The second one. MS has a patent on the ribbon bar. In order to build a ribbon-like interface, you have to license the look-and-feel from them (or use their Windows APIs with Visual Studio, which I thought comes with such a license).
Apologies for the serious answer but... Microsoft cannot claim intellectual property rights over pull-down menus. They are published UI standard, intended for copying.
No, that's pretty much correct. The photons that come out the other side of the medium aren't the "original" photons. They are photons that have been "relayed" (propagated) through the medium. It's as if there was a big complicated telephone game going on.
Not every particle get emitted again, nor does every particle get absorbed (reflection / refraction).
Another analogy for Stooshie: Imagine twenty people lined up along the length of a tennis court, each one holding a single tennis ball. You toss a tennis ball quickly to the first person at end of the line. He catches it and throws the one he was holding to the next person, she catches his and throws hers on to the next and so forth. Each person tosses the ball at the same speed you threw it at originally, but each person wastes a bit of time moving their own ball to their throwing hand and turning to make the throw. The overall time it takes to cover the length of the court (group velocity) is slower than if you had simply thrown the ball directly to the end of the court. Additionally, the overall velocity of the propagated tennis ball is slower than the velocity of each individual point-to-point exchange.
The speed of light quanta (photons) is constant, the propagation of a light wave varies with the medium it travels through.
The collider is so cool you could keep a side of meat in it for a month. It is so incredibly hip it has trouble seeing over its own pelvis. Hey, you sass that hoopy large hadron collider, there's a frood that really knows where its towel's at.
Technology doesn't get replaced with new technology that doesn't work as well as the existing technology.
The problem is that the criteria changes. I still use an IBM Model M 1391401 keyboard, and, in my opinion, it works much better than nearly all of the keyboards currently available. The trouble is, most keyboards today are made to satisfy resellers and bulk buyers, not end users. Membrane keyboards are quieter in cubicle farms and cheaper to make by the thousands for companies like Dell. So bye-bye buckling-spring keyboard. It's a good thing they were so well made; you can still use Model M keyboards today, even though some of them were made more than 20 years ago.
How about mobile phones? As battery powered phones, they've actually gotten worse. I used to get two weeks of standby time out of my Sprint PCS phone. In fact, that's what I bought it for. No, I couldn't take pictures, no I couldn't play MP3s or connect over Bluetooth. I could surf the web, and it did have a color screen. Now? I have to charge my phone every other day. It depends on your definition of better.
Cheaper beats better, most of the time. Multifunction beats best of breed, most of the time. In the process, consumers lose out on what was special about the better products (I'm going to hang on to my second-gen iPod Nano for as long as I can).
Touchscreens will not be the thing to do away with the mouse. A touch pad the size of your mouse pad, maybe. It'll be wedged to the side of your keyboard, and no it won't be better.
Right you are, but the only way you can tell that from TFA is to click the link in said TFA it to another FA, which has a link in it to the original story from some sort of "Newspaper."
How do they expect Slashdotters to figure out what's going on if it isn't mentioned in the summary?
The ability to spy on Americans, in violation of their rights...
The ability to intercept communications between Americans and foreign nationals of suspect affiliations has always been within the purview of the federal government. Granted, it used to be letters that were intercepted, but even then, no warrants were required.
For crying out loud, if an American citizen is having a conversation with someone overseas whose phone number was listed in the laptop of an enemy combatant picked up on the battlefield, I sure hope the feds are listening.
Absolutely. Astounding became Analog, which is still around. You'll find your basic hard SF and space opera here, along with SF related science articles. IASFM was renamed (and relaunched if I recall correctly) as Asimov's Science Fiction. ASF content is a bit broader than Analog as you'll find more "speculative fiction" here (like alternate histories...). I have the current copies of each one on my desktop at home at the moment.
My dad introduced me to science fiction by bringing home a "kid's" novel one day. I couldn't have been much older than eight or nine. I tore through it as quickly as I could, sneaking a flashlight under the covers to finish it. It was Tom Swift: The City in the Stars. As each new one came out, I'd spend my allowance on it (when I wasn't saving for a Lego set).
I was hooked. I made it through the sixth book in the series before I tumbled to the fact that this wasn't the original series. At that point I became a regular at the library and checked out every Tom Swift book they had. That's how I learned about this "interloan" thing.
I'd never been out of the kid's section before but I noticed that the library had this whole other back section that wasn't nonfiction, and wasn't kid's books. I walked back through it and to my amazement I discovered shelf after shelf full of fiction and a fair number of the books had the letters SF written in Sharpie on a label card on the spine. Magic!
I decided to try out my first "Adult" science fiction novel and I thought robots were just the coolest thing (next to spaceships of course, but all decent science fiction had spaceships in it). Robots of Dawn had just arrived, and since the title sounded cool, I grabbed it from the returns rack. I became a lifelong fan of Isaac Asimov after the first chapter. I went back to the library and dug up as many books by him as I could find, not just his science fiction, but the Ellery Queen stories, his science books, as much as I could find in the library's catalog or through the interloan program.
I began reading back issues of Astounding Science Fiction, Analog, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (IASFM!), and discovered other authors. Many of the story intros or commentaries in anthologies had mentioned this Dune novel, so I decided to check it out. I had to renew it because I couldn't read through it in three weeks (it was 1984, the same year the David Lynch movie was released... I was ten). It was a revelation.
From there, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Heinlein, Simak, Gordon R. Dickson, Phillip K. Dick, Sturgeon, Bradbury, Poul Anderson, Piers Anthony, Douglas Adams, C.J. Cherryh, Kim Stanley Robinson, Spider Robinson, Ursula K. Leguin, Joan D. Vinge, Vernor Vinge, and more, and more. But to understand all of these, I had to get their references, and so I began to dig into Dickens and Melville and Shakespeare. By the time I was in Junior High School, I was more widely read than just about any other kid in school.
Don't sell your kids short thinking they're too young for Asimov. Granted, his writings are a gateway drug.
I was under the impression that there's not enough "waste oil" to meet the kind of demand that a majority-bio-diesel solution would call for. The result would be that much of the stuff getting pumped into tanks would have to come straight from rapeseed oil (for example), and not by way of the deep fryer at the local pub. With the possible exception of cellulosic biofuels, every current method of producing combustible fuel somehow links food production to the fuel tank of your vehicle.
The net result for biofuel, even biodiesel, is that we starve people in developing nations by the millions so we can drive our cars. Let the internal combustion engine die alongside oil reserves. We need something very different, and if food supply is involved anywhere in that chain, it had better be burned in the cells of horses not the tanks of the latest S Class. That's why the focus ought to be on things like electric or mechanical (flywheel) means to powering vehicles.
Sadly, the emphasis is on biofuels rather than electric. Basically this boils down to burning food. At best, arable land that could be used for food crops will get used for fuel crops instead (this is already happening).
Electric cars, on the other hand, can be powered by nuclear reactors. And dang it, where's my flywheel?
The truth is that another hijacking is unlikely to happen
With these devices it would seem far more likely to happen. All you'd need to do is hack the system that controls the bracelets and you've just subdued the entire passenger compliment. This seems like a massively stupid idea.
IRC, the quantum entanglement phenomenon has been shown not to transfer information faster than the speed of light. There's no teleportation of matter occurring at all, simply matter here and matter there whose state is coupled. Not at all the same thing.
Einstein showed that there is no need for a static background. Your arguments suggest that light propagates only as a wave, which again, Einstein showed to be false in those same 1905 papers (quanta of light). He didn't write the book until a few years later. The notion of photon which Einstein proposed has lead to one of the most spectacularly successful models of the universe we've yet seen: quantum mechanics, A.K.A. the Standard Model.
Davis Mechanics are modifications to Newton's mechanics. They're simply easier to deal with when you're not working with velocities close to the speed of light, or stellar scales. Calculations for firing a gun can easily use cleaned up Newtonian mechanics for a reasonable approximation. Just like NASA still uses Newtonian Mechanics (tweaked) to do most of its calculations.
As for the propagation of light in mediums like water, the speed of photons is constant, the propagation of the wave slows down as the photons interact with matter, getting absorbed or emitted as the case may be. Cerenkov radiation happens when energetic particles move faster than the propagation of the wave (not faster than the photons) and cause additional emission of photons (more than would've come from the wave itself). The analogy to sonic booms should not be stretched beyond its purpose to impute mechanisms.
That was one of the worst episodes of any Star Trek, ever. "If the sails get blown on hard enough, the ship'll go faster than light!" This was one of the few episodes of any of the series that I actively hated. I can respect JMS for his "at the speed of plot" quips about how fast Star Furies in B5 go, but in this episode of DS9 they sacrificed suspension of disbelief on the part many of their viewers for the sake of allegory.
I've worked with more than a dozen female programmers in my career. One of them checked in code that didn't compile, and then later explained that it wasn't her responsibility to ensure that the code actually worked. Another woman I've worked with debugs assembly for instrumentation code in monitoring tools. She works on very difficult code and does it well (fair disclosure: she's my girlfriend). Yet another woman I worked with was a fair GUI programmer, but she began slacking off as she prepared for a career completely unrelated to computers.
The truth is, I've known and worked with programmers (of both sexes) that land all along the spectrum, from dead-weight incompetent to brilliant and prolific. This is simply crude and ridiculous stereotyping.
Nah... Use Woolite and hand wash it. It's cheaper. Besides, those dry cleaner hangars will keep screwing up the lines of the car, and you'll get that "We're sorry, we tried and tried to get that bug juice off the grill but no matter what we did we couldn't" sucks-to-be-you sticker on it.
Yeah! Let's charge President Bush with all kinds of crimes! But make sure we get Clinton, too! He bombed those folks in Europe. Get him!
Stirring up the mob with this impeachment nonsense is a way to get people to ignore what's going on around them. Congress has driven us to start putting food in our gas tanks. The end result will be famine and food riots. Way to go!
"American's demand we do something about these obscene oil profits." I actually heard this quote on the radio driving home. No, we don't. We want our lower cost of living back. The U.S. is the only nation on earth with abundant untouched oil resources that has decided not to harvest them. Thanks Congress! No off shore oil, no shale processing, no drilling in ANWR, and no reasonable alternatives (nuclear, darn it, like France).
Congress is currently trying their best to centralize the U.S. economy under the guise of phony environmentalism (Cap & Trade). With even limited use, cap and trade schemes have led to worse pollution, because now companies can simply pay money to pollute more. So why write it into law? Why, to lock down that nasty free market thing, of course. Free markets are key to free societies.
But just so people don't notice this tilt toward a centralized economy (which historically always leads to a weak economy and totalitarianism), we'll prattle on about how horrible we think President Bush is.
Fire and motion. The American people are the ones pinned down.
/rant... You can mod me down now. Sigh.
I really think we had a bunch of Cold War guys that got blindsided by 9/11 and overreacted. They sincerely wanted to protect U.S. interests and scraped and fought for any means to do it. Reign them in, vote them out. But this frothing at the mouth has got to stop. Bring back the debate of clear ideas, unclouded with slippery half-statements.
To Congress: Stop telling me what I demand. Stop putting words in my mouth. I want to be able to work hard and enjoy what I've earned. If I work harder, produce more or better than my neighbor, then I do deserve more. Let me keep it. I'll pay you to keep criminals at bay. I'll pay you to keep the opportunities equal. I'm not paying you to keep the results equal. That only achieves a lowest common denominator. I'll pay you for the infrastructure you maintain on my behalf. But please, no more power grabs. I demand the rule of law, tempered by the application of principle, guided by the restraint of morals. You must serve, you must not rule.
And they laughed when I made papier-mâché throwing stars. I'll show them! I am the Paper Ninja (played by Matthew Lillard), and I've just come from OfficeMax!
Hmm... The vibe I got from the article was that the "heads up" was regarding the need for more lawyers. "This is scary stuff man, you better watch out... You don't even know! I mean, you'll need, like, twice the number of lawyers now!"
It reads like FUD, but not so much against open source as for pair-programming with a lawyer. The first clue was his assertion that open source == GPL v3.0.
Slashdot Mirror
The second one. MS has a patent on the ribbon bar. In order to build a ribbon-like interface, you have to license the look-and-feel from them (or use their Windows APIs with Visual Studio, which I thought comes with such a license).
Apologies for the serious answer but... Microsoft cannot claim intellectual property rights over pull-down menus. They are published UI standard, intended for copying.
No, that's pretty much correct. The photons that come out the other side of the medium aren't the "original" photons. They are photons that have been "relayed" (propagated) through the medium. It's as if there was a big complicated telephone game going on.
Not every particle get emitted again, nor does every particle get absorbed (reflection / refraction).
Another analogy for Stooshie: Imagine twenty people lined up along the length of a tennis court, each one holding a single tennis ball. You toss a tennis ball quickly to the first person at end of the line. He catches it and throws the one he was holding to the next person, she catches his and throws hers on to the next and so forth. Each person tosses the ball at the same speed you threw it at originally, but each person wastes a bit of time moving their own ball to their throwing hand and turning to make the throw. The overall time it takes to cover the length of the court (group velocity) is slower than if you had simply thrown the ball directly to the end of the court. Additionally, the overall velocity of the propagated tennis ball is slower than the velocity of each individual point-to-point exchange.
The speed of light quanta (photons) is constant, the propagation of a light wave varies with the medium it travels through.
The collider is so cool you could keep a side of meat in it for a month. It is so incredibly hip it has trouble seeing over its own pelvis. Hey, you sass that hoopy large hadron collider, there's a frood that really knows where its towel's at.
The problem is that the criteria changes. I still use an IBM Model M 1391401 keyboard, and, in my opinion, it works much better than nearly all of the keyboards currently available. The trouble is, most keyboards today are made to satisfy resellers and bulk buyers, not end users. Membrane keyboards are quieter in cubicle farms and cheaper to make by the thousands for companies like Dell. So bye-bye buckling-spring keyboard. It's a good thing they were so well made; you can still use Model M keyboards today, even though some of them were made more than 20 years ago.
How about mobile phones? As battery powered phones, they've actually gotten worse. I used to get two weeks of standby time out of my Sprint PCS phone. In fact, that's what I bought it for. No, I couldn't take pictures, no I couldn't play MP3s or connect over Bluetooth. I could surf the web, and it did have a color screen. Now? I have to charge my phone every other day. It depends on your definition of better.
Cheaper beats better, most of the time. Multifunction beats best of breed, most of the time. In the process, consumers lose out on what was special about the better products (I'm going to hang on to my second-gen iPod Nano for as long as I can).
Touchscreens will not be the thing to do away with the mouse. A touch pad the size of your mouse pad, maybe. It'll be wedged to the side of your keyboard, and no it won't be better.
Right you are, but the only way you can tell that from TFA is to click the link in said TFA it to another FA, which has a link in it to the original story from some sort of "Newspaper."
How do they expect Slashdotters to figure out what's going on if it isn't mentioned in the summary?
The ability to intercept communications between Americans and foreign nationals of suspect affiliations has always been within the purview of the federal government. Granted, it used to be letters that were intercepted, but even then, no warrants were required.
For crying out loud, if an American citizen is having a conversation with someone overseas whose phone number was listed in the laptop of an enemy combatant picked up on the battlefield, I sure hope the feds are listening.
Absolutely. Astounding became Analog, which is still around. You'll find your basic hard SF and space opera here, along with SF related science articles. IASFM was renamed (and relaunched if I recall correctly) as Asimov's Science Fiction. ASF content is a bit broader than Analog as you'll find more "speculative fiction" here (like alternate histories...). I have the current copies of each one on my desktop at home at the moment.
My dad introduced me to science fiction by bringing home a "kid's" novel one day. I couldn't have been much older than eight or nine. I tore through it as quickly as I could, sneaking a flashlight under the covers to finish it. It was Tom Swift: The City in the Stars. As each new one came out, I'd spend my allowance on it (when I wasn't saving for a Lego set).
I was hooked. I made it through the sixth book in the series before I tumbled to the fact that this wasn't the original series. At that point I became a regular at the library and checked out every Tom Swift book they had. That's how I learned about this "interloan" thing.
I'd never been out of the kid's section before but I noticed that the library had this whole other back section that wasn't nonfiction, and wasn't kid's books. I walked back through it and to my amazement I discovered shelf after shelf full of fiction and a fair number of the books had the letters SF written in Sharpie on a label card on the spine. Magic!
I decided to try out my first "Adult" science fiction novel and I thought robots were just the coolest thing (next to spaceships of course, but all decent science fiction had spaceships in it). Robots of Dawn had just arrived, and since the title sounded cool, I grabbed it from the returns rack. I became a lifelong fan of Isaac Asimov after the first chapter. I went back to the library and dug up as many books by him as I could find, not just his science fiction, but the Ellery Queen stories, his science books, as much as I could find in the library's catalog or through the interloan program.
I began reading back issues of Astounding Science Fiction, Analog, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (IASFM!), and discovered other authors. Many of the story intros or commentaries in anthologies had mentioned this Dune novel, so I decided to check it out. I had to renew it because I couldn't read through it in three weeks (it was 1984, the same year the David Lynch movie was released... I was ten). It was a revelation.
From there, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Heinlein, Simak, Gordon R. Dickson, Phillip K. Dick, Sturgeon, Bradbury, Poul Anderson, Piers Anthony, Douglas Adams, C.J. Cherryh, Kim Stanley Robinson, Spider Robinson, Ursula K. Leguin, Joan D. Vinge, Vernor Vinge, and more, and more. But to understand all of these, I had to get their references, and so I began to dig into Dickens and Melville and Shakespeare. By the time I was in Junior High School, I was more widely read than just about any other kid in school.
Don't sell your kids short thinking they're too young for Asimov. Granted, his writings are a gateway drug.
I was under the impression that there's not enough "waste oil" to meet the kind of demand that a majority-bio-diesel solution would call for. The result would be that much of the stuff getting pumped into tanks would have to come straight from rapeseed oil (for example), and not by way of the deep fryer at the local pub. With the possible exception of cellulosic biofuels, every current method of producing combustible fuel somehow links food production to the fuel tank of your vehicle.
The net result for biofuel, even biodiesel, is that we starve people in developing nations by the millions so we can drive our cars. Let the internal combustion engine die alongside oil reserves. We need something very different, and if food supply is involved anywhere in that chain, it had better be burned in the cells of horses not the tanks of the latest S Class. That's why the focus ought to be on things like electric or mechanical (flywheel) means to powering vehicles.
Sadly, the emphasis is on biofuels rather than electric. Basically this boils down to burning food. At best, arable land that could be used for food crops will get used for fuel crops instead (this is already happening).
Electric cars, on the other hand, can be powered by nuclear reactors. And dang it, where's my flywheel?
With these devices it would seem far more likely to happen. All you'd need to do is hack the system that controls the bracelets and you've just subdued the entire passenger compliment. This seems like a massively stupid idea.
IRC, the quantum entanglement phenomenon has been shown not to transfer information faster than the speed of light. There's no teleportation of matter occurring at all, simply matter here and matter there whose state is coupled. Not at all the same thing.
Einstein showed that there is no need for a static background. Your arguments suggest that light propagates only as a wave, which again, Einstein showed to be false in those same 1905 papers (quanta of light). He didn't write the book until a few years later. The notion of photon which Einstein proposed has lead to one of the most spectacularly successful models of the universe we've yet seen: quantum mechanics, A.K.A. the Standard Model.
Davis Mechanics are modifications to Newton's mechanics. They're simply easier to deal with when you're not working with velocities close to the speed of light, or stellar scales. Calculations for firing a gun can easily use cleaned up Newtonian mechanics for a reasonable approximation. Just like NASA still uses Newtonian Mechanics (tweaked) to do most of its calculations.
As for the propagation of light in mediums like water, the speed of photons is constant, the propagation of the wave slows down as the photons interact with matter, getting absorbed or emitted as the case may be. Cerenkov radiation happens when energetic particles move faster than the propagation of the wave (not faster than the photons) and cause additional emission of photons (more than would've come from the wave itself). The analogy to sonic booms should not be stretched beyond its purpose to impute mechanisms.
That was one of the worst episodes of any Star Trek, ever. "If the sails get blown on hard enough, the ship'll go faster than light!" This was one of the few episodes of any of the series that I actively hated. I can respect JMS for his "at the speed of plot" quips about how fast Star Furies in B5 go, but in this episode of DS9 they sacrificed suspension of disbelief on the part many of their viewers for the sake of allegory.
I'm still in therapy over it.
I've worked with more than a dozen female programmers in my career. One of them checked in code that didn't compile, and then later explained that it wasn't her responsibility to ensure that the code actually worked. Another woman I've worked with debugs assembly for instrumentation code in monitoring tools. She works on very difficult code and does it well (fair disclosure: she's my girlfriend). Yet another woman I worked with was a fair GUI programmer, but she began slacking off as she prepared for a career completely unrelated to computers.
The truth is, I've known and worked with programmers (of both sexes) that land all along the spectrum, from dead-weight incompetent to brilliant and prolific. This is simply crude and ridiculous stereotyping.
Nah... Use Woolite and hand wash it. It's cheaper. Besides, those dry cleaner hangars will keep screwing up the lines of the car, and you'll get that "We're sorry, we tried and tried to get that bug juice off the grill but no matter what we did we couldn't" sucks-to-be-you sticker on it.
Yeah! Let's charge President Bush with all kinds of crimes! But make sure we get Clinton, too! He bombed those folks in Europe. Get him!
Stirring up the mob with this impeachment nonsense is a way to get people to ignore what's going on around them. Congress has driven us to start putting food in our gas tanks. The end result will be famine and food riots. Way to go!
"American's demand we do something about these obscene oil profits." I actually heard this quote on the radio driving home. No, we don't. We want our lower cost of living back. The U.S. is the only nation on earth with abundant untouched oil resources that has decided not to harvest them. Thanks Congress! No off shore oil, no shale processing, no drilling in ANWR, and no reasonable alternatives (nuclear, darn it, like France).
Congress is currently trying their best to centralize the U.S. economy under the guise of phony environmentalism (Cap & Trade). With even limited use, cap and trade schemes have led to worse pollution, because now companies can simply pay money to pollute more. So why write it into law? Why, to lock down that nasty free market thing, of course. Free markets are key to free societies.
But just so people don't notice this tilt toward a centralized economy (which historically always leads to a weak economy and totalitarianism), we'll prattle on about how horrible we think President Bush is.
Fire and motion. The American people are the ones pinned down.
/rant... You can mod me down now. Sigh.
I really think we had a bunch of Cold War guys that got blindsided by 9/11 and overreacted. They sincerely wanted to protect U.S. interests and scraped and fought for any means to do it. Reign them in, vote them out. But this frothing at the mouth has got to stop. Bring back the debate of clear ideas, unclouded with slippery half-statements.
To Congress: Stop telling me what I demand. Stop putting words in my mouth. I want to be able to work hard and enjoy what I've earned. If I work harder, produce more or better than my neighbor, then I do deserve more. Let me keep it. I'll pay you to keep criminals at bay. I'll pay you to keep the opportunities equal. I'm not paying you to keep the results equal. That only achieves a lowest common denominator. I'll pay you for the infrastructure you maintain on my behalf. But please, no more power grabs. I demand the rule of law, tempered by the application of principle, guided by the restraint of morals. You must serve, you must not rule.
And they laughed when I made papier-mâché throwing stars. I'll show them! I am the Paper Ninja (played by Matthew Lillard), and I've just come from OfficeMax!
see parent, sing to the tune of "Still Alive"...
Actually it prefers the term "Non-luminous Little Person".
Hmm... The vibe I got from the article was that the "heads up" was regarding the need for more lawyers. "This is scary stuff man, you better watch out... You don't even know! I mean, you'll need, like, twice the number of lawyers now!"
It reads like FUD, but not so much against open source as for pair-programming with a lawyer. The first clue was his assertion that open source == GPL v3.0.
Hmmm... I seem to have found Argument, I was looking for Abuse... I'll try down the hall.
Look out, Drew Carey!
I don't know about WinFS being a phoenix or terminator. Those would be effective. I've always pictured each new Windows project as the Black Knight:
"Look, you stupid Bastard. You've got no features left.""Yes I have."
"Look!"
"It's just a flesh wound."
Apparently, you've tried hard enough to find it.