My concern is that Microsoft could arbitrarily decide that your copy is not properly licenced, and then effectively hold your data to ransom by preventing you from accessing your PC. If you (heaven forbid) actually decide to use their new encrypted file system then you're doubly screwed. What if your business was entirely based on vista machines, and microsoft had the power to lock all of your users out? It gives them amazing power to extort money from you or even shut down your company if you decide to sue them for some reason. I just hope that the WGA (what a name!) thing gets ruled illegal by the EU, given that then seem to be the only body with the balls to take MS on.
Actually I think that a slightly improved version of that would be a two machine solution. The first machine simply turns the electronic vote via touchscreen or similar into a human and machine readable card. The voter then checks that the printed card actually reflect their intension, and then puts the cards into the tallying machine. This simply reads the card, indicates visually what it has read and records the vote. In case of a recount you can then either use manual or computer methods of counting the votes as the printed cards are retained. Full traceability, with no single point of failure, and manual backup. Easy.
Any mixture that contains enough of the innocent compound to mask the suspect one will probably be too dilute to work, and almost impossible to react with another chemical to produce the desired chemical without a fully equiped chemistry lab on the plane. In fact that last statement is true for almost any imaginable binary explosive (but not for binary chemical warfare agent. Why blow a plane out of the sky when all you have to do is poison those on board and let the plane crash with no pilot)
Altering the chemistry to maintain the function while also adequately fooling spectroscopic techniques is extremely far fetched, especially in order to have a chemical which can then be used an an explosive or toxin. In fact, all a screening technique would have to show is whether or not the sample in question is water. If it's not water then you do further, more precise checks, and if you don't have to open the container, then so much the better.
Raman instruments, such as the one my employer makes, are well suited to this type of application, both for quick tests and more in depth analysis.
I suggest Raman spectroscopy. It's non destructive, can be used on samples inside containers, uniquely identifies molecules and compounds rather than elements, and is great for biological samples too.
ditto. Telewest is great, except when some **** cut the cable before the England game last month. I was able to watch it on the bbc website though, which wasn't to bad once I reduced my desktop resolution towards the native stream size.
Not to the victims, their friends and families. They're still victimised and terrorised whatever the intent.
There is also the question of negligence, or simply the lack of consideration. IMHO killing someone simply because you're not interested in their worth as a human being is almost as bad as intentionally killing them. Killing 1 innocent bystander to get 1 criminal would not be tollerated on the streets of New York or Washington DC, so why is it on the streets of Baghdad? It's because the lives of the Iraqi civilians don't count, as witnessed by the fact that they're not counted.
I think a point worth mentioning is that both "We cannot explain this, therefore it is inexplicable therefore God did it" and "We can explain this, therefore God didn't do it" are equally incorrect statements.
Both arguements assume that God (Intelligent Designer or whatever) must act on the universe by directly interfering with the universes natural processes. Thus, by this reasoning, in order to prove Gods existance we would have to find an instance of a evolution by a supernatural mechanism, and to disprove His existance you just shoot down each claim to the former.
This is false reasoning because it assumes that the natural mechanisms of the universe are not themselves the method by which God chooses to act. It also assumes that the universe didn't just pop into being, fully formed 5 seconds ago, populated by creatures who thought they were much older than that. These are both assumptions that cannot be proven. Sure, the universe looks much older that 5 seconds, but we cannot prove it without basing that upon unprovable assumptions.
Even if we understood all the mechanisms of the universe, we still couldn't understand that which is outside of ability to perceive. We cannot explain what we cannot see, and we don't know what it is that we cannot see. Furthermore we have no reason to believe that we can see all that there is, or that our ability to perceive it is totally reliable. Science and reason are great tools for understanding the universe as we see it, and I believe to understand something of the mind of God along the way, but they are limited by our nature, and to pretend otherwise is a lie. Furthermore, to regard everything beyond the scope of science to be irrelevent, simply because it cannot be reasoned, is false logic. It may not have a repeatable, observable effect on us, but it may have an effect that is important.
Careful, that's probably libelous. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. Bill Gates is an employee and shareholder of Microsoft, and probably doesn't have that much to do with the financial side of the business.
Re:no laughing matter (and how to avoid it)
on
Merck's Deleted Data
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· Score: 1
In 1997, the Food and Drug Administration issued 21 CFR Part 11, the Final Rule on Electronic Records and Electronic Signatures. Part 11 applies to all electronic records that are created, modified, maintained, archived, retrieved, or transmitted in companies or departments that work under any kind of FDA regulation, as well as records submitted to the agency under the requirements of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and the Public Health Service Act. All GxP-regulated industries (pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers of medical devices, analytical contract laboratories, etc.) must comply with these regulations.
True, but it does imply that the written documents correspond strongly with the oral tradition that was the primary method of spreading the gospel in the early church.
In fact, it strengthens the case for Christ that there is no very early cannonical document, from which all other documents could be sourced. If such an account did exist then it could be argued that Christianity evolved from a story, but the existence of many slightly different accounts implies several witnesses reporting what they saw in their own words.
What you'll find there is an expert (A guy studying for a PhD in Critical textual analysis of ancient documents, who goes by the name caesar) pointing out that there are no serious and well regarded scholars who deny that Jesus existed, and that some of the new testament document have their origin just a few years after Jesus was crucified. Given that is the case, anyone who wishes to deny the historical accuracy of the claims of the gospels has to come up with a good theory as to why this fledgling cult wasn't killed off like so many others.
Once you accept the fact that Jesus existed and that the NT is generally reliable, insomuch that it hasn't been significantly altered since it was written, you have then only to believe or disbelieve what the books actually contain. To disregard the claims of the gospel you have nothing more solid than simply denying that such things are possible. This is also known as an argument from incredulity, a logical falacy.
If the claims of the NT had been false, they would have been convincingly squashed very early on, simply by the Jewish authorities producing the body of Jesus, or people who were cited as eyewitnesses to these events would have been produced to deny that they did witness them, and that would basically have been that. Instead, people chose to die rather than say they did not see these things, some of them in extremely gruesome ways.
To be honest, I cannot begin to imagine how difficult it would have been to fake the claims of the gospels, and to find people willing to die for a lie.
In this paper, we have considered the theoretical foundations of the hydrino hypothesis, both within the theoretical framework of CQM, in which hydrinos were originally suggested, and within standard quantum mechanics. We found that CQM is inconsistent and has several serious deficiencies. Amongst these are the failure to reproduce the energy levels of the excited states of the hydrogen atom, and the absence of Lorentz invariance. Most importantly, we found that CQM does not predict the existence of hydrino states! Also, standard quantum mechanics cannot encompass hydrino states, with the properties currently attributed to them. Hence there remains no theoretical support of the hydrino hypothesis. This strongly suggests that the experimental evidence put forward in favour of the existence of hydrinos should be reconsidered for interpretation in terms of conventional physics. This reconsideration of the experimental data is beyond the scope of the current paper. Also, to understand properly the experimental results presented by Mills et al , it would be helpful if these were independently reproduced by some other experimental groups.
ridiculously false eh. Care to back up your claims? (Before you spout off about the gospels, and the whole new testament being corrupted or made up etc, you might like to check out this thread) Once you've done that please explain how you can start a new religion based upon miraculous events within days of the death of your its founder, while there are still many thousands of eyewitnesses around to disprove your claims. Finally please explain why people would be willing to die for something they knew to be false. I await your answer with eager anticipation.
Symantec's case isn't helped by the fact that none of the major AV/firewall vendors have come up with a home user security package for Windows XP x64 yet, and that may be hindering sales of the OS. In effect they are forcing microsoft's hand by leaving a portion of microsoft customers unprotected.
Well I have a Napster to go subscription, and I must say I'm very happy with it in general. I can download anything from their million plus track archive to my zen micro, I can use windows media player to manage the synchronisation to the device according to either automatic or manual ratings, and it costs less than the price of a CD per month. If I actually want to burn a track to CD then I can purchase it at 79p per track, or better deals for entire albums, and any track I purchase can be played from wma format on up to the seperate PC's. Licences for purchased tracks can also be restored online should your hard drive die on you, or if you reinstall windows.
This is one problem with DRM. Whatever system you choose is a monopoly of some kind since an open source DRM system is impossible. As for the BBC, if 90% of its customers already have windows and access to (AFAIK) the only widely installed DRM enabled video codec out there, or at least the major one, they're going to use that rather than waste vast amounts of licence payers money developing their own in house codec. Better the devil you know perhaps.
Personally I'm quite pleased that it's only available to UK residents AND that it will be DRM protected. After all, why should I pay to give the rest of the world free, high quality (or even low quality) entertainment. Furthermore, if the protection were broken they would probably be forced to stop distributing the material in order to protect their international exclusive contracts with other networks.
Well all I can say as a windows C++ software developer writing video streaming apps using DirectX, is that since switching to XP (which was pretty much as soon as it came out) I think I've seen 1 BSOD, and actually laughed because I was so surprised to see it. I used to see them a little more often on 2k and several times a day when I was developing on win 98. I also use XP pro on my home gaming machine and IMHO, XP is about as stable as you're ever likely to get, so long as you don't get faulty hardware or crappy drivers.
Come to think of it, I've almost forgotten what a BSOD looks like.
I simply don't believe that's their goal. When the executives were asked at PDC this year about apple and iPods they talked about how they were different to apple because microsoft just wanted to create a software ecosystem in which third party developers could thrive, wheras apple want to retain total control of their platform and client software. Look at the amount of effort microsoft put into supporting and encouraging third party software developers. They produce the best (or at least most) IDEs, reference material, training courses and certification for software development all targeted at third party developers. They know that the easiest way to keep sales of windows high is to make sure that if you want to do anything on a PC there will be more choice in Windows based software than anything else.
Of course today intelligence is a negative evolutionary pressure. Smart people are having fewer children, or not having children at all, while people with no education or job prospects are having kids as fast as they can pick them up off the floor. This has always been true to some extent, but now all the children of parents with limited intelligence stand a reasonable chance of living long enough to have children of their own. Free healthcare, social security and cheap food conspire to make humanity stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
My reading of it was not that using vista in a VM was not allowed, but using the same licence for both the host and virtualised OS was not allowed.
My concern is that Microsoft could arbitrarily decide that your copy is not properly licenced, and then effectively hold your data to ransom by preventing you from accessing your PC. If you (heaven forbid) actually decide to use their new encrypted file system then you're doubly screwed. What if your business was entirely based on vista machines, and microsoft had the power to lock all of your users out? It gives them amazing power to extort money from you or even shut down your company if you decide to sue them for some reason. I just hope that the WGA (what a name!) thing gets ruled illegal by the EU, given that then seem to be the only body with the balls to take MS on.
Not at all. You simply randomly check machines by verifying their voting record against a batch of votes. Any doubts and you hand recount everything.
Actually I think that a slightly improved version of that would be a two machine solution. The first machine simply turns the electronic vote via touchscreen or similar into a human and machine readable card. The voter then checks that the printed card actually reflect their intension, and then puts the cards into the tallying machine. This simply reads the card, indicates visually what it has read and records the vote. In case of a recount you can then either use manual or computer methods of counting the votes as the printed cards are retained. Full traceability, with no single point of failure, and manual backup. Easy.
Any mixture that contains enough of the innocent compound to mask the suspect one will probably be too dilute to work, and almost impossible to react with another chemical to produce the desired chemical without a fully equiped chemistry lab on the plane. In fact that last statement is true for almost any imaginable binary explosive (but not for binary chemical warfare agent. Why blow a plane out of the sky when all you have to do is poison those on board and let the plane crash with no pilot)
Altering the chemistry to maintain the function while also adequately fooling spectroscopic techniques is extremely far fetched, especially in order to have a chemical which can then be used an an explosive or toxin. In fact, all a screening technique would have to show is whether or not the sample in question is water. If it's not water then you do further, more precise checks, and if you don't have to open the container, then so much the better.
Raman instruments, such as the one my employer makes, are well suited to this type of application, both for quick tests and more in depth analysis.
I suggest Raman spectroscopy. It's non destructive, can be used on samples inside containers, uniquely identifies molecules and compounds rather than elements, and is great for biological samples too.
ditto. Telewest is great, except when some **** cut the cable before the England game last month. I was able to watch it on the bbc website though, which wasn't to bad once I reduced my desktop resolution towards the native stream size.
Not to the victims, their friends and families. They're still victimised and terrorised whatever the intent.
There is also the question of negligence, or simply the lack of consideration. IMHO killing someone simply because you're not interested in their worth as a human being is almost as bad as intentionally killing them. Killing 1 innocent bystander to get 1 criminal would not be tollerated on the streets of New York or Washington DC, so why is it on the streets of Baghdad? It's because the lives of the Iraqi civilians don't count, as witnessed by the fact that they're not counted.
I think a point worth mentioning is that both "We cannot explain this, therefore it is inexplicable therefore God did it" and "We can explain this, therefore God didn't do it" are equally incorrect statements.
Both arguements assume that God (Intelligent Designer or whatever) must act on the universe by directly interfering with the universes natural processes. Thus, by this reasoning, in order to prove Gods existance we would have to find an instance of a evolution by a supernatural mechanism, and to disprove His existance you just shoot down each claim to the former.
This is false reasoning because it assumes that the natural mechanisms of the universe are not themselves the method by which God chooses to act. It also assumes that the universe didn't just pop into being, fully formed 5 seconds ago, populated by creatures who thought they were much older than that. These are both assumptions that cannot be proven. Sure, the universe looks much older that 5 seconds, but we cannot prove it without basing that upon unprovable assumptions.
Even if we understood all the mechanisms of the universe, we still couldn't understand that which is outside of ability to perceive. We cannot explain what we cannot see, and we don't know what it is that we cannot see. Furthermore we have no reason to believe that we can see all that there is, or that our ability to perceive it is totally reliable. Science and reason are great tools for understanding the universe as we see it, and I believe to understand something of the mind of God along the way, but they are limited by our nature, and to pretend otherwise is a lie. Furthermore, to regard everything beyond the scope of science to be irrelevent, simply because it cannot be reasoned, is false logic. It may not have a repeatable, observable effect on us, but it may have an effect that is important.
Careful, that's probably libelous. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. Bill Gates is an employee and shareholder of Microsoft, and probably doesn't have that much to do with the financial side of the business.
In 1997, the Food and Drug Administration issued 21 CFR Part 11, the Final Rule on Electronic Records and Electronic Signatures. Part 11 applies to all electronic records that are created, modified, maintained, archived, retrieved, or transmitted in companies or departments that work under any kind of FDA regulation, as well as records submitted to the agency under the requirements of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and the Public Health Service Act. All GxP-regulated industries (pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers of medical devices, analytical contract laboratories, etc.) must comply with these regulations.
True, but how is your typical IT boss looking to switch to linux going to tell a true Linux expert from a /. reader?
True, but it does imply that the written documents correspond strongly with the oral tradition that was the primary method of spreading the gospel in the early church.
In fact, it strengthens the case for Christ that there is no very early cannonical document, from which all other documents could be sourced. If such an account did exist then it could be argued that Christianity evolved from a story, but the existence of many slightly different accounts implies several witnesses reporting what they saw in their own words.
What you'll find there is an expert (A guy studying for a PhD in Critical textual analysis of ancient documents, who goes by the name caesar) pointing out that there are no serious and well regarded scholars who deny that Jesus existed, and that some of the new testament document have their origin just a few years after Jesus was crucified. Given that is the case, anyone who wishes to deny the historical accuracy of the claims of the gospels has to come up with a good theory as to why this fledgling cult wasn't killed off like so many others.
Once you accept the fact that Jesus existed and that the NT is generally reliable, insomuch that it hasn't been significantly altered since it was written, you have then only to believe or disbelieve what the books actually contain. To disregard the claims of the gospel you have nothing more solid than simply denying that such things are possible. This is also known as an argument from incredulity, a logical falacy.
If the claims of the NT had been false, they would have been convincingly squashed very early on, simply by the Jewish authorities producing the body of Jesus, or people who were cited as eyewitnesses to these events would have been produced to deny that they did witness them, and that would basically have been that. Instead, people chose to die rather than say they did not see these things, some of them in extremely gruesome ways.
To be honest, I cannot begin to imagine how difficult it would have been to fake the claims of the gospels, and to find people willing to die for a lie.
From the conclusion:
ridiculously false eh. Care to back up your claims? (Before you spout off about the gospels, and the whole new testament being corrupted or made up etc, you might like to check out this thread) Once you've done that please explain how you can start a new religion based upon miraculous events within days of the death of your its founder, while there are still many thousands of eyewitnesses around to disprove your claims. Finally please explain why people would be willing to die for something they knew to be false. I await your answer with eager anticipation.
Anyone got a spare googlemail Uk invite?
Symantec's case isn't helped by the fact that none of the major AV/firewall vendors have come up with a home user security package for Windows XP x64 yet, and that may be hindering sales of the OS. In effect they are forcing microsoft's hand by leaving a portion of microsoft customers unprotected.
Well I have a Napster to go subscription, and I must say I'm very happy with it in general. I can download anything from their million plus track archive to my zen micro, I can use windows media player to manage the synchronisation to the device according to either automatic or manual ratings, and it costs less than the price of a CD per month. If I actually want to burn a track to CD then I can purchase it at 79p per track, or better deals for entire albums, and any track I purchase can be played from wma format on up to the seperate PC's. Licences for purchased tracks can also be restored online should your hard drive die on you, or if you reinstall windows.
This is one problem with DRM. Whatever system you choose is a monopoly of some kind since an open source DRM system is impossible. As for the BBC, if 90% of its customers already have windows and access to (AFAIK) the only widely installed DRM enabled video codec out there, or at least the major one, they're going to use that rather than waste vast amounts of licence payers money developing their own in house codec. Better the devil you know perhaps.
Personally I'm quite pleased that it's only available to UK residents AND that it will be DRM protected. After all, why should I pay to give the rest of the world free, high quality (or even low quality) entertainment. Furthermore, if the protection were broken they would probably be forced to stop distributing the material in order to protect their international exclusive contracts with other networks.
Well all I can say as a windows C++ software developer writing video streaming apps using DirectX, is that since switching to XP (which was pretty much as soon as it came out) I think I've seen 1 BSOD, and actually laughed because I was so surprised to see it. I used to see them a little more often on 2k and several times a day when I was developing on win 98. I also use XP pro on my home gaming machine and IMHO, XP is about as stable as you're ever likely to get, so long as you don't get faulty hardware or crappy drivers.
Come to think of it, I've almost forgotten what a BSOD looks like.
and when both of them start crashing and/or you REALLY care about uptime, put it on VMS.
I simply don't believe that's their goal. When the executives were asked at PDC this year about apple and iPods they talked about how they were different to apple because microsoft just wanted to create a software ecosystem in which third party developers could thrive, wheras apple want to retain total control of their platform and client software. Look at the amount of effort microsoft put into supporting and encouraging third party software developers. They produce the best (or at least most) IDEs, reference material, training courses and certification for software development all targeted at third party developers. They know that the easiest way to keep sales of windows high is to make sure that if you want to do anything on a PC there will be more choice in Windows based software than anything else.
Of course today intelligence is a negative evolutionary pressure. Smart people are having fewer children, or not having children at all, while people with no education or job prospects are having kids as fast as they can pick them up off the floor. This has always been true to some extent, but now all the children of parents with limited intelligence stand a reasonable chance of living long enough to have children of their own. Free healthcare, social security and cheap food conspire to make humanity stupid.