of course it included SCMS.
People like DVDs because you don't have to rewind them, you can jump directly to a particular scene (which is, I know, just another way of saying you don't have to rewind them), and they have the same familiar size and shape that CDs have. The hilarious part is that D-VHS is targetting the high-end consumer with titles like X-Men, Independence Day, Die Hard, U-571 and Terminator 1 and 2 - all of them eye candy that, while they may look good on HDTV, are mass-market films.
Jon, did you happen to see how big Amazon's debt is? As small a profit as they turned is pretty much nothing considering how far in the whole they are as a company. Kinda of like raving about a "budget surplus" while the country still carries a monsterous deficit.
By definition, a country cannot have a monstrous "deficit" and have a "budget surplus." A "deficit" is a "budget deficit."
You should have said, instead, this: Kinda like raving about a "budget surplus" while the country still carries a monstrous DEBT. As the terms are used in the press, deficit is annual, debt is total.
Anyway, a profit should be calculated after debt service. So when one has a budget surplus or a profit, the debt should be on the downward slope.
Should be. But if your interest is higher than your debt service . . . well, then you're playing games with your budget and sooner or later it will be bankruptcy time.
Are they trying to obscure just how wide the coverage really is? There are two zoom levels: the whole country (with only dots representing the metro areas where they have coverage) and each metro area (and the map is zoomed up to a level where you can't see the coverage borders). Sorry, I won't buy this if I can't tell whether I can use it more than 20 miles outside a major city.
And will they still be fighting the Nazi's? Maybe they could be up against Mao's China or something for some Ancient Zhou era artifacts or something. That would be cool. Weird though, but cool.
Interesting idea, given the fact that Kate Capshaw is in it, reprising her role as That Woman Who Screamed Her Way Through the Temple of Doom.
Normally, a company to company lawsuit over unfair competition will ask for damages due to lost sales. Just what are those damages when the price was $0.00?
I thought that part of the reason for the states v. MS was these type of problems (MS trying to squeeze out Netscape). And even though AOL has already had their input on the matter, I guess they still have the right to sue. Seems odd that they'd just now jump on the bandwagon, and that they could have been on it all along.
Not odd at all.
The US and the states are acting in the public interest, not in Netscape's.
Despite this, if the US and the states had come up with a good remedy, that might have been enough for AOL/TW.
AOL/TW sits back and waits to see what happens, letting the US and the states spend all the money.
When they get the decision they want, but don't get the remedy they want, they bring suit in their own interests, using the existing judgment to reduce the amount of resources they have to dedicate to the suit, while putting themselves in the driver's seat with regard to the ultimate remedy.
As the article mentions - you just CANT go around violating the second law of thermodynamics like they do (i.e. for a gravstar to form it must 'lose' entropy).
IN A CLOSED SYSTEM, entropy never increases. A star isn't a closed system because it is part of the universe and so gives its heat (and therefore entropy) to the rest of the universe (nature abhors a vaccuum and all that).
Once the event horizon forms, the black hole STILL isn't a closed system, as anything can enter the black hole (even if nothing can leave); however, though I don't have the math to figure this out, I would expect that from the point of view of entropy, a black hole behaves as a closed system because its "temperature" cannot decrease without quantum tunnelling. Beyond that, I don't understand what the hell is going on inside the things, but I do know that the entropy question above is as much a red herring as the "escape velocity" question.
Apple posted a loss for the last fiscal year, not a profit - though it was a very small loss, especially given their huge operating capital.
All the focus on the industrial design of the iMacs is from people who haven't used Macintosh operating systems. The industrial design is to draw the eye to the screen; the Mac's real selling point is there, not in the white curves.
The success of Microsoft has NOTHING to do with the home consumer and everything to do with the business sector. Businesses wouldn't buy Apples, but they would buy machines from IBM (the typewriter company, rather than the long-haired upstarts). So one saw all the business software coming out for the IBM/MSDOS systems (especially Lotus 1,2,3, which was the first "killer app"). Gates rode IBM's coattails at first, until Compaq came up with a clone that had a design (the "portable" computer - remember those first Compaqs?) that offered something IBM didn't and offered full hardware compatability with IBM (and of course Gates &co had brightly given IBM a non-exclusive license).
The marketing folks at MS (maybe including Gates himself) recognized that business customers like packaged solutions, so they came up with the MS Office idea: come up with the second best word processor (Word, versus WordPerfect, which until 9.0 was the best), the second best spreadsheet (Excel, versus Lotus), the second best DB (Access, versus dBase), and sell companies on the idea that they can find all their software solutions in the same package! (and on the compatibility idea - that software from the company that makes the OS will work better with the OS than software from other companies)
Schools bought Apples. The big question was: when the home PC caught on, would home users go with the computers they used at work, or the computers their kids used at home? In the end, I suspect that it was the availability of pirated Microsoft software from the office that was the real key to the success of the IBM/Wintel computer over the Apple. People bought what they were familiar with from work, and what they could rip off software for. Windows was always just a way to make an IBM-paradigm computer more like a Mac.
But the Apple has always been the better home computer. For running general user software in a normal single-tasking home environment, the pre-X Mac OS was perfect. (OS X is a better OS, but the usability isn't quite up to the older Mac OSes yet.)
Now the generation of kids who worked with Apples in school are getting into their 30s. Software piracy is being stamped out by better copy protection. Thanks to the Internet (and in particular the WWW), the compatibility issues for data and documents between the Mac and the Wintel are fading away. The Apple kids are buying Macs for *their* kids. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see the Mac double its market share in the next 3 years.
In the end, the Mac is starting to succeed because they're reminding folks who grew up with Macs why they first liked computers.
Honestly, the people that attach word docs are usually the people that give you a blank stare when you say words like 'linux' and 'unix'. They're the people that work in accounting and marketing that only know how to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Exchange.
And human resources. See the point now?
No Casualties?
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think the best SF book about a technological proxy war, and of interest in evaluating the implications of drone warfare, is Lem's Fiasco. Though the real thrust of the book is the Fermi Paradox (and Lem has some very interesting ideas on that score, too), the planet "contacted" (if you read the book you'll see why those scare quotes are important) is in the final stages of a technological proxy war/drone war that has extended well out into the planetary system.
How do you explain the fact that Heisenberg was able to explain pretty much the whole process to the Farm Hall group after hearing that it had been accomplished? Sorry, the Farm Hall transcripts can be taken both ways.
If you read the (can't remember where, but they are published) transcripts from Heisenberg's conversations with his fellow German physicists in Allied custody at the end of the war, it's impossible to believe that H was trying to build the bomb. Clearly H knew a lot more about how to build a bomb than he let on to his Nazi masters.
Slashdot Mirror
About 2,800 of the comments were form letters -- both pro- and anti-Microsoft groups offered their supporters a way to sign on to a prewritten document.
I wonder what percentage of those were pro? I also wonder what percentage of the 7,500 pro were from microsoft.com domains, or from the domains of Microsoft's various hangers-on?
Non-sequitur. Evolution has nothing to do with "good" and "bad," "advanced" and "less-advanced," "civilized" and "uncivilized," or, frankly, "fair" and "unfair" - only "more likely to survive in current circumstances" and "less likely to survive in current circumstances." We have created the circumstances we live in, and we will reap what we've sown.
BTW, how good your health care is in the UK or Canada (or other "Western" countries with national health) is still dependant upon your wealth (or more precisely the wealth of your country) relative to the less fortunate. Watch out - the hypocrisy you decry may be your own.
Reading the comments in this thread is a little like reading an MSCE's comments on the latest kernel changes. Great swathes of ignorance coated with a veneer of superficial knowledge.
Humanity is not immune from natural selection. True, we no longer have predators to worry about, but we do have a number of other factors in our environment which act differently on different individual members of our species.
In the developed world, there's pollution, random violence (from gang shootings in the inner city to kids with psychological problems in the suburbs), affordability of medical care (how many folks who make $18K/year can afford in vitro fertilization?) - all of these might select for cerain traits (mostly for sociability and intelligence). In the developing world, there're still the old standbys, famine, disease, warfare, natural disaster. And in the interactions between the two there are factors (war, affordability of medical care, etc.).
Others in this thread have a few bright ideas about evolution: for instance, should we colonize other planets (or even more so, other planetary systems), the colony effect will almost certainly apply. (Look to the genetic variation on Galapagos for examples; small island colonies in the Americas shown interesting genetic variations from the main population).
At the heart of this argument is a little something called the anthropic fallacy - the idea that things are the way they are because they should be, when the reality is that thing are the way they are because if they weren't, we wouldn't be in a position to wonder about why things are the way they are. Writers who assume that evolution has ended do so because they see themselves as the pinnacle of evolution, and cannot imagine a being superior to themselves.
One imagines that the queen bee feels the same way.
Is that you could no longer have satellites in any orbit other than geosynchronous unless their orbits were very carefully tuned to avoid hitting the cable.
Easy enough. The station at the center of mass would be an obvious target, and the cable would be rather thin and so easy to avoid. This is not a problem - for the purposes of orbital mechanics, the cable is basically two-dimensional and orbits could easily be planned around it. Besides, I doubt that a satellite collision would do much, other than slice the satellite in half.
Nope. For surface-to-orbit, rocket propusion is no more than a short-term solution. And remember, the "elevator" doesn't just go up to geosynchronous orbit; its anchor is in geosynchronous orbit - the top of the elevator is even further out (the elevator's center of gravity must be in geosynchronous orbit).
This thing would make travel to the moon something you could afford for the weekend. Rockets will never manage that.
It's called 2MASS to rhyme with the sponsoring institution, UMass. Get it?
Although, since a mu is pronounced identically to an "em", 2ASS would still rhyme with UMASS.
See The DCC Faq for comparanda:
And of course it included SCMS.
People like DVDs because you don't have to rewind them, you can jump directly to a particular scene (which is, I know, just another way of saying you don't have to rewind them), and they have the same familiar size and shape that CDs have. The hilarious part is that D-VHS is targetting the high-end consumer with titles like X-Men, Independence Day, Die Hard, U-571 and Terminator 1 and 2 - all of them eye candy that, while they may look good on HDTV, are mass-market films.
Jon, did you happen to see how big Amazon's debt is? As small a profit as they turned is pretty much nothing considering how far in the whole they are as a company. Kinda of like raving about a "budget surplus" while the country still carries a monsterous deficit.
By definition, a country cannot have a monstrous "deficit" and have a "budget surplus." A "deficit" is a "budget deficit."
You should have said, instead, this: Kinda like raving about a "budget surplus" while the country still carries a monstrous DEBT. As the terms are used in the press, deficit is annual, debt is total.
Anyway, a profit should be calculated after debt service. So when one has a budget surplus or a profit, the debt should be on the downward slope.
Should be. But if your interest is higher than your debt service . . . well, then you're playing games with your budget and sooner or later it will be bankruptcy time.
Are they trying to obscure just how wide the coverage really is? There are two zoom levels: the whole country (with only dots representing the metro areas where they have coverage) and each metro area (and the map is zoomed up to a level where you can't see the coverage borders). Sorry, I won't buy this if I can't tell whether I can use it more than 20 miles outside a major city.
It isn't "Open Source" unless the code is readable - you know, unless the SOURCE CODE is OPEN to be read and modified.
I posted this from Lynx, on xterm, in Enlightenment, on OS X. Is that Unix-like enough for you?
People vary in their sensitivity to EMFs, and up to 20% of the population (according to Swedish research) can become electrically sensitive.
Anybody notice that this doesn't cite the article, or quote it? Where was it published, the Swedish edition of The Journal of Irreproducible Results?
And will they still be fighting the Nazi's? Maybe they could be up against Mao's China or something for some Ancient Zhou era artifacts or something. That would be cool. Weird though, but cool.
Interesting idea, given the fact that Kate Capshaw is in it, reprising her role as That Woman Who Screamed Her Way Through the Temple of Doom.
Normally, a company to company lawsuit over unfair competition will ask for damages due to lost sales. Just what are those damages when the price was $0.00?
Before IE, the price WASN'T $0.
I thought that part of the reason for the states v. MS was these type of problems (MS trying to squeeze out Netscape). And even though AOL has already had their input on the matter, I guess they still have the right to sue. Seems odd that they'd just now jump on the bandwagon, and that they could have been on it all along.
Not odd at all.
Makes perfect sense to me.
As the article mentions - you just CANT go around violating the second law of thermodynamics like they do (i.e. for a gravstar to form it must 'lose' entropy).
IN A CLOSED SYSTEM, entropy never increases. A star isn't a closed system because it is part of the universe and so gives its heat (and therefore entropy) to the rest of the universe (nature abhors a vaccuum and all that). Once the event horizon forms, the black hole STILL isn't a closed system, as anything can enter the black hole (even if nothing can leave); however, though I don't have the math to figure this out, I would expect that from the point of view of entropy, a black hole behaves as a closed system because its "temperature" cannot decrease without quantum tunnelling. Beyond that, I don't understand what the hell is going on inside the things, but I do know that the entropy question above is as much a red herring as the "escape velocity" question.
HE WAS/IS A CITIZEN OF THE USA
Since when? Reid is a British subject, not a US Citizen.
Apple posted a loss for the last fiscal year, not a profit - though it was a very small loss, especially given their huge operating capital.
All the focus on the industrial design of the iMacs is from people who haven't used Macintosh operating systems. The industrial design is to draw the eye to the screen; the Mac's real selling point is there, not in the white curves.
The success of Microsoft has NOTHING to do with the home consumer and everything to do with the business sector. Businesses wouldn't buy Apples, but they would buy machines from IBM (the typewriter company, rather than the long-haired upstarts). So one saw all the business software coming out for the IBM/MSDOS systems (especially Lotus 1,2,3, which was the first "killer app"). Gates rode IBM's coattails at first, until Compaq came up with a clone that had a design (the "portable" computer - remember those first Compaqs?) that offered something IBM didn't and offered full hardware compatability with IBM (and of course Gates &co had brightly given IBM a non-exclusive license).
The marketing folks at MS (maybe including Gates himself) recognized that business customers like packaged solutions, so they came up with the MS Office idea: come up with the second best word processor (Word, versus WordPerfect, which until 9.0 was the best), the second best spreadsheet (Excel, versus Lotus), the second best DB (Access, versus dBase), and sell companies on the idea that they can find all their software solutions in the same package! (and on the compatibility idea - that software from the company that makes the OS will work better with the OS than software from other companies)
Schools bought Apples. The big question was: when the home PC caught on, would home users go with the computers they used at work, or the computers their kids used at home? In the end, I suspect that it was the availability of pirated Microsoft software from the office that was the real key to the success of the IBM/Wintel computer over the Apple. People bought what they were familiar with from work, and what they could rip off software for. Windows was always just a way to make an IBM-paradigm computer more like a Mac.
But the Apple has always been the better home computer. For running general user software in a normal single-tasking home environment, the pre-X Mac OS was perfect. (OS X is a better OS, but the usability isn't quite up to the older Mac OSes yet.)
Now the generation of kids who worked with Apples in school are getting into their 30s. Software piracy is being stamped out by better copy protection. Thanks to the Internet (and in particular the WWW), the compatibility issues for data and documents between the Mac and the Wintel are fading away. The Apple kids are buying Macs for *their* kids. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see the Mac double its market share in the next 3 years.
In the end, the Mac is starting to succeed because they're reminding folks who grew up with Macs why they first liked computers.
> The government approach is disfunctional. Dysfunctional, not disfunctional, guys.
Honestly, the people that attach word docs are usually the people that give you a blank stare when you say words like 'linux' and 'unix'. They're the people that work in accounting and marketing that only know how to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Exchange.
And human resources. See the point now?
I think the best SF book about a technological proxy war, and of interest in evaluating the implications of drone warfare, is Lem's Fiasco. Though the real thrust of the book is the Fermi Paradox (and Lem has some very interesting ideas on that score, too), the planet "contacted" (if you read the book you'll see why those scare quotes are important) is in the final stages of a technological proxy war/drone war that has extended well out into the planetary system.
How do you explain the fact that Heisenberg was able to explain pretty much the whole process to the Farm Hall group after hearing that it had been accomplished? Sorry, the Farm Hall transcripts can be taken both ways.
If you read the (can't remember where, but they are published) transcripts from Heisenberg's conversations with his fellow German physicists in Allied custody at the end of the war, it's impossible to believe that H was trying to build the bomb. Clearly H knew a lot more about how to build a bomb than he let on to his Nazi masters.
Right conversation, wrong names. Don't forget who was a programmer once upon a time, even if they're just a figurehead now.
You mean Paul Allen? ;-)
(Yeah, yeah, I know, Gates has done his time, too [he's sure as hell a better programmer than I am]. But who could resist such a setup?)
My PDA has more ram than my first computer had in hard drive space.