You can't do twice as much science with two Hubble telescopes.
I had no idea that whoever ran the Hubble never had to turn down an application to make use of the thing. Perhaps if there were two of them more would get done more quickly.
No doubt there is some limit on the usefulness of a space-based telescope, but if we really were running out of useful things to do with the Hubble why did we bother fixing those gyros in the first place?
It seems like you're arguing that the Hubble is important enough to save, but not important enough to have more than one of. Are there any decisions at all associated with the Hubble program that perhaps looking back were not perfect, or is the issue simply that I'm questioning sacred cows?
Relax - I'm sure you're a smart guy and that you do great work. I'm not saying that there is no place at all for manned space programs, or for satellite repairs. I'm just questioning whether they really are cost-effective. For repairs at least the question is economically straightforward to answer if you have a full cost breakdown. For manned space in general you have to somehow quantify the benefits, which is mostly impossible without some agreement on the principles that will be used to do this.
My argument stands - what purpose does this station serve?
What science is done on the station that couldn't be done more effectively with probes?
What repairs does it do that couldn't be done more effectively with probes?
Now, if you already have a space station, taking advantage of it by leveraging marginal costs for marginal benefits is just good sense. However, nobody has made a case for why this thing is up there in the first place.
It seems like if you want to talk about probe repairs the argument will be, well, we already need it for the science anyway. Perhaps if we start talking about the science the argument will be, well, we already need it for the probe repairs anyway. Perhaps if we try to talk about both we'll end up talking about springboards to mars or whatever.
It seems like the ISS is just a means to an end, but nobody can actually tell me what that end is, beyond keeping a few industries going.
Besides - no government anywhere is likely to lay a hand on you if you're 100% cooperative with whatever they want you to do. It is in their interest to give you the carrot as well as the stick.
If they tell you to sit and you sit, no problem. If they tell you to talk and you spill your guts, no problem.
I'm sure those fed-types are real nice up until the part where say that since you aren't being arrested you're going to go ahead and walk past them and out the door...
And how much nicer would it have been if it weren't designed to require shuttle visits, and if the cost of those visits went into other probes. Perhaps it could have gone into building more than one hubble in the first place.
A bit of a tangent, but why is it that when they build these things they don't just make more than one, or at least plan to make more than one? 95% of the cost is probably in the design, so if you just run off more than one you'd have a LOT more bang for the buck.
Why go anywhere off-planet in the first place? With people, that is?
Is it just to say that we did it? Well, that's nice and all, and you're free to start collecting donations, but I'd rather not have myself and all my descendants for 30 years be paying the bills.
Is it to start some kind of viable off-planet existence? That actually makes sense to me, but in that case maybe we should go ahead and terraform the planet we intend to live on FIRST, and then start sending people to live on it. Just about all the research needed for this would be done on the ground, where it is a heck of a lot cheaper.
Is it to explore the solar system? Well, that is certainly done a lot cheaper with probes. Unhappy that we just have two of them stuck on one part of mars? Well, then go ahead and launch 50 of them, or build ones with wings or whatever. Any approach you take will be far cheaper if you leave out the people.
Calling somebody a luddite for not wanting to spend billions of dollars on orbiting stations is kind of like calling somebody a luddite for not owning their own learjet. It has nothing to do with not finding such things interesting or without value - they just do not have value proportionate to their cost.
Yup - would they even need cooling if it weren't for the people?
Ditto for the hubble. People talk about it like it was a great victory for science that the space shuttle could fix it.
Instead of launching special rescue missions with the shuttle they could have:
1. Made the hubble servicable by robots. 2. Just made a new hubble every few years. Forget upgrades, just replace the whole thing.
The advantage of #2 is that instead of putting up a cutting-edge telescope and making it last 20 years, you just put up a pretty nice one, and make it last 5 years. Then you put up another pretty nice one in 5 years. Chances are the pretty nice one you build 5 years from now is nicer than the cutting edge one you put up this year.
The only part of the hubble that is probably worth recycling is the mirror, since the technology for mirrors hasn't changed much in the last 100 years (unless it can go adaptive/etc). So, put the mirror in some detachable module and have a robot swap it out with the rest of a new telescope. The mirror doesn't need any moving parts so it should last forever.
Yup - and that is more-or-less what we do. However, the result is that some box running XP, or NT, or whatever still exists, much to the chagrin of the occasional purist. What else can you do?
Agreed on all points. I consider my role to be one of making sure that those making decisions have all the information needed to make the best decision, and to make recommendations from my perspective. I then support those decisions.
I was aiming my comment more at those who seem to think that platform standards alone should dictate software decisions. It just doesn't work that way in the real world.
That art has to be made by someone, and it cost money to live, by not paying for art you are depriving the artists of the means to make their art.
You're not paying them either way - because they aren't accepting payment.
It doesn't matter if the creator is never selling their art, if you copy it, you are still hurting creators who are selling their art by displacing your need for that type of art from art that is for sale which would support someone, to art that isn't for sale that you stole.
Now you're arguing that by copying one person's art (which cannot be obtained in any other way) I'm depriving some other artist of income, since I have some desperate need for art and if I couldn't get one for free I'd buy another.
That is like arguing that every time you download a copy of linux some kitten in Redmond dies.
Obviously free art reduces the market for paid art. Should we make it illegal to offer one's art for free?
I just don't see any of this as being a valid arguemnt. In any case, legally it is a simple matter. The artist isn't selling their work, so people pirate it. If the artist has a problem with it they can seek legal recourse in the country in which this is happening. When the artist explains to the court that they don't consider the country important enough to bother selling their work in in the first place, I'm sure that court will be quite eager to throw the book at the poor guy who just wanted some piece of software. Just ask the Canadians how that worked for DirecTV.
That can be a very hard case to make when that "odd ball" software has 80% of the market share in its domain and has a feature list quadruple that of its nearest competitor.
Keep in mind that software compatibility isn't very high on the list of features the people who make purchasing decisions are concerned with. If that odd ball software allows the business to lay off 50 employees due to productivity improvements, then IT will be asked to support it.
Actually, most likely IT will just refuse to support it, so then the area buying the software will just hire some consultant to come in one-time and deploy a small server farm in somebody's closet. Then when the time for the first security patch comes along IT will be told that it is now their problem. Executive management will back the decision, and now IT is stuck trying to slowly move all that non-standard stuff into the datacenter, etc.
Unless you and everybody else in the same industry refuses to buy a software package that doesn't meet IT standards, then vendors won't care about this and you'll be stuck with non-standard software.
Usually those support contracts contain clauses that cost the support provider money if your computers go down because they miss something in the upgrade.
That means that if you want them to push out an upgrade, you need to pay them to test all your apps, or waive their liability if you have a big mess.
All that cost is risk-aversion, and depending on your industry/etc it may actually be money well spent.
That's like saying that there is no point in putting off retirement, because you can't work forever.
If they delay spending millions of dollars for one year, then that is a net savings for the company. A million dollars next year is cheaper than a million dollars this year.
Plus, maybe during that year a few more IE6-only apps get retired, and as a result the upgrade just gets that much easier.
We run into this kind of problem all the time at work. Imagine that you buy a $500k machine 5 years ago. It is run by a controller. The controller software runs on Windows XP - great corporate standard and all that. Today IT starts talking about moving to Windows 7. You check, and that controller doesn't run on Windows 7. The manufacturer who made the machine doesn't support windows 7 for that machine either, only for the newer model of the machine. So, now you're either stuck on Windows XP, or you are buying another $500k machine. Now imagine the machine cost $5M and requires that the building housing it be constructed around it, and consider your options.
No, the vendor doesn't care, because they know they make the best machine around, and for anything costing that much you're luck if there are 2 or 3 vendors in the whole world.
Well, I'd be happy if they just released open source drivers for the phones, and source to all the good parts of the phone (sure, they can keep the parts of the market that support paid software closed).
Then I could just flash my phone with my favorite android distro, and I could care less what Google does with theirs. There are all of about 14 programs I can buy for my desktop, so why should I care if I can't buy any software for my phone either?
Right, but effectively it meant that the government could draw upon its own resources, since the bank was effectively owned 100% by the government at that point (they just won't pay for it until it is all over - since until then it won't be apparent whether the bank is worth anything).
My objection wasn't to keeping the bank running. My objection is to handing billions of dollars to the private citizens who mismanaged it in the first place, and who will run the bank to maximize profit, and not in the public interest.
Hardly, the whole mess could have been solved without any bailouts at all:
0. The plan below would be publicly communicated, so that everybody knows the implications of a "bailout." 1. Banks under risk of collapse would have a board of governors appointed by the Fed. 2. Bank could draw upon federal loans as needed to operate in the interim. 3. Board of governors would replace the first few tiers of executives with new ones. Bank records would be seized and mined for evidence against the previous round of executives and they'd spend the rest of their lives in court. 4. All bank dividends would be halted. 5. Bank would be operated in a manner to safeguard the federal economy in general, and then to protect depositors, with regard for bank owners being a much lower priority. 6. Once crisis is over, governors would reorganize bank in a manner that is most appropriate to protect the economy (likely chopping it up into a billion parts that no longer represent systemic risk - hiring staff as necessary due to the loss of economies of scale). 7. The re-organized business units would be IPO'ed. 8. An accounting would be taken, and after government loans and operating costs are paid back with interest any net value remaining in the company would be distributed to the former shareholders. Any net deficit would be recovered from the previous company leadership via restitution.
The result is that taxpayers don't foot much of the bill (maybe a little of it), and banks won't be too eager to ask for "help" either. In the future bankers will make their operations a little more boring.
All of this should of course be mixed with healthy regulation. Too-big-to-fail means too-big-to-exist, and there is no reason that banks should be selling insurance or other non-regulated investments. Make banks one industry, insurance another, and investments another. Never the twain shall meet.
While someone's right to their own creation is pretty well established (after all, that's the purpose of copyright), where does the idea that people should have to either sell you something or let you take it come from?
Uh, nobody is taking anything from anybody - they're making a copy. The creator still has their creation, and they are completely unharmed.
I'm fine with the purpose of copyright - encouraging the creation of content by giving the creator a limited monopoly on their creation so that they can monetize it and finance the creation. The problem is that in this case no monetization is happening, which means the law has failed to achieve its purpose.
A copyright law that only protected works that were available for sale would be JUST as effective at promoting science and the arts. Indeed, it would be more effective as it would remove the extinction of orphan works. Ditto for a law that limits copyright to some sane duration.
For some reason everybody acts like copyright exists to protect the rights of content creators. It doesn't exist for this purpose at all. It exists to benefit society by creating a demand for content creators in the first place. Content creators who don't share their content at all have no benefit to society at all. Now, that's fine if you want to paint masterpieces in your basement - nobody is forcing you to sell it. However, you aren't harmed at all if your masterpiece can be purchased at the local walmart if you weren't ever going to sell it yourself.
Who is being harmed in this case, and how? And I don't hurt feelings either - I'm talking about loss of some kind that can be measured in things you can see and touch.
I don't see the problem either - it is just DRM. That means in two weeks there will be a hacked market app on your favorite site that validates anything as legit.
The only way to keep people from running apps you don't want them to run is to not hand them the code to the apps - source, binary, or otherwise. Write a web-based app and nobody will use it without buying an account or whatever.
If you want your app to run offline, then it can be run without buying it - full stop.
Unless something has changed, for example, it is completely legal to intercept DirecTV service in Canada (I know it used to be at least). Why? Simple - DirecTV refused to sell service to Canadians (licensing issues and all that), so Canada just said, well, we won't regard cloning of access cards/etc as theft of service. As a result you can sell cloned smartcards or whatever in your local walmart if you want.
Perhaps that has changed, but the bottom line is that if you refuse to actually provide a service in some country, don't expect that country's government to do much to protect your non-existent market.
Yes, and what is the chance of this actually happening? And if it does happen, what are the chances that a few hundred tons of nuclear waste will make much of a difference?
Most likely the lords will just make a bunch of serfs haul the stuff off somewhere. How many slaves do you think died building the pyramids?
And why exactly should we care so much about this today?
I mean, hey, let's not leave toxic waste all over the topsoil for our kids, but if they can't bother to study physics after we die that is their problem.
The problem is that you can't revoke permissions for an app - you can only not install it.
What I want is to be able to run that app that wants 48 permissions, but only give it 3. The other 45 then give bogus data to the app. Maybe that means the app can't run, or maybe it just means that I get the utility of the app without it phoning home with all my personal info.
Yup, at work we're getting started on retiring the "Next Generation Jargonterm System" in favor of the "Global Jargonterm System."
No doubt in the future we'll replace the "Global Jargonterm System" with the "Enhanced Jargonterm System." when the GJS is the Next Generation of the Last Generation.
How ironic that this be for a cable on TVs, which already brought us the VHF vs UHF terminology. At least they numbered the channels so that there wasn't really any confusion.
They should NOT be permitted: To advertise any electrical performance numbers that exceed the requirements of the defined HDMI specification, as these numbers are irrelevant to all users.
I disagree. They are relevant to users who might want to have future-proof wiring behind their walls or whatever (granted, they have to speculate as to what future requirements might be). They are also relevant to people like me who might want to use an HDMI cable to implement my experimental 100GHz ethernet protocol or whatever.
Bottom line is that at least numerical specifications are objective - these aren't the kinds of claims we should be worried about on packaging, as long as they are accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't do twice as much science with two Hubble telescopes.
I had no idea that whoever ran the Hubble never had to turn down an application to make use of the thing. Perhaps if there were two of them more would get done more quickly.
No doubt there is some limit on the usefulness of a space-based telescope, but if we really were running out of useful things to do with the Hubble why did we bother fixing those gyros in the first place?
It seems like you're arguing that the Hubble is important enough to save, but not important enough to have more than one of. Are there any decisions at all associated with the Hubble program that perhaps looking back were not perfect, or is the issue simply that I'm questioning sacred cows?
Relax - I'm sure you're a smart guy and that you do great work. I'm not saying that there is no place at all for manned space programs, or for satellite repairs. I'm just questioning whether they really are cost-effective. For repairs at least the question is economically straightforward to answer if you have a full cost breakdown. For manned space in general you have to somehow quantify the benefits, which is mostly impossible without some agreement on the principles that will be used to do this.
My argument stands - what purpose does this station serve?
What science is done on the station that couldn't be done more effectively with probes?
What repairs does it do that couldn't be done more effectively with probes?
Now, if you already have a space station, taking advantage of it by leveraging marginal costs for marginal benefits is just good sense. However, nobody has made a case for why this thing is up there in the first place.
It seems like if you want to talk about probe repairs the argument will be, well, we already need it for the science anyway. Perhaps if we start talking about the science the argument will be, well, we already need it for the probe repairs anyway. Perhaps if we try to talk about both we'll end up talking about springboards to mars or whatever.
It seems like the ISS is just a means to an end, but nobody can actually tell me what that end is, beyond keeping a few industries going.
Besides - no government anywhere is likely to lay a hand on you if you're 100% cooperative with whatever they want you to do. It is in their interest to give you the carrot as well as the stick.
If they tell you to sit and you sit, no problem. If they tell you to talk and you spill your guts, no problem.
I'm sure those fed-types are real nice up until the part where say that since you aren't being arrested you're going to go ahead and walk past them and out the door...
Also its far cheaper to maintain a scope that is extremely nearby the space station, than it is to maintain with robots or shuttles.
Sure, if you don't account for the cost of the space station in the first place.
Why you'd spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a space station to save a few tens of millions of dollars on telescope repairs is beyond me...
And how much nicer would it have been if it weren't designed to require shuttle visits, and if the cost of those visits went into other probes. Perhaps it could have gone into building more than one hubble in the first place.
A bit of a tangent, but why is it that when they build these things they don't just make more than one, or at least plan to make more than one? 95% of the cost is probably in the design, so if you just run off more than one you'd have a LOT more bang for the buck.
Why go anywhere off-planet in the first place? With people, that is?
Is it just to say that we did it? Well, that's nice and all, and you're free to start collecting donations, but I'd rather not have myself and all my descendants for 30 years be paying the bills.
Is it to start some kind of viable off-planet existence? That actually makes sense to me, but in that case maybe we should go ahead and terraform the planet we intend to live on FIRST, and then start sending people to live on it. Just about all the research needed for this would be done on the ground, where it is a heck of a lot cheaper.
Is it to explore the solar system? Well, that is certainly done a lot cheaper with probes. Unhappy that we just have two of them stuck on one part of mars? Well, then go ahead and launch 50 of them, or build ones with wings or whatever. Any approach you take will be far cheaper if you leave out the people.
Calling somebody a luddite for not wanting to spend billions of dollars on orbiting stations is kind of like calling somebody a luddite for not owning their own learjet. It has nothing to do with not finding such things interesting or without value - they just do not have value proportionate to their cost.
Yup - would they even need cooling if it weren't for the people?
Ditto for the hubble. People talk about it like it was a great victory for science that the space shuttle could fix it.
Instead of launching special rescue missions with the shuttle they could have:
1. Made the hubble servicable by robots.
2. Just made a new hubble every few years. Forget upgrades, just replace the whole thing.
The advantage of #2 is that instead of putting up a cutting-edge telescope and making it last 20 years, you just put up a pretty nice one, and make it last 5 years. Then you put up another pretty nice one in 5 years. Chances are the pretty nice one you build 5 years from now is nicer than the cutting edge one you put up this year.
The only part of the hubble that is probably worth recycling is the mirror, since the technology for mirrors hasn't changed much in the last 100 years (unless it can go adaptive/etc). So, put the mirror in some detachable module and have a robot swap it out with the rest of a new telescope. The mirror doesn't need any moving parts so it should last forever.
Yup - and that is more-or-less what we do. However, the result is that some box running XP, or NT, or whatever still exists, much to the chagrin of the occasional purist. What else can you do?
Agreed on all points. I consider my role to be one of making sure that those making decisions have all the information needed to make the best decision, and to make recommendations from my perspective. I then support those decisions.
I was aiming my comment more at those who seem to think that platform standards alone should dictate software decisions. It just doesn't work that way in the real world.
That art has to be made by someone, and it cost money to live, by not paying for art you are depriving the artists of the means to make their art.
You're not paying them either way - because they aren't accepting payment.
It doesn't matter if the creator is never selling their art, if you copy it, you are still hurting creators who are selling their art by displacing your need for that type of art from art that is for sale which would support someone, to art that isn't for sale that you stole.
Now you're arguing that by copying one person's art (which cannot be obtained in any other way) I'm depriving some other artist of income, since I have some desperate need for art and if I couldn't get one for free I'd buy another.
That is like arguing that every time you download a copy of linux some kitten in Redmond dies.
Obviously free art reduces the market for paid art. Should we make it illegal to offer one's art for free?
I just don't see any of this as being a valid arguemnt. In any case, legally it is a simple matter. The artist isn't selling their work, so people pirate it. If the artist has a problem with it they can seek legal recourse in the country in which this is happening. When the artist explains to the court that they don't consider the country important enough to bother selling their work in in the first place, I'm sure that court will be quite eager to throw the book at the poor guy who just wanted some piece of software. Just ask the Canadians how that worked for DirecTV.
I don't see this as a moral issue at all.
That can be a very hard case to make when that "odd ball" software has 80% of the market share in its domain and has a feature list quadruple that of its nearest competitor.
Keep in mind that software compatibility isn't very high on the list of features the people who make purchasing decisions are concerned with. If that odd ball software allows the business to lay off 50 employees due to productivity improvements, then IT will be asked to support it.
Actually, most likely IT will just refuse to support it, so then the area buying the software will just hire some consultant to come in one-time and deploy a small server farm in somebody's closet. Then when the time for the first security patch comes along IT will be told that it is now their problem. Executive management will back the decision, and now IT is stuck trying to slowly move all that non-standard stuff into the datacenter, etc.
Unless you and everybody else in the same industry refuses to buy a software package that doesn't meet IT standards, then vendors won't care about this and you'll be stuck with non-standard software.
Usually those support contracts contain clauses that cost the support provider money if your computers go down because they miss something in the upgrade.
That means that if you want them to push out an upgrade, you need to pay them to test all your apps, or waive their liability if you have a big mess.
All that cost is risk-aversion, and depending on your industry/etc it may actually be money well spent.
That's like saying that there is no point in putting off retirement, because you can't work forever.
If they delay spending millions of dollars for one year, then that is a net savings for the company. A million dollars next year is cheaper than a million dollars this year.
Plus, maybe during that year a few more IE6-only apps get retired, and as a result the upgrade just gets that much easier.
We run into this kind of problem all the time at work. Imagine that you buy a $500k machine 5 years ago. It is run by a controller. The controller software runs on Windows XP - great corporate standard and all that. Today IT starts talking about moving to Windows 7. You check, and that controller doesn't run on Windows 7. The manufacturer who made the machine doesn't support windows 7 for that machine either, only for the newer model of the machine. So, now you're either stuck on Windows XP, or you are buying another $500k machine. Now imagine the machine cost $5M and requires that the building housing it be constructed around it, and consider your options.
No, the vendor doesn't care, because they know they make the best machine around, and for anything costing that much you're luck if there are 2 or 3 vendors in the whole world.
Well, I'd be happy if they just released open source drivers for the phones, and source to all the good parts of the phone (sure, they can keep the parts of the market that support paid software closed).
Then I could just flash my phone with my favorite android distro, and I could care less what Google does with theirs. There are all of about 14 programs I can buy for my desktop, so why should I care if I can't buy any software for my phone either?
Right, but effectively it meant that the government could draw upon its own resources, since the bank was effectively owned 100% by the government at that point (they just won't pay for it until it is all over - since until then it won't be apparent whether the bank is worth anything).
My objection wasn't to keeping the bank running. My objection is to handing billions of dollars to the private citizens who mismanaged it in the first place, and who will run the bank to maximize profit, and not in the public interest.
Hardly, the whole mess could have been solved without any bailouts at all:
0. The plan below would be publicly communicated, so that everybody knows the implications of a "bailout."
1. Banks under risk of collapse would have a board of governors appointed by the Fed.
2. Bank could draw upon federal loans as needed to operate in the interim.
3. Board of governors would replace the first few tiers of executives with new ones. Bank records would be seized and mined for evidence against the previous round of executives and they'd spend the rest of their lives in court.
4. All bank dividends would be halted.
5. Bank would be operated in a manner to safeguard the federal economy in general, and then to protect depositors, with regard for bank owners being a much lower priority.
6. Once crisis is over, governors would reorganize bank in a manner that is most appropriate to protect the economy (likely chopping it up into a billion parts that no longer represent systemic risk - hiring staff as necessary due to the loss of economies of scale).
7. The re-organized business units would be IPO'ed.
8. An accounting would be taken, and after government loans and operating costs are paid back with interest any net value remaining in the company would be distributed to the former shareholders. Any net deficit would be recovered from the previous company leadership via restitution.
The result is that taxpayers don't foot much of the bill (maybe a little of it), and banks won't be too eager to ask for "help" either. In the future bankers will make their operations a little more boring.
All of this should of course be mixed with healthy regulation. Too-big-to-fail means too-big-to-exist, and there is no reason that banks should be selling insurance or other non-regulated investments. Make banks one industry, insurance another, and investments another. Never the twain shall meet.
While someone's right to their own creation is pretty well established (after all, that's the purpose of copyright), where does the idea that people should have to either sell you something or let you take it come from?
Uh, nobody is taking anything from anybody - they're making a copy. The creator still has their creation, and they are completely unharmed.
I'm fine with the purpose of copyright - encouraging the creation of content by giving the creator a limited monopoly on their creation so that they can monetize it and finance the creation. The problem is that in this case no monetization is happening, which means the law has failed to achieve its purpose.
A copyright law that only protected works that were available for sale would be JUST as effective at promoting science and the arts. Indeed, it would be more effective as it would remove the extinction of orphan works. Ditto for a law that limits copyright to some sane duration.
For some reason everybody acts like copyright exists to protect the rights of content creators. It doesn't exist for this purpose at all. It exists to benefit society by creating a demand for content creators in the first place. Content creators who don't share their content at all have no benefit to society at all. Now, that's fine if you want to paint masterpieces in your basement - nobody is forcing you to sell it. However, you aren't harmed at all if your masterpiece can be purchased at the local walmart if you weren't ever going to sell it yourself.
Who is being harmed in this case, and how? And I don't hurt feelings either - I'm talking about loss of some kind that can be measured in things you can see and touch.
I don't see the problem either - it is just DRM. That means in two weeks there will be a hacked market app on your favorite site that validates anything as legit.
The only way to keep people from running apps you don't want them to run is to not hand them the code to the apps - source, binary, or otherwise. Write a web-based app and nobody will use it without buying an account or whatever.
If you want your app to run offline, then it can be run without buying it - full stop.
That depends on the local laws.
Unless something has changed, for example, it is completely legal to intercept DirecTV service in Canada (I know it used to be at least). Why? Simple - DirecTV refused to sell service to Canadians (licensing issues and all that), so Canada just said, well, we won't regard cloning of access cards/etc as theft of service. As a result you can sell cloned smartcards or whatever in your local walmart if you want.
Perhaps that has changed, but the bottom line is that if you refuse to actually provide a service in some country, don't expect that country's government to do much to protect your non-existent market.
Yes, and what is the chance of this actually happening? And if it does happen, what are the chances that a few hundred tons of nuclear waste will make much of a difference?
Most likely the lords will just make a bunch of serfs haul the stuff off somewhere. How many slaves do you think died building the pyramids?
And why exactly should we care so much about this today?
I mean, hey, let's not leave toxic waste all over the topsoil for our kids, but if they can't bother to study physics after we die that is their problem.
The problem is that you can't revoke permissions for an app - you can only not install it.
What I want is to be able to run that app that wants 48 permissions, but only give it 3. The other 45 then give bogus data to the app. Maybe that means the app can't run, or maybe it just means that I get the utility of the app without it phoning home with all my personal info.
Android forces a false dichotomy.
Yup, at work we're getting started on retiring the "Next Generation Jargonterm System" in favor of the "Global Jargonterm System."
No doubt in the future we'll replace the "Global Jargonterm System" with the "Enhanced Jargonterm System." when the GJS is the Next Generation of the Last Generation.
How ironic that this be for a cable on TVs, which already brought us the VHF vs UHF terminology. At least they numbered the channels so that there wasn't really any confusion.
They should NOT be permitted:
To advertise any electrical performance numbers that exceed the requirements of the defined HDMI specification, as these numbers are irrelevant to all users.
I disagree. They are relevant to users who might want to have future-proof wiring behind their walls or whatever (granted, they have to speculate as to what future requirements might be). They are also relevant to people like me who might want to use an HDMI cable to implement my experimental 100GHz ethernet protocol or whatever.
Bottom line is that at least numerical specifications are objective - these aren't the kinds of claims we should be worried about on packaging, as long as they are accurate.
WHOOSH!!!!