The problem with this mindset is that how can companies supposed to sustain research costs (that may cost them millions)? Sure, production cost alone is cheap, but if companies can't offset those research cost (or whatever) to innovate such products, it would eventually lead to scarcity of innovation. Yes, sure, governments still fund researches and academia/open source folks may still do researches anyway, but don't forget that those companies also have important roles. How about the scientists that does it?
We don't argue that R&D is bad. No - it's perfectly good. However, some people seem to be treating it as an inherent right - if I develop a product, I have the right to make enough money off it to pay back my R&D investment. And I can't agree with that stance. It provides no incentive to make the research cost-effective, and instead fleeces the money out of you and me.
If I invented a "paraplegic instant cure", as you suggest, I sure wouldn't make myself a price curve and find a way to maximize profit. Yes I'd want some money - but not at the expense of denying people a cure they need. To me, the intangible value of saving a life is very important - and that "human compassion" factor is sadly lacking. In the music world, call it "cultural enrichment" - you don't think the great playwrites are in the business solely for money, do you? Or in the software world, call it "consumer goodwill" or "consumer loyalty".
When you consider it civil disobedience, and are completely prepared to pay the consequences (e.g. when you get sued for copyright breach, you plead guilty), it's completely right. Ask Ghandi.
All you are doing is running the gamble that the public will agree with the "disobediant" version more than the "monopolistic" version. I'm quite willing to run that risk. But I feel that most people are not.
So we ought to round up the authors of SSH and stick them in jail? After all, an unpatched SSH install is a wide-open door for invasion, and I'll bet good money that most of the invader's connections would come in over SSH!
While it would be great to prosecute only the people that deliberately exploit holes in programming, your idea would do more harm than good. (Much like the DMCA...). If I write code to work around a known Windows API bug that exploits a not-quite-normal workaround, am I hacking Windows?
I submit that by "manned flights", you really should include regular passenger airline travel - after all, those aren't safe, the terrorists could hijack them! Or the tail could fall off (crash in NY about 3 years ago), or a fuel tank could explode (crash in Florida ~5 years ago), or...
Yes, I'm being facetious. The point here is that the space program has extremely well educated people taking risks they know extremely well. Immediately after Colombia broke up, the media interviewed countless astronauts who said they would gladly have flown a rescue mission, even knowing their own shuttle could have been stranded in space as well.
Safety should be paramount.
Frankly, it already is. Notice how shuttle launches seem to be delayed two or ten times due to a possible fault in backup equipment, or a single bad gauge when we know nothing can go wrong there, or the small risk of weather upsetting the launch? For every accident we see, there are hundreds or more accidents avoided because of careful attention to safety.
NASA employs management to decide when the risks are too high; sometimes, the management is wrong. Frankly, I feel that the problem was that management decided the risks (in recent flights) were so small they felt they didn't need to tell anyone else - which is a completely wrong decision in my book. The fact that Colombia flew is regrettable but unavoidable; ignoring all the engineers who were concerned with the fuel tank insulation impact was wrong, and frankly NASA administrators should (or have?) pay with their jobs.
They guestimated the danger as "negligible", while actually it looked more like "will destroy maybe one in three shuttle flights if insulation breaks off". It is not the responsibility of Congress to demand safety... instead, it is their responsibility to ensure that the managers THEY put in place demand safety.
"This is a season when textbook publishers get kicked around a lot, and they're feeling vulnerable," Mr. Adler said. "The practice of selling U.S. products abroad at prices keyed to the local market is longstanding. It's not unusual, it doesn't violate public policy and it's certainly not illegal. But publishers are still coming to terms with the dramatic change in the law."
It is longstanding, it makes economic sense, but it's not necessarily legal. More specifically, banning imported books in the US is illegal (everything else is fine, and business as usual).
When a company puts that "not for sale in the US" sticker on a book, they are artificially creating two markets. This is ONLY legal if the company is not a monopoly - it's the basic definition OF a monopoly! And I have yet to see one of my textbooks distributed by more than one publisher. (Hint: anyone heard of a legal case involving someone disobeying a "not for sale in the US" sticker?)
My take:
Importing "International edition" and selling it on the cheap = OKAY.
Publishers sueing/punishing/criminalizing imported books and importers = NOT OKAY.
But then again, I'm just a Slashdotter, IANAL, who's gonna listen to me?:-)
Honestly, if they didn't actually put a man in space, the Chinese government would be stuck in the most embarassing scandal in its history. They have FAR more to lose by putting forward a fake than they do by actually spending the money.
(Coincidentally, that's the argument I use against Apollo moon landing conspiracies. Funny to use it in this way too...)
Not wrong, just glossing over the minor details:-).
The VMware guys did complain about the two or three (he was deliberately vague) instructions that behave wrong for virtualization - the x86 design is, in fact, buggy enough to make virtualization difficult.
This only matters when the OS uses, and cares about, the particular instructions. I think earlier versions of VMware ran slightly modified kernels with these instructions directly changed, until they got patches into the respective entities (e.g. Linus) to eliminate the rare instruction that misbehaves - the replacement is only a handful of instructions anyway, and only in hand-coded assembly because no compiler uses such instructions, so it makes no performance difference.
Not 100% pure virtualization, where the virutal OS can't detect it's being emulated, but there are so many other ways to check... fire off a bunch of TLB instructions, for example, and time it against the RTC, a VMM will take much longer due to emulation. But it would be stupid to try to fake out an OS anyway since it's so easy to detect!
Hmm... now that I think about it, the method I've described was mentioned specifically for VMware's attempts to run VMware inside of VMware - I'm not sure that they don't do code rewriting in normal use, but they CAN do complete virtualization with practically no changes to the underlying OS - including no dynamic code rewriting!
I'm unsure why Xen needs guest OS mods, vs the way VMWare and Plex86 do things. I only skimmed the paper, so I might have missed something.
VMWare and Plex86 need to trap priviledged instructions in running code and replace them with their own. I believe they do this by literally scanning code-to-be-executed, which slows down the virtual machine of course.
Xen solves this by replacing all such instructions with Xen system calls; somewhat the same as User Mode Linux, where low level instructions are replaced with system calls to the host kernel.
Not quite... they just run the virtualized kernel in plain user-mode, then when a privilaged instruction comes up it trips a processor exception. The VMM (VMware or Plex86) then steps in, emulates the privilaged instruction, then gets out of the way. Privilaged instructions, for the non OS-enthusiasts, are usually hardware-related things like INP and OUTP, instructions to change the page tables, switch between 8086 and protected mode, etc. Since these instructions are so rare, VMWare is only ~10% slower than normal - and runs full speed on a large set of workloads.
Not having read the Xen site yet, what they _probably_ do is replace all such instructions in the source code with their own function calls. VMware did something similar at one point, but didn't turn it into a product because they felt it didn't have commercial potential.
People don't share because of the RIAA/MPAA threats. Not legal threats - those are too new - but cease and decist letters.
Most major universities (mine is in that crowd) turn a blind eye to P2P traffic... until they get a C&D complaint. The policy here: the networking people immediately cut off the connection. They will not turn it back on until a student says the offending file has been removed (honor code is involved - very serious honor code). And, if it really was the student's fault - that is, the student can't prove the letter was a mistake - it's a $80 reconnect fee.
The university I'm at has ~15,000 students. They get several C&D letters a week - many are repeat offenders. Just about everyone I know (or rather, who understands how) cuts off their upload and leeches in order to avoid C&D-type problems.
Get a single C&D letter, be out $80... whoops, there went the month's beer money. College students ain't stupid, not when it comes to getting that beer...
Really good idea. The canonical criticisms, as described by OS teachers I had (hint: one of them WAS Mendel...):
Unnecessary - Unix FFS improved (a few years after LSFS came out) by adding clusters and cylendar clustars, reaching almost the same performance.
CPU-intensive. Requires a background daemon to reclaim disk space (~10% of disk access was this daemon, IIRC). Being Slashdotters who hate even the CPU cycles Winmodems consume...
Poor performance in common cases. LSFS is lightning-fast writing, comprable to other filesystems reading small files, and dog slow reading large files because of how they fragment. When the paper was written, writes and small reads (logs) were very important; lately, large reads (e.g. on-disk databases/swap, large datasets) have become more important.
Not criticizing - it's a brilliant paper. But I think it would take a few more generations before LSFS could overcome some of the inherent problems - and Mendel's too busy having fun with VMWare now.
In a large number of cases, yes - user-mode task switching is better. It provides much faster context switches by avoiding the overhead of kernel calls and associated validation. A programmer can link to a different library and get different task-switching behavior for his specific need - user-mode multitasking is more adaptable. It provides better fault separation. It's easier to patch problems.
(Admittedly, I'm playing devil's advocate. In general, I agree that task-switching out best be a kernel-level process. But you make it out to be a much firmer rule than it actually is. There is a LOT of work - ongoing - on good user-mode multitasking. The primary argument against it is simply that it's harder to do correctly.)
The problem with your example - using two vehicles - is the docking proceedure required. I suggest you do a little more reading on the old Apollo program approaches - there was a great deal of anxiety over exactly where any docking would occur (none, earth, or lunar orbit), and "in orbit over the moon" was NOT a popular opinion (just the most technically feasable). Mating two spacecraft - especially when there is no provision for emergency - is inherently difficult. What if the launch vehicle runs out of fuel and can't mate properly? The space shuttle at least had enough fuel to de-orbit after a failed launch; all lunar insertion orbits were calibrated to include a return-to-Earth option (Apollo 13 included a short burn at a relatively safe point - that could be done with manuvering thrusters alone, and was! - to leave that orbit).
I say that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the space shuttle concept. Except we don't have a space shuttle - we have a space BMW. It costs too much, and doesn't really have a role as a general purpose commuter's car (do you really need the whatever-traction-control-option to commute? You shouldn't go to work on days when you need that!). Either NASA needs to bite the bullet - scale UP production, admitting there will be problems (and thus using unmanned flights for a while) that they need to work out, or they need to admit that their space shuttle is not a space shuttle, and design something else. The space shuttle is an old car that needs a new engine; NASA has been trying to make do with oil changes and better carburators for the past 100,000 miles.
IBM doesn't particularly like the GPL - I can't seem to recall anything they've _directly_ released under it. (JFS and other stuff was by companies that were de facto, but not legally, IBM).
And honestly, IBM ain't gonna GPL the code. They want to make money off of it... they'll want to sell products based off it without giving away all their proprietary modifications... which means they need the code under a less restrictive license. I'm thinking BSD-style, or even public domain (after all, just about everyone's seen the UNIX sources, or so it seems!). But no way GPL.
He is talking about frequency - and correctly so. Just about every statistician I've heard of will use a well known model called a "Poisson process" - which works roughly they way Dvorak used it. The model simply requires time between events (crashes) to be exponentially distributed - that is, a computer lasting twice as long before crashing is half as likely (which would be completely true, if the bugs were random). And unless there's some sort of code in Windows that says "crash every 5 hours", the math works out just fine, and you can turn one frequency into another with no problem at all. (And Gates had better hope it's random - non-randomness would just mean MORE crashes, not less!)
prob. lasting half a day = 19/20 (95% of computer make it half the day)
After 13 half-days (or 7 days), a computer has a 50% chance of crashing. Meaning we expect just over two crashes a month. Approximate it instead of running the numbers all the way through, and Dvorak got 3 crashes a month.
It's not hard to recognize the diffence between a conversation where ideas are exchanged and dueling monologues where knowledge is simply being showcased. I see a lot of the latter, and curiously much more from computer geeks than from people in other professions that are equally demanding intellectually.
Exactly one of the things that has started to bug me more than a little bit. Honestly I love to duel, and a good argument is well worth the time (even if I were on a lawyer's salary:). But... a duel is give-and-take, and is no fun in a one-sided romp (I don't verbally mug people for fun) - or worse, when somebody feigns knowledge but instead simply expounds on his theory and clearly never thinks about anything I've said - a "monologue", as you put it. I'm definitely an introvert, and I've worked hard to see the difference between steamrolling monologue, a conversation, and attention-grabbing dumbness (yes, I've done all three. I'm learning, slowly and painfully.) And nothing bugs me more than to have to watch one of my friends (introverts, mostly) come over and drop a bomb on a conversation I've worked hard to enter.
Advice to anyone trying to keep a conversation moving: ask questions. Not trying to poke holes in the other person, but genuinely trying to develop enough background to have a conversation on a topic that YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT! An important distinction: I'm sick of hearing a few certain people talk, because any conversation with those people invariably devloves into one of their lectures on one of the things they happen to be very good at. (Opinions on how Akira Kurisowa founded the entire "Western" american film genre and how modern anime is superior to modern Hollywood films are interesting the first time, redundant the second time, and downright offensive the twentieth - especially when every comment I make is dismissed with "you haven't watched enough anime"!)
Conversation vs. Monologue. Downright insightful. *Tips hat to drooling-dog*
As I recall, Ryan Patterson even applied for a patent - beating out Sony (I think - one of the large Japanese tech companies, there was a press release I think published in the Rocky Mountain News) who was working on the same idea. It would be absolutely hilarious, to see him club MS over infringement!
Truth be told, though, it was a rather shallow project - flex sensors, analog-to-digital converter, transmission over RF using standard chips he used at an internship the previous summer, then interpretation in what looked like a Visual Basic program. Nothing extraordinary, and nothing that you couldn't find in a good EE lab. Just a very slick presentation, and the foresight to be in the "engineering" category so the AI people wouldn't tear him to pieces. (Yes, I'm bitter, and ever since I've been very tempted to rig up some camera - neural network setup that does the same thing, sans gloves.)
Which brings me to my honest question: what separates an invention like this - an API-driven robot, or a translation glove - from a commercial product? If Microsoft is publicizing these research ideas, they must expect to make some sort of eventual profit off them - yet the ideas are so obvious that they've popped up elsewhere first? Something just doesn't feel like it's adding up correctly.
In that case, it depends on the state - some states allow taped conversations by one side, some states require both sides to consent. I don't even recall details from the Linda Tripp case, but there are specific laws dealing with it.
Then you've never plugged an IC in backwards, thus inverting the power supply? Doing so lets the magic smoke out of just about any chip, causing it to cease to function. Hot enough to boil water, too - or at least burn as well as a stove!
Not quite... coney means pika. (Yes, I'm absolutely sure.) Looks like a mouse, but without the huge tail. Usually lives above timberline, known for distinctive round ears. And weighs about a tenth of what a marmot weights (maybe half of what a rabbit weighs). Probably tastes closer to rabbit, too.
But I take your point completely. I read the books just before the movies came out, and it took at least two readings before I could really connect all the places. I have no chance of piecing together most of the history and poetry without a very comprehensive guide.
On the other hand, I sort of like somewhat archaic language - fortnight (two weeks), a "score" of something (20), fo'c's'le (forecastle, the raised deck under the forward mast on a boat, pronounced "folk sull"), and other random trivia.
Yeah, I'm taking it as a rough over-time number. Remembering a year ago, when counterstrike numbers were well over 100,000 - and that was still a year or so after counterstrike came out!
Seems to me they just managed to ban the most popular Internet game ever.
After all, most of the CT skins are police. If memory serves, one or two of them even say "POLICE" in big letters.
Do they seriously believe that banning depictions of violence against law enforcement will actually change anything? Perhaps we should ban books about people who shoot up schools - don't want to provide blueprints for future terrorists! While we're at it, we need to "sanitize" every reference to school shootings in the past twenty years, to make sure that there isn't any way for Johnny, the overprotected kiddie, to get the idea in his head that he could go shoot up his teachers (and never mind that we have thrown away any means to tell him it's bad when he DOES think it up). In twenty years, all this terrorism / Columbine stuff is going to be a forgotten memory, and we can all be happy and dance in a circle with Barney the purple dinosaur and...
Rats. Seems I can only stand so much sarcasm in one post. *runs to bathroom to puke*
Slashdot Mirror
We don't argue that R&D is bad. No - it's perfectly good. However, some people seem to be treating it as an inherent right - if I develop a product, I have the right to make enough money off it to pay back my R&D investment. And I can't agree with that stance. It provides no incentive to make the research cost-effective, and instead fleeces the money out of you and me.
If I invented a "paraplegic instant cure", as you suggest, I sure wouldn't make myself a price curve and find a way to maximize profit. Yes I'd want some money - but not at the expense of denying people a cure they need. To me, the intangible value of saving a life is very important - and that "human compassion" factor is sadly lacking. In the music world, call it "cultural enrichment" - you don't think the great playwrites are in the business solely for money, do you? Or in the software world, call it "consumer goodwill" or "consumer loyalty".
All you are doing is running the gamble that the public will agree with the "disobediant" version more than the "monopolistic" version. I'm quite willing to run that risk. But I feel that most people are not.
While it would be great to prosecute only the people that deliberately exploit holes in programming, your idea would do more harm than good. (Much like the DMCA...). If I write code to work around a known Windows API bug that exploits a not-quite-normal workaround, am I hacking Windows?
Yes, I'm being facetious. The point here is that the space program has extremely well educated people taking risks they know extremely well. Immediately after Colombia broke up, the media interviewed countless astronauts who said they would gladly have flown a rescue mission, even knowing their own shuttle could have been stranded in space as well.
Safety should be paramount.
Frankly, it already is. Notice how shuttle launches seem to be delayed two or ten times due to a possible fault in backup equipment, or a single bad gauge when we know nothing can go wrong there, or the small risk of weather upsetting the launch? For every accident we see, there are hundreds or more accidents avoided because of careful attention to safety.
NASA employs management to decide when the risks are too high; sometimes, the management is wrong. Frankly, I feel that the problem was that management decided the risks (in recent flights) were so small they felt they didn't need to tell anyone else - which is a completely wrong decision in my book. The fact that Colombia flew is regrettable but unavoidable; ignoring all the engineers who were concerned with the fuel tank insulation impact was wrong, and frankly NASA administrators should (or have?) pay with their jobs.
They guestimated the danger as "negligible", while actually it looked more like "will destroy maybe one in three shuttle flights if insulation breaks off". It is not the responsibility of Congress to demand safety... instead, it is their responsibility to ensure that the managers THEY put in place demand safety.
It is longstanding, it makes economic sense, but it's not necessarily legal. More specifically, banning imported books in the US is illegal (everything else is fine, and business as usual).
When a company puts that "not for sale in the US" sticker on a book, they are artificially creating two markets. This is ONLY legal if the company is not a monopoly - it's the basic definition OF a monopoly! And I have yet to see one of my textbooks distributed by more than one publisher. (Hint: anyone heard of a legal case involving someone disobeying a "not for sale in the US" sticker?)
My take:
Importing "International edition" and selling it on the cheap = OKAY.
Publishers sueing/punishing/criminalizing imported books and importers = NOT OKAY.
But then again, I'm just a Slashdotter, IANAL, who's gonna listen to me? :-)
(Coincidentally, that's the argument I use against Apollo moon landing conspiracies. Funny to use it in this way too...)
The VMware guys did complain about the two or three (he was deliberately vague) instructions that behave wrong for virtualization - the x86 design is, in fact, buggy enough to make virtualization difficult.
This only matters when the OS uses, and cares about, the particular instructions. I think earlier versions of VMware ran slightly modified kernels with these instructions directly changed, until they got patches into the respective entities (e.g. Linus) to eliminate the rare instruction that misbehaves - the replacement is only a handful of instructions anyway, and only in hand-coded assembly because no compiler uses such instructions, so it makes no performance difference.
Not 100% pure virtualization, where the virutal OS can't detect it's being emulated, but there are so many other ways to check ... fire off a bunch of TLB instructions, for example, and time it against the RTC, a VMM will take much longer due to emulation. But it would be stupid to try to fake out an OS anyway since it's so easy to detect!
Hmm... now that I think about it, the method I've described was mentioned specifically for VMware's attempts to run VMware inside of VMware - I'm not sure that they don't do code rewriting in normal use, but they CAN do complete virtualization with practically no changes to the underlying OS - including no dynamic code rewriting!
VMWare and Plex86 need to trap priviledged instructions in running code and replace them with their own. I believe they do this by literally scanning code-to-be-executed, which slows down the virtual machine of course. Xen solves this by replacing all such instructions with Xen system calls; somewhat the same as User Mode Linux, where low level instructions are replaced with system calls to the host kernel.
Not quite ... they just run the virtualized kernel in plain user-mode, then when a privilaged instruction comes up it trips a processor exception. The VMM (VMware or Plex86) then steps in, emulates the privilaged instruction, then gets out of the way. Privilaged instructions, for the non OS-enthusiasts, are usually hardware-related things like INP and OUTP, instructions to change the page tables, switch between 8086 and protected mode, etc. Since these instructions are so rare, VMWare is only ~10% slower than normal - and runs full speed on a large set of workloads.
Not having read the Xen site yet, what they _probably_ do is replace all such instructions in the source code with their own function calls. VMware did something similar at one point, but didn't turn it into a product because they felt it didn't have commercial potential.
Most major universities (mine is in that crowd) turn a blind eye to P2P traffic... until they get a C&D complaint. The policy here: the networking people immediately cut off the connection. They will not turn it back on until a student says the offending file has been removed (honor code is involved - very serious honor code). And, if it really was the student's fault - that is, the student can't prove the letter was a mistake - it's a $80 reconnect fee.
The university I'm at has ~15,000 students. They get several C&D letters a week - many are repeat offenders. Just about everyone I know (or rather, who understands how) cuts off their upload and leeches in order to avoid C&D-type problems.
Get a single C&D letter, be out $80... whoops, there went the month's beer money. College students ain't stupid, not when it comes to getting that beer...
Really good idea. The canonical criticisms, as described by OS teachers I had (hint: one of them WAS Mendel...):
- Unnecessary - Unix FFS improved (a few years after LSFS came out) by adding clusters and cylendar clustars, reaching almost the same performance.
- CPU-intensive. Requires a background daemon to reclaim disk space (~10% of disk access was this daemon, IIRC). Being Slashdotters who hate even the CPU cycles Winmodems consume...
- Poor performance in common cases. LSFS is lightning-fast writing, comprable to other filesystems reading small files, and dog slow reading large files because of how they fragment. When the paper was written, writes and small reads (logs) were very important; lately, large reads (e.g. on-disk databases/swap, large datasets) have become more important.
Not criticizing - it's a brilliant paper. But I think it would take a few more generations before LSFS could overcome some of the inherent problems - and Mendel's too busy having fun with VMWare now.(Admittedly, I'm playing devil's advocate. In general, I agree that task-switching out best be a kernel-level process. But you make it out to be a much firmer rule than it actually is. There is a LOT of work - ongoing - on good user-mode multitasking. The primary argument against it is simply that it's harder to do correctly.)
The problem with your example - using two vehicles - is the docking proceedure required. I suggest you do a little more reading on the old Apollo program approaches - there was a great deal of anxiety over exactly where any docking would occur (none, earth, or lunar orbit), and "in orbit over the moon" was NOT a popular opinion (just the most technically feasable). Mating two spacecraft - especially when there is no provision for emergency - is inherently difficult. What if the launch vehicle runs out of fuel and can't mate properly? The space shuttle at least had enough fuel to de-orbit after a failed launch; all lunar insertion orbits were calibrated to include a return-to-Earth option (Apollo 13 included a short burn at a relatively safe point - that could be done with manuvering thrusters alone, and was! - to leave that orbit).
I say that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the space shuttle concept. Except we don't have a space shuttle - we have a space BMW. It costs too much, and doesn't really have a role as a general purpose commuter's car (do you really need the whatever-traction-control-option to commute? You shouldn't go to work on days when you need that!). Either NASA needs to bite the bullet - scale UP production, admitting there will be problems (and thus using unmanned flights for a while) that they need to work out, or they need to admit that their space shuttle is not a space shuttle, and design something else. The space shuttle is an old car that needs a new engine; NASA has been trying to make do with oil changes and better carburators for the past 100,000 miles.
And honestly, IBM ain't gonna GPL the code. They want to make money off of it... they'll want to sell products based off it without giving away all their proprietary modifications... which means they need the code under a less restrictive license. I'm thinking BSD-style, or even public domain (after all, just about everyone's seen the UNIX sources, or so it seems!). But no way GPL.
Me? I'm dreaming for public domain :)
prob. lasting half a day = 19/20 (95% of computer make it half the day)
After 13 half-days (or 7 days), a computer has a 50% chance of crashing. Meaning we expect just over two crashes a month. Approximate it instead of running the numbers all the way through, and Dvorak got 3 crashes a month.
Exactly one of the things that has started to bug me more than a little bit. Honestly I love to duel, and a good argument is well worth the time (even if I were on a lawyer's salary :). But... a duel is give-and-take, and is no fun in a one-sided romp (I don't verbally mug people for fun) - or worse, when somebody feigns knowledge but instead simply expounds on his theory and clearly never thinks about anything I've said - a "monologue", as you put it. I'm definitely an introvert, and I've worked hard to see the difference between steamrolling monologue, a conversation, and attention-grabbing dumbness (yes, I've done all three. I'm learning, slowly and painfully.) And nothing bugs me more than to have to watch one of my friends (introverts, mostly) come over and drop a bomb on a conversation I've worked hard to enter.
Advice to anyone trying to keep a conversation moving: ask questions. Not trying to poke holes in the other person, but genuinely trying to develop enough background to have a conversation on a topic that YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT! An important distinction: I'm sick of hearing a few certain people talk, because any conversation with those people invariably devloves into one of their lectures on one of the things they happen to be very good at. (Opinions on how Akira Kurisowa founded the entire "Western" american film genre and how modern anime is superior to modern Hollywood films are interesting the first time, redundant the second time, and downright offensive the twentieth - especially when every comment I make is dismissed with "you haven't watched enough anime"!)
Conversation vs. Monologue. Downright insightful. *Tips hat to drooling-dog*
"No really, we're all becoming educated about copyright!"
Truth be told, though, it was a rather shallow project - flex sensors, analog-to-digital converter, transmission over RF using standard chips he used at an internship the previous summer, then interpretation in what looked like a Visual Basic program. Nothing extraordinary, and nothing that you couldn't find in a good EE lab. Just a very slick presentation, and the foresight to be in the "engineering" category so the AI people wouldn't tear him to pieces. (Yes, I'm bitter, and ever since I've been very tempted to rig up some camera - neural network setup that does the same thing, sans gloves.)
Which brings me to my honest question: what separates an invention like this - an API-driven robot, or a translation glove - from a commercial product? If Microsoft is publicizing these research ideas, they must expect to make some sort of eventual profit off them - yet the ideas are so obvious that they've popped up elsewhere first? Something just doesn't feel like it's adding up correctly.
Is Netflix going to get into the game rental business?
I just might be willing to forgive them (they still gotta renounce the patent, though).
I need mod points. Good... so very good...
In that case, it depends on the state - some states allow taped conversations by one side, some states require both sides to consent. I don't even recall details from the Linda Tripp case, but there are specific laws dealing with it.
And a very popular hire out of Stanford is Google. Conclusion?
Then you've never plugged an IC in backwards, thus inverting the power supply? Doing so lets the magic smoke out of just about any chip, causing it to cease to function. Hot enough to boil water, too - or at least burn as well as a stove!
"Hey, you copied 100 lines out of our code!"
"Uh... those 100 lines define POSIX standard XYZ, and there really is no other way to write them"
"But you still copied our code!"
(end cynicism)
Not quite... coney means pika. (Yes, I'm absolutely sure.) Looks like a mouse, but without the huge tail. Usually lives above timberline, known for distinctive round ears. And weighs about a tenth of what a marmot weights (maybe half of what a rabbit weighs). Probably tastes closer to rabbit, too.
But I take your point completely. I read the books just before the movies came out, and it took at least two readings before I could really connect all the places. I have no chance of piecing together most of the history and poetry without a very comprehensive guide.
On the other hand, I sort of like somewhat archaic language - fortnight (two weeks), a "score" of something (20), fo'c's'le (forecastle, the raised deck under the forward mast on a boat, pronounced "folk sull"), and other random trivia.
Yeah, I'm taking it as a rough over-time number. Remembering a year ago, when counterstrike numbers were well over 100,000 - and that was still a year or so after counterstrike came out!
After all, most of the CT skins are police. If memory serves, one or two of them even say "POLICE" in big letters.
Do they seriously believe that banning depictions of violence against law enforcement will actually change anything? Perhaps we should ban books about people who shoot up schools - don't want to provide blueprints for future terrorists! While we're at it, we need to "sanitize" every reference to school shootings in the past twenty years, to make sure that there isn't any way for Johnny, the overprotected kiddie, to get the idea in his head that he could go shoot up his teachers (and never mind that we have thrown away any means to tell him it's bad when he DOES think it up). In twenty years, all this terrorism / Columbine stuff is going to be a forgotten memory, and we can all be happy and dance in a circle with Barney the purple dinosaur and...
Rats. Seems I can only stand so much sarcasm in one post. *runs to bathroom to puke*