In theory you're right, nobody sells for zero. In practice, there's a point where it's not worth anybody's hassle to sell or even track a price - there is always overhead. Thus zero.
JavaScript doesn't work that way. JavaScript runs in a very restricted security environment. It can do math, it can interact with the user, it can communicate with the website it came from. It can't spam the world without sending it all through the server it came from, which would defeat the purpose.
"To reach the other goals of the device, and provide an answer to the question ‘is the stellarator the right concept for fusion energy?’, years of plasma physics research is needed. That task has just started."
This is a long, long way from "star in a jar works."
Patents last 17 years, not forever. You can't "suppress" something permanently by patenting it - quite the opposite really because the patent is now published and once it expires others can begin to use it. The point of patents is to let those who developed an invention have a chance to profit from them and be glad they shared the idea at all; in software that mostly doesn't work but I'm not convinced it's such a bad idea with expensive machine parts.
WPA-PSK is insufficiently secure... and it's Amazon's fault? Stupid. Did they crack https? No. So clearly there are sufficiently secure technologies. Use them. Don't prop up crap technologies by calling in the Feds. Honestly, invoking the law to resolve a problem that clearly doesn't require it is an actively dangerous habit of thought. And I'm hardly a libertarian. I just know a bad idea when I see one.
I had one of these too. You can still get similar kits from Radio Shack. For younger kids they have versions that just snap together from modules. My daughter enjoyed these. The newer kits do feature ICs, which is fine, but the snap-together sets came with disappointing instructions that seemed to give up on explaining how things work when they got to the ICs.
Okay, so what should we do with North Korea, exactly? They have nuclear weapons, complete control of the information available to their populace, a crumbling food production system and a huge army as well as hordes of mortars aimed at Seoul. Good luck...
I am a constant critic of my own country's policy but when it comes to North Korea I rarely point the finger because I really don't know what can be done.
(I made an exception when Bush actually taunted them without the slightest ability to back it up. THAT actually managed to make matters worse, which is an accomplishment.)
I'm not a huge Microsoft fan, but Active Directory is one innovation of theirs that's tough to argue with.
All things considered, Active Directory is a very well-thought-through directory system that doesn't seem to be a mere refinement of a competitor's system. At least not when you consider its most innovative features like multimastering. Linux and Unix in general are still playing catch-up with AD and it's been out for years.
Yes, I know about NIS/YP, but it's more appropriate to compare simplistic flat systems like that to old-style NT domains. AD is several quantum jumps beyond that. Who had a really usable enterprise-class distributed hierarchical directory service before Microsoft?
AD does so much so well that it's possible to, for instance, set up intranet secure web servers and have them get their keys automagically through AD. Compare that to the hoops you jump through to do anything similar on Linux.
They may be glossing over an important detail, something like "10 times as much usable energy when you take into account that you're not wasting energy on pressurization or cooling."
We kept the Russians in the ISS project to keep Russian rocketry engineers and physicists gainfully employed. Which, in my opinion, was a worthy investment. But I wish we could have done it without compromising the usefulness of the ISS.
Of course, since Russian rockets are currently the only reliable manned ticket to space, maybe it's not so dumb.
That's not even an overstatement; it's the headline of some completely different story. "Mozilla Community: Prone to Exaggeration" maybe. But not even half as much as the troll who wrote this article.
Google Adsense is not the only way to profit from this. Such "Google Farmers" can build pagerank, then sell outgoing links directly to clients. Google has no way of knowing in this case unless they find a magic algorithm to distinguish these sites from creators of legitimate content.
Just for the record, I have yet more prior art on this. In 1994 I developed, for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a system that dynamically generated and cached GIF images of particular rectangular subregions of biology data as a web-based interface to same. In fact, I gave a presentation on it at the Second International Web Conference and talked specifically about its caching capabilities and so on. And I know I'm not the only one with prior art on this stupidity.
It's a niche, but it's vanishingly small
on
Time Sharing Cars
·
· Score: 1
I briefly had a membership to Philly Car Share here in Philadelphia, as well as a trial membership to FlexCar in Seattle before that. I never used either one. Living in Philadelphia without a car, I expected to find Philly Car Share useful. But if you're in the car more than two hours, it's generally cheaper to rent a car for a full 24 hours from the highly competitive rental car industry, which is more than eager to put you behind the wheel at an attractive price. And if you're in the car less than two hours, it's doubtful that you are really traveling far enough from the center of the city that a taxicab won't do the job.
As for big-item shopping, the big-box stores on Columbus Boulevard offer delivery, and the taxicab companies can usually send station wagons if requested.
In an area with extensive public transportation, taxis, and competitive rental companies, the nice for car sharing is pretty close to nonexistent. I'd consider get a membership just to keep in practice driving, but now that I'm spending more overnights in Delaware, I'll be able to do that by renting a car on weekends (again, the car-sharing services charge much more for full nights or weekends than a regular rental car company).
I played a few zillion levels of your random pacman. I must admit I almost didn't catch on to what makes this interesting before giving up on it, but it's good fun once the maze gets ridiculously detailed!
A Bit on the Racist Side
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In the finest slashdot tradition, I would like to take this opportunity to suggest that purely on the basis of a quote in a review, the author's views sound a wee bit racist. Specifically, I don't think the reviewer goes far enough in his criticism of that quote about one American engineer doing the work of six Indian engineers. I can see a rationale for one American call-center employee equaling several offshore employees, maybe -- if the Indian call-center employees are not as culturally as well as linguistically fluent in American, so to speak. But that's a tough argument to swallow with engineers; cultural barriers are much less relevant there. And the Indian engineers I've met are no slouches, either.
I'm still doing it, although I don't get to make entirely new programs as often as I'd like these days. Certain areas of work, particularly video and audio, involve more patent licensing issues than others. Even in those cases, though, it's a matter of having some negotiating savvy when and if it becomes an issue.
Cockroach generations are very short indeed. They develop immunity to poisons rather quickly (though not so far, as another poster points out, to boric acid). How long does it take for the cockroaches who don't follow little circuit boards with antennae to repopulate the Earth?
The selfish gene theory suggests that we may behave altrustically for the sake of others to whom we are genetically related; for instance, when a bird risks death to warn the flock of a predator rathern than simply fleeing alone, its genes are better propagated by the survival of the flock of relatives than by its solitary survival. Human altruism, which of course often extends beyond family members, may have developed from this basis.
The government was pretty cooperative as I understand it. A lot of things they could have done would have prevented this, but permits have been forthcoming.
Slashdot Mirror
In theory you're right, nobody sells for zero. In practice, there's a point where it's not worth anybody's hassle to sell or even track a price - there is always overhead. Thus zero.
JavaScript doesn't work that way. JavaScript runs in a very restricted security environment. It can do math, it can interact with the user, it can communicate with the website it came from. It can't spam the world without sending it all through the server it came from, which would defeat the purpose.
"To reach the other goals of the device, and provide an answer to the question ‘is the stellarator the right concept for fusion energy?’, years of plasma physics research is needed. That task has just started."
This is a long, long way from "star in a jar works."
Patents last 17 years, not forever. You can't "suppress" something permanently by patenting it - quite the opposite really because the patent is now published and once it expires others can begin to use it. The point of patents is to let those who developed an invention have a chance to profit from them and be glad they shared the idea at all; in software that mostly doesn't work but I'm not convinced it's such a bad idea with expensive machine parts.
WPA-PSK is insufficiently secure... and it's Amazon's fault? Stupid. Did they crack https? No. So clearly there are sufficiently secure technologies. Use them. Don't prop up crap technologies by calling in the Feds. Honestly, invoking the law to resolve a problem that clearly doesn't require it is an actively dangerous habit of thought. And I'm hardly a libertarian. I just know a bad idea when I see one.
LiveJournal has always permitted one-way "friend" relationships, helpfully distinguishing the "mutual friends" for you. This patent is just silly.
A "first to file" system wouldn't be completely disastrous provided that evidence of prior art was still enough to scuttle the patent.
I had one of these too. You can still get similar kits from Radio Shack. For younger kids they have versions that just snap together from modules. My daughter enjoyed these. The newer kits do feature ICs, which is fine, but the snap-together sets came with disappointing instructions that seemed to give up on explaining how things work when they got to the ICs.
Okay, so what should we do with North Korea, exactly? They have nuclear weapons, complete control of the information available to their populace, a crumbling food production system and a huge army as well as hordes of mortars aimed at Seoul. Good luck...
I am a constant critic of my own country's policy but when it comes to North Korea I rarely point the finger because I really don't know what can be done.
(I made an exception when Bush actually taunted them without the slightest ability to back it up. THAT actually managed to make matters worse, which is an accomplishment.)
I'm not a huge Microsoft fan, but Active Directory is one innovation of theirs that's tough to argue with.
All things considered, Active Directory is a very well-thought-through directory system that doesn't seem to be a mere refinement of a competitor's system. At least not when you consider its most innovative features like multimastering. Linux and Unix in general are still playing catch-up with AD and it's been out for years.
Yes, I know about NIS/YP, but it's more appropriate to compare simplistic flat systems like that to old-style NT domains. AD is several quantum jumps beyond that. Who had a really usable enterprise-class distributed hierarchical directory service before Microsoft?
AD does so much so well that it's possible to, for instance, set up intranet secure web servers and have them get their keys automagically through AD. Compare that to the hoops you jump through to do anything similar on Linux.
They may be glossing over an important detail, something like "10 times as much usable energy when you take into account that you're not wasting energy on pressurization or cooling."
James Lovelock is an environmentalist and serious scientist who supports nuclear power.
n glish/love-indep-24-05-04.htm
http://www.ecolo.org/media/articles/articles.in.e
Patrick Moore is a paid lobbyist for the logging industry, who used to be an environmentalist a long time ago.
http://www.fanweb.org/patrick-moore/liar.html
There's a big difference in credibility. Moore has so little that I'm not sure a quote from him helps the cause any.
We kept the Russians in the ISS project to keep Russian rocketry engineers and physicists gainfully employed. Which, in my opinion, was a worthy investment. But I wish we could have done it without compromising the usefulness of the ISS.
Of course, since Russian rockets are currently the only reliable manned ticket to space, maybe it's not so dumb.
"Billions of watts of energy." Uh-huh, for how long? A billion watts for a picosecond is no biggie.
> Absent, of course, are any details as to how they will accomplish it when they are the
> party out of power in Congress.
Let's try that in English:
"They didn't say how they'll do this when everyone knows they will lose."
Nice impartial reporting there bucko.
That's not even an overstatement; it's the headline of some completely different story. "Mozilla Community: Prone to Exaggeration" maybe. But not even half as much as the troll who wrote this article.
Google Adsense is not the only way to profit from this. Such "Google Farmers" can build pagerank, then sell outgoing links directly to clients. Google has no way of knowing in this case unless they find a magic algorithm to distinguish these sites from creators of legitimate content.
Just for the record, I have yet more prior art on this. In 1994 I developed, for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a system that dynamically generated and cached GIF images of particular rectangular subregions of biology data as a web-based interface to same. In fact, I gave a presentation on it at the Second International Web Conference and talked specifically about its caching capabilities and so on. And I know I'm not the only one with prior art on this stupidity.
I briefly had a membership to Philly Car Share here in Philadelphia, as well as a trial membership to FlexCar in Seattle before that. I never used either one. Living in Philadelphia without a car, I expected to find Philly Car Share useful. But if you're in the car more than two hours, it's generally cheaper to rent a car for a full 24 hours from the highly competitive rental car industry, which is more than eager to put you behind the wheel at an attractive price. And if you're in the car less than two hours, it's doubtful that you are really traveling far enough from the center of the city that a taxicab won't do the job.
As for big-item shopping, the big-box stores on Columbus Boulevard offer delivery, and the taxicab companies can usually send station wagons if requested.
In an area with extensive public transportation, taxis, and competitive rental companies, the nice for car sharing is pretty close to nonexistent. I'd consider get a membership just to keep in practice driving, but now that I'm spending more overnights in Delaware, I'll be able to do that by renting a car on weekends (again, the car-sharing services charge much more for full nights or weekends than a regular rental car company).
I played a few zillion levels of your random pacman. I must admit I almost didn't catch on to what makes this interesting before giving up on it, but it's good fun once the maze gets ridiculously detailed!
In the finest slashdot tradition, I would like to take this opportunity to suggest that purely on the basis of a quote in a review, the author's views sound a wee bit racist. Specifically, I don't think the reviewer goes far enough in his criticism of that quote about one American engineer doing the work of six Indian engineers. I can see a rationale for one American call-center employee equaling several offshore employees, maybe -- if the Indian call-center employees are not as culturally as well as linguistically fluent in American, so to speak. But that's a tough argument to swallow with engineers; cultural barriers are much less relevant there. And the Indian engineers I've met are no slouches, either.
You forgot your rolex.
Hope this helps.
I'm still doing it, although I don't get to make entirely new programs as often as I'd like these days. Certain areas of work, particularly video and audio, involve more patent licensing issues than others. Even in those cases, though, it's a matter of having some negotiating savvy when and if it becomes an issue.
Cockroach generations are very short indeed. They develop immunity to poisons rather quickly (though not so far, as another poster points out, to boric acid). How long does it take for the cockroaches who don't follow little circuit boards with antennae to repopulate the Earth?
The selfish gene theory suggests that we may behave altrustically for the sake of others to whom we are genetically related; for instance, when a bird risks death to warn the flock of a predator rathern than simply fleeing alone, its genes are better propagated by the survival of the flock of relatives than by its solitary survival. Human altruism, which of course often extends beyond family members, may have developed from this basis.
The government was pretty cooperative as I understand it. A lot of things they could have done would have prevented this, but permits have been forthcoming.