If folks find this unacceptable, let them start their own companies. The fact is, any increase in salaries must be matched by an increase in productivity in order to be sustainable.
Actually this isn't a fact at all.
Cry me a river buddy, but this is you own, unsubstantiated opinion. If inflation is 2%, then is real terms productivity can stay the same and everybody can get a 2% pay raise indefinately.
I dare say that IT has added precious little to most companies' bottom lines in recent years.
This is simply a stupid way of looking at it. You could say the same thing about payroll, engineering, legal, or just about any other department besides sales. After all, they're all costs you have to pay to make the sale right?
The reality is that it's all about how you figure things. IT exists at companies because without it, their competitors would eat them alive. They'd simply be able to produce better product faster, and cheaper than someone without IT.
Microsoft's certification is a GOOD thing. If they are delaying games to get them through the certification process - like drivers going through basic WHQL compatibility and regression testing - then they will arrive on your doorstep with less bugs.
It sounds like you're making a LOT of assumptions here.
That the delay is on Microsoft's end.
That something is actually being done during this delay.
That the thing being doing is some sort of quality/bug testing
That FAST production runs don't cost money.
etc, etc.
You're not actually providing facts to back this up, so all you have is a long string of assumptions that leads up to:
"This delay means the xbox launch is going to be great!"
I would think launch day is the BEST time to make a fast production run of exactly the right amount, to cut down on wastage and warehouse stock at all levels.
I really have to wonder just what it is you're thinking. People don't buy a video game system just to have one, they buy it to PLAY GAMES. Without any games, there's no point in buying the system.
If you start printing discs the day of the launch, it's going to be DAYS until they're on store shelves. (They haven't invented teleporters yet.)
It's also important to point out that companies (for example disc manufacturers) deliberately keep a backlog of orders, so that their multi-million dollar capital investment in equipment is never sitting idle. Doing an instant production run of millions means paying enough money to get pushed ahead of the people already in the queue.
That's what I said, but you were too busy nitpicking and beating straw men to notice.
Sigh, it's not a straw man, as you certainly didn't give the issue proper emphasis. The listener not being at a fixed point is the fundamental reason why this guy's idea won't work.
Latency is a side-issue that only prohibits the canceling of certain types of noise, not all of it.
More nitpicking and bad assumptions on your part.
This is neither nitpicking, nor a bad assumption. It's a freakin big deal since it's the difference between being able to do SOME noise cancllation and being able to do NONE AT ALL.
Also, remember what I said about the latency inherent in your analog hardware (hint: you might want to go study the complex frequency response of a mechanical speaker).
Sigh, you deal with this with filters. Depending on the feedback system you're using, it will automatically become part of the filter response. It's just like dealing with the response of the microphone, and the distances between the mic, speaker, listener, and source.
Two can play the strawman game: While you're busy filtering that transformer, a car just honked. Ooops. Now your filter echoed a phase inverted honk 17 ms later. Oww. My earses! They hurtses!:-(
You ALSO deal with this with filters. (If the sound's not repetitive, don't try cancel it, duh.)
Gaim has been ported to Windows for some time now, yet I haven't seen one diatribe against the Gaim developers.
Microsoft hasn't filed a multi-billion dollar lawsuit claiming that all of linux is their property.
There's a difference between dealing with the devil and dealing with a competitor. Microsoft isn't that great, but at least still tries to make money by selling product. SCO has shifted their focus as a company to suing people who use linux.
See the difference?
It's like the difference between a car company that isn't very good, and a patent lawyer who abuses the system, demanding royalties for inventions that aren't novel nor his own.
One of them, at the end of the day, is still producing something, while the other one is simply a cancer on society.
Helping SCO directly hurts Linux, it's that simple.
Dealing with one is forgivable, dealing with the other is unconscionable.
When they put 3+MP cameras with decent AF in phones
You're simply NOT going to see decent cameras in phones because good cameras need big, expensive lenses. Even something like a Canon S505 still has a lens thats probably 3x bigger (or more) than whatever's on your phone.
You say that like it's a good thing. Much as I dislike the MPAA, the fact is that movies cost money to make. A lot of money.
Nobody's FORCING the major studios to spend that much making movies. Nobody hold a gun to their head and says "You must spend $100,000,000 dollars on the sequel to a movie that sucked the first time."
That's their own decision. The are lots of GOOD movies that have been made on very small budgets. They just don't run around blowing up Ferrari's.
I hate to break it to you, but there won't be a HitMovie.avi for you to download in a few years if this becomes the norm.
Actually, there still would be, it would just be distributed on the net by the producer itself (like many "virals" made by marketng companies), full of commercials (possibly availible without for a fee), and produced on a more modest budget than most of the current crap.
As a bonus, it would be virtually impossible for the movie studios to monopolize distribution on the net in the way that they currently have in theatres. This means that independent films would almost instantly become "mainstream".
Parent is exactly right. There are two ways to handle noise cancellation. #1 is source cancellation (very hard unless the source is confined). #2 is receiver cancellation (very easy). However, don't expect either method to work at high frequencies.
Unless your receiver is moving around.
What we have here (not from the parent but from the submitter of this article) is a failure to understand the technology. Any attempts at active noise cancellation are going to suck ass unless you know exactly where the microphone, speaker and listener are in relation to each other.
Let's do some envelope calculations: our latency has to be under 42 microseconds to do *any* good (i.e. avoid adding to the noise), under 21 microseconds to get a 3dB attenuation, under 4.2 microseconds to get -10dB, and under 0.4 microseconds to get -20dB. No sweat, right?:-)
I don't really agree with your reasoning here. Your latency can be very large as long as the sound is repetitive. All you need is adequate resolution.
In mathematical terms if d = n/f, where n is a positive integer, then:
cos (2 * pi * f * t) = cos (2 * pi * f * (t + d))
because:
cos (2 * pi * f * t) = cos (2 * pi * f * (t + n/f))
cos (2 * pi * f * t) = cos (2 * pi * f * t + 2 * pi * n)
and cos ( x + 2 * pi * n) = cos (x) for all integer values of n
therefore: cos (2 * pi * f * t) = cos (2 * pi * f * t)
For example, if I've got a power transformer that's buzzing at 60Hz, I don't need to be able to do a bunch of calculations and respond within N microseconds. I can *predict* what the incoming sound is going to look like very far into the future. All I need is enough resolution in a delay line, which can be and probably already is on the sound card.
BZZZT. Wrong answer buddy. You should never reference an encyclopedia in any kind of serious academic work.
This is nonsense.
It's just something your teachers told you because they wanted their students to actually go to the library and learn the necessary skillset to use a library.
There's nothing fundamentally bad about citing an encyclopedia article. Sure it may not have tons of depth, but that's not always necessary, especially for imformation that's peripheral to your main subject, but needs to be mentioned in some way.
Shit, what if you're doing research ABOUT encyclopedias, are you still forbidden from citing them? Dismissing something as a useful source of information simply because it has the word encyclopedia in the title is retarded.
It would cost HP more to buy as many copies of Windows as they actually need, so this deal is in their favor.
Only because Microsoft is using their monopoly position in the marketplace to force this deal on HP.
This deal is of questionable legality... but hey what does MS have to worry about? They've been convicted of illegal market manipulation twice and still haven't faced signifcant penalites.
just like at national parks. Someone who never sets foot in a national park does still have an interest in preserving them, but most of that cash flow should still come from the people that drive their RVs through them, or need rangers to run off the bear that has them up a tree.
I've always thought this was particularly fucked up.
Why is it that poor people shouldn't be allowed into the park?
Seems pretty regressive and fucked up to me, especially for something that is already subsidized by tax dollars.
The whole "let's just charge the people who use it" concept willfully ignores the fact that charges affect who uses it in the first place. This is true for parks, the radio spectrum, roads, etc.
Some people just don't have that much money, should these people be denied access to public services as a result? If so, then maybe these things aren't really that essential after all and the gov't shouldn't be providing them in the first place. Hey, the poor can do without it, why can't you?
Sell the land. Let the "free market" decide what to do with Yellowstone. After all the people with the largest chunk of money to throw at it deserve the most access to it, right?
What wikipedia needs to do is have both "stable" and "unstable" branches of wikipedia, like the linux kernel does.
Make searches default to the stable page, with the option to add in the more recent changes by clicking a button.
This has a number of advantages:
Removes the immediate payback for defacing a page.
Makes it possible to cite a stable version of a wikipedia page in an academic work without it being completely screwed up at a later date. (They should be archived quarterly/yearly/whatever).
Still allows up-to-the-minute information to be accessed by those looking for it.
(personal belief here) It would increase the credibility of the information. It's easier to research and verify a small set of changes to a stable page, than to check out a whole page. It's better that this research is done BEFORE some hapless individual uses incorrect information.
You argument would'nt be completely retarded if the concept of "intent" was never considered in a court of law.
Yes that's a great idea. Now we're trying to establish whether something was legal or illegal soley by arguing about the thoughts inside a person's head.
Things like this should be handled by computer crime laws that already exist and make clear distinctions about these sorts of things, not half-baked analogies comparing sending bit on a network to any sort of physical tresspass.
This means that the failure rate can actually increase by several orders of magnitude in a very brief period.
I'd like to see some real data supporting this offhand statement. Essentially, it's claiming to be able to predict the failure rate better than the guys who actually designed and operate these satellites and have access to more data than you.
I'm not buying it. Also, both common sense and research will point out that the GPS system was put into service over a period of time. There's a pretty large diversity of launch and operational dates up there.
The probability of failure due to wear out cannot possibly be extrapolated from observing the failure probability during the first and second periods, because the causes are completely different.
The oldest satellite up there was launched in 1990. The first GPS satellite was launched in 1978. We have 27 years worth of data, besides the original system calculations that were done.
Coping up with an increasing failure rate could easily have been thwarted by budget cuts.
The GPS system is run by the military, not NASA or the FAA. They have PLENTY of money. The curent cost is around $400 million/year which is nothing for those guys. The overall military budget is more than $400 billion. Proportionately, paying my phone bill is a bigger expense for me than maintaining the GPS system is for these guys.
So, there may be gaping holes in his assumptions, but not in his logic. Previous posts were attacking his logic rather than his assumption with flawed arguments.
It think there are problems with both, but I suspect we're using slightly different meaning for the word logic.
Well, when you send an email, you don't send it to the recipient's computer. You send it to their email account. The recipient downloads it to their PC, so they can't claim they never gave the file permission to download. Especially given that many mail programs allow you to block attachment downloads.
And when you vist that webpage you got the spyware from you deliberately chose to go there and download that information too.
See how muddled it gets?
You can say that because X happened or because Y happened it is or is not tresspass, but that isn't actually recorded anywhere in the law. See how dangerous that is?
We both think your logic is reasonable, but someone else could easily inperpret thing differently. We really don't know which way this judge would rule and I think that's pretty scary.
Thus, being able to "just keep up" with the current failure rate will not be sufficient to prevent the system from collapsing.
But the implication that we're only able to just keep up is false.
We're only launching that number of satellites per year because that's how many we need to provide adequate redundancy, not because it's the best we can do. We could send up more, but it would be a waste of money.
What several posts fail to understand (e.g., grand parent or a few posts in parallel threads) is that the failure rate of a system is not constant over time
I understand this concept, but what you're failing to properly acknowedge is that:
A) The system is redundant
B) The failure rate to needs to increase by orders of magnitude in order to outpace our ability to replace satellites.
I highly doubt that the stastical data supports such claims.
Go ahead fit the standard function to the availible data form the GPS satellites the have already failed. I bet it's going to agree with the course of action the the US is taking. Why? Because they can do the same math you can. As a matter of fact, I be they have even better data they don't publish.
I am not trying to enter into the politcal side of this discussion, and I agree that the author of the article may have is own motives, but this is simply not relevant to the logic of his argumentation.
There are gaping holes in his logic. Is it more likely that he's:
A) incompetent
or
B) pushing an adgenda?
The implication is that the failure rate is going to accelerate beyond the replacement rate real soon now.
So if that *actually* happens they'll increase the replacement rate. Are we now also worried that the US is suddenly only going to be capable of two satellite launches per year?
My point is that this is all silly sensationalism. If the failure rate doubles, no big deal, we send up a few more. The system would still have 100% uptime.
For the GPS system to actually become "unreliable", failure rates would have to increase by orders of magnitude. There is no data presented to suggest such an abrupt change might take place.
The registry is 100x more secure and robust than a flat file.
That's nonsense.
A) The mechanisms proctecting the registry are the same type that protect the file system. It's not like the registry encrypt's each user's setting individually.
b) Robust! How!? I want to add tab completion to my command line and I have to risk editing a file that can fubar my whole computer? How is that "robust"? Where are the fucking comments that tell me what this entry is and what it does?
The registry is a dirty, brittle hack used by lazy programmers like yourself. It's a pain in the ass for end users. Especially those with multiple computers who don't want to manually configure the preferences for every app on each PC they use.
So maybe the US will stop its attemps to prevent the European Galileo...
Actually, it looks like this whole thing may be just misinformation to drum up support for Galileo.
The satellites are lasting LONGER than expected, and we have plenty of spares. It appears the article may also have the number of necessary satellites wrong.
As someone else has pointed out:
Bonnor said launches of new satellites are "only just keeping up" with current losses of around two satellites per year.
So we HAVE SPARES and we're REPLACING THE SPARES AS WE USE THEM. Sounds like it's working just dandy.
and this is an example of a court needing to use historical legal theories to grapple with new and previously unforeseen contexts in Cyberspace
No, this is an example of a really dangerous precedent.
What if, for example, I was to send you an email contained a corrupted file that crashed your system?
Is that tresspass too?
How the fuck do we know?
Part of the reason for having laws, it to have it clearly spelled out, what we can and cannot do within the bounds of the law.
Rulings like this are really dangerous because they throw the established legal meaning and inperpretations to the wind.
Computer crime laws exist and they are there for a reason. If they are not strong enough, that is a job for the legislature, not the judiciary.
Sure it's important to catch these jackasses, but it's not so important that we should forget why we have written laws in the first place. A person should be able to know very clearly what they can and cannot do.
Rulings like this are very dangerous, as the judge if effectively just making shit up and ruling by analogy.
Can they start charging people who call on the phone too? We don't know.
With judgment like this, you could be declared a criminal at any moment. No matter what you do, with enough bad analogies and hyperbole, it could be compared with something illegal. Is that really what you want?
Think about it. Do they call a person "pro-choice" or "pro-abortion"? The term you choose shows your bias.
Pro-choice vs pro-abortion is like saying "pro freedom of speech" vs "pro racist propaganda". It's deliberately imflammatory. It's a delierately lack of acknowedgement between advocating the RIGHT to do something, and suggesting that someone actually does it. It's simply incorrect.
Your example shows just how skewed your idea of liberal vs conservative is.
NPR isn't really liberal. That's like calling the BBC liberal.
Maybe they don't run stories about how evolution might be wrong, or that the moon landing might have been faked, but that's not liberal, it's REASONABLE.
Now saying these guys are on the same level as Fox news is simply ludicrous. These are the guys who sued Al Franken claiming to own the phrase "fair and balanced". They've been censured in the UK for irresponbile journalism.
I could list cases where the network as a whole has been irrespobsible and biased, and make an argument that it was set up that way from the start... but you should just use Google. Why trust me when you can confirm things from multiple sources?
But the arguement isn't to transfer control from the US to another country; rather, it's to transfer control from one country to all countries (or, strictly, an agency representing all/most countries).
No it's not. It's about transfer of control to the UN.
The UN is an organization that is dominated by a handful of large countries. Many (probably most of the major players in the UN) don't have very good guarantees as to freedom of speech, seizure, etc. They would like to be able to implement these policies on the internet.
If control of domain registrations is handed over to what is (basically) a GOVERNMENT organization, you can bet there will be abuses for politcal gain. It seems pretty likely to me that the whole reason they're doing all this bitching in the first place, it's that right now it's too hard to get sites like Chinasucks.org taken down.
the Internet is governed by consensus rather than hope (that the US won't pull the plug on, say, Venezeula).
THE US DOESN'T CONTROL DOMAIN REGISTRATIONS. It's a US company that does. There's a BIG difference.
AbiWord: Frequent goofs with drawing the screen. Annoying, unpredictable bugs in typesetting paragraphs. Output doesn't seem compatible with Apple Preview, but works with Adobe Reader; in output, some formatting is lost, such as italics. Doesn't support X-style cut and paste.
1) Lack of italics screams, "I don't have my fonts configured properly." I've had font problems with Abiword before, but they haven't been very hard to fix.
2) I just used "X-style" cut and paste in Abiword and it worked fine.
Computers with Windows XP are stuffed to the roof with trialware and services that kick back the cost. Those with empty hard drives are, well, empty. What's so hard to grasp here?
Do you honestly beleive that Microsoft isn't charging Dell for copies or Windows, and this cost isn't being passed onto consumers? I think I have a bridge to sell you....
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If folks find this unacceptable, let them start their own companies. The fact is, any increase in salaries must be matched by an increase in productivity in order to be sustainable.
Actually this isn't a fact at all.
Cry me a river buddy, but this is you own, unsubstantiated opinion. If inflation is 2%, then is real terms productivity can stay the same and everybody can get a 2% pay raise indefinately.
I dare say that IT has added precious little to most companies' bottom lines in recent years.
This is simply a stupid way of looking at it. You could say the same thing about payroll, engineering, legal, or just about any other department besides sales. After all, they're all costs you have to pay to make the sale right?
The reality is that it's all about how you figure things. IT exists at companies because without it, their competitors would eat them alive. They'd simply be able to produce better product faster, and cheaper than someone without IT.
It sounds like you're making a LOT of assumptions here.
You're not actually providing facts to back this up, so all you have is a long string of assumptions that leads up to:
"This delay means the xbox launch is going to be great!"
I would think launch day is the BEST time to make a fast production run of exactly the right amount, to cut down on wastage and warehouse stock at all levels.
I really have to wonder just what it is you're thinking. People don't buy a video game system just to have one, they buy it to PLAY GAMES. Without any games, there's no point in buying the system.
If you start printing discs the day of the launch, it's going to be DAYS until they're on store shelves. (They haven't invented teleporters yet.)
It's also important to point out that companies (for example disc manufacturers) deliberately keep a backlog of orders, so that their multi-million dollar capital investment in equipment is never sitting idle. Doing an instant production run of millions means paying enough money to get pushed ahead of the people already in the queue.
That's what I said, but you were too busy nitpicking and beating straw men to notice.
:-(
Sigh, it's not a straw man, as you certainly didn't give the issue proper emphasis. The listener not being at a fixed point is the fundamental reason why this guy's idea won't work.
Latency is a side-issue that only prohibits the canceling of certain types of noise, not all of it.
More nitpicking and bad assumptions on your part.
This is neither nitpicking, nor a bad assumption. It's a freakin big deal since it's the difference between being able to do SOME noise cancllation and being able to do NONE AT ALL.
Also, remember what I said about the latency inherent in your analog hardware (hint: you might want to go study the complex frequency response of a mechanical speaker).
Sigh, you deal with this with filters. Depending on the feedback system you're using, it will automatically become part of the filter response. It's just like dealing with the response of the microphone, and the distances between the mic, speaker, listener, and source.
Two can play the strawman game: While you're busy filtering that transformer, a car just honked. Ooops. Now your filter echoed a phase inverted honk 17 ms later. Oww. My earses! They hurtses!
You ALSO deal with this with filters. (If the sound's not repetitive, don't try cancel it, duh.)
They have never sued any companies for using Linux.
Wrong.
Gaim has been ported to Windows for some time now, yet I haven't seen one diatribe against the Gaim developers.
Microsoft hasn't filed a multi-billion dollar lawsuit claiming that all of linux is their property.
There's a difference between dealing with the devil and dealing with a competitor. Microsoft isn't that great, but at least still tries to make money by selling product. SCO has shifted their focus as a company to suing people who use linux.
See the difference?
It's like the difference between a car company that isn't very good, and a patent lawyer who abuses the system, demanding royalties for inventions that aren't novel nor his own.
One of them, at the end of the day, is still producing something, while the other one is simply a cancer on society.
Helping SCO directly hurts Linux, it's that simple.
Dealing with one is forgivable, dealing with the other is unconscionable.
When they put 3+MP cameras with decent AF in phones
You're simply NOT going to see decent cameras in phones because good cameras need big, expensive lenses. Even something like a Canon S505 still has a lens thats probably 3x bigger (or more) than whatever's on your phone.
You say that like it's a good thing. Much as I dislike the MPAA, the fact is that movies cost money to make. A lot of money.
Nobody's FORCING the major studios to spend that much making movies. Nobody hold a gun to their head and says "You must spend $100,000,000 dollars on the sequel to a movie that sucked the first time."
That's their own decision. The are lots of GOOD movies that have been made on very small budgets. They just don't run around blowing up Ferrari's.
I hate to break it to you, but there won't be a HitMovie.avi for you to download in a few years if this becomes the norm.
Actually, there still would be, it would just be distributed on the net by the producer itself (like many "virals" made by marketng companies), full of commercials (possibly availible without for a fee), and produced on a more modest budget than most of the current crap.
As a bonus, it would be virtually impossible for the movie studios to monopolize distribution on the net in the way that they currently have in theatres. This means that independent films would almost instantly become "mainstream".
Parent is exactly right. There are two ways to handle noise cancellation. #1 is source cancellation (very hard unless the source is confined). #2 is receiver cancellation (very easy). However, don't expect either method to work at high frequencies.
:-)
Unless your receiver is moving around.
What we have here (not from the parent but from the submitter of this article) is a failure to understand the technology. Any attempts at active noise cancellation are going to suck ass unless you know exactly where the microphone, speaker and listener are in relation to each other.
Let's do some envelope calculations: our latency has to be under 42 microseconds to do *any* good (i.e. avoid adding to the noise), under 21 microseconds to get a 3dB attenuation, under 4.2 microseconds to get -10dB, and under 0.4 microseconds to get -20dB. No sweat, right?
I don't really agree with your reasoning here. Your latency can be very large as long as the sound is repetitive. All you need is adequate resolution.
In mathematical terms if d = n/f, where n is a positive integer, then:
cos (2 * pi * f * t) = cos (2 * pi * f * (t + d))
because: cos (2 * pi * f * t) = cos (2 * pi * f * (t + n/f))
cos (2 * pi * f * t) = cos (2 * pi * f * t + 2 * pi * n)
and cos ( x + 2 * pi * n) = cos (x) for all integer values of n
therefore: cos (2 * pi * f * t) = cos (2 * pi * f * t)
For example, if I've got a power transformer that's buzzing at 60Hz, I don't need to be able to do a bunch of calculations and respond within N microseconds. I can *predict* what the incoming sound is going to look like very far into the future. All I need is enough resolution in a delay line, which can be and probably already is on the sound card.
BZZZT. Wrong answer buddy. You should never reference an encyclopedia in any kind of serious academic work.
This is nonsense.
It's just something your teachers told you because they wanted their students to actually go to the library and learn the necessary skillset to use a library.
There's nothing fundamentally bad about citing an encyclopedia article. Sure it may not have tons of depth, but that's not always necessary, especially for imformation that's peripheral to your main subject, but needs to be mentioned in some way.
Shit, what if you're doing research ABOUT encyclopedias, are you still forbidden from citing them? Dismissing something as a useful source of information simply because it has the word encyclopedia in the title is retarded.
It would cost HP more to buy as many copies of Windows as they actually need, so this deal is in their favor.
Only because Microsoft is using their monopoly position in the marketplace to force this deal on HP.
This deal is of questionable legality... but hey what does MS have to worry about? They've been convicted of illegal market manipulation twice and still haven't faced signifcant penalites.
just like at national parks. Someone who never sets foot in a national park does still have an interest in preserving them, but most of that cash flow should still come from the people that drive their RVs through them, or need rangers to run off the bear that has them up a tree.
I've always thought this was particularly fucked up.
Why is it that poor people shouldn't be allowed into the park?
Seems pretty regressive and fucked up to me, especially for something that is already subsidized by tax dollars.
The whole "let's just charge the people who use it" concept willfully ignores the fact that charges affect who uses it in the first place. This is true for parks, the radio spectrum, roads, etc.
Some people just don't have that much money, should these people be denied access to public services as a result? If so, then maybe these things aren't really that essential after all and the gov't shouldn't be providing them in the first place. Hey, the poor can do without it, why can't you?
Sell the land. Let the "free market" decide what to do with Yellowstone. After all the people with the largest chunk of money to throw at it deserve the most access to it, right?
What wikipedia needs to do is have both "stable" and "unstable" branches of wikipedia, like the linux kernel does.
Make searches default to the stable page, with the option to add in the more recent changes by clicking a button.
This has a number of advantages:
You argument would'nt be completely retarded if the concept of "intent" was never considered in a court of law.
Yes that's a great idea. Now we're trying to establish whether something was legal or illegal soley by arguing about the thoughts inside a person's head.
Things like this should be handled by computer crime laws that already exist and make clear distinctions about these sorts of things, not half-baked analogies comparing sending bit on a network to any sort of physical tresspass.
This means that the failure rate can actually increase by several orders of magnitude in a very brief period.
I'd like to see some real data supporting this offhand statement. Essentially, it's claiming to be able to predict the failure rate better than the guys who actually designed and operate these satellites and have access to more data than you.
I'm not buying it. Also, both common sense and research will point out that the GPS system was put into service over a period of time. There's a pretty large diversity of launch and operational dates up there.
The probability of failure due to wear out cannot possibly be extrapolated from observing the failure probability during the first and second periods, because the causes are completely different.
The oldest satellite up there was launched in 1990. The first GPS satellite was launched in 1978. We have 27 years worth of data, besides the original system calculations that were done.
Coping up with an increasing failure rate could easily have been thwarted by budget cuts.
The GPS system is run by the military, not NASA or the FAA. They have PLENTY of money. The curent cost is around $400 million/year which is nothing for those guys. The overall military budget is more than $400 billion. Proportionately, paying my phone bill is a bigger expense for me than maintaining the GPS system is for these guys.
So, there may be gaping holes in his assumptions, but not in his logic. Previous posts were attacking his logic rather than his assumption with flawed arguments.
It think there are problems with both, but I suspect we're using slightly different meaning for the word logic.
Well, when you send an email, you don't send it to the recipient's computer. You send it to their email account. The recipient downloads it to their PC, so they can't claim they never gave the file permission to download. Especially given that many mail programs allow you to block attachment downloads.
And when you vist that webpage you got the spyware from you deliberately chose to go there and download that information too.
See how muddled it gets?
You can say that because X happened or because Y happened it is or is not tresspass, but that isn't actually recorded anywhere in the law. See how dangerous that is?
We both think your logic is reasonable, but someone else could easily inperpret thing differently. We really don't know which way this judge would rule and I think that's pretty scary.
Thus, being able to "just keep up" with the current failure rate will not be sufficient to prevent the system from collapsing.
But the implication that we're only able to just keep up is false.
We're only launching that number of satellites per year because that's how many we need to provide adequate redundancy, not because it's the best we can do. We could send up more, but it would be a waste of money.
What several posts fail to understand (e.g., grand parent or a few posts in parallel threads) is that the failure rate of a system is not constant over time
I understand this concept, but what you're failing to properly acknowedge is that:
A) The system is redundant
B) The failure rate to needs to increase by orders of magnitude in order to outpace our ability to replace satellites.
I highly doubt that the stastical data supports such claims.
Go ahead fit the standard function to the availible data form the GPS satellites the have already failed. I bet it's going to agree with the course of action the the US is taking. Why? Because they can do the same math you can. As a matter of fact, I be they have even better data they don't publish.
I am not trying to enter into the politcal side of this discussion, and I agree that the author of the article may have is own motives, but this is simply not relevant to the logic of his argumentation.
There are gaping holes in his logic. Is it more likely that he's:
A) incompetent
or
B) pushing an adgenda?
Pray tell, what is space supposed to be about?
Space is about curiosity, imagination and scientific endevor.
It's about understanding and interacting with the universe in which we live.
It's about intellect, exploration, and doing something greater and worthy or remberance.
200 years from now the moon landing will still be considered a major event. I wasn't alive for that one, but maybe I can be for the Mars landing.
The implication is that the failure rate is going to accelerate beyond the replacement rate real soon now.
So if that *actually* happens they'll increase the replacement rate. Are we now also worried that the US is suddenly only going to be capable of two satellite launches per year?
My point is that this is all silly sensationalism. If the failure rate doubles, no big deal, we send up a few more. The system would still have 100% uptime.
For the GPS system to actually become "unreliable", failure rates would have to increase by orders of magnitude. There is no data presented to suggest such an abrupt change might take place.
The registry is 100x more secure and robust than a flat file.
That's nonsense.
A) The mechanisms proctecting the registry are the same type that protect the file system. It's not like the registry encrypt's each user's setting individually.
b) Robust! How!? I want to add tab completion to my command line and I have to risk editing a file that can fubar my whole computer? How is that "robust"? Where are the fucking comments that tell me what this entry is and what it does?
The registry is a dirty, brittle hack used by lazy programmers like yourself. It's a pain in the ass for end users. Especially those with multiple computers who don't want to manually configure the preferences for every app on each PC they use.
So maybe the US will stop its attemps to prevent the European Galileo...
Actually, it looks like this whole thing may be just misinformation to drum up support for Galileo.
The satellites are lasting LONGER than expected, and we have plenty of spares. It appears the article may also have the number of necessary satellites wrong.
As someone else has pointed out:
Bonnor said launches of new satellites are "only just keeping up" with current losses of around two satellites per year.
So we HAVE SPARES and we're REPLACING THE SPARES AS WE USE THEM. Sounds like it's working just dandy.
and this is an example of a court needing to use historical legal theories to grapple with new and previously unforeseen contexts in Cyberspace
No, this is an example of a really dangerous precedent.
What if, for example, I was to send you an email contained a corrupted file that crashed your system?
Is that tresspass too?
How the fuck do we know?
Part of the reason for having laws, it to have it clearly spelled out, what we can and cannot do within the bounds of the law.
Rulings like this are really dangerous because they throw the established legal meaning and inperpretations to the wind.
Computer crime laws exist and they are there for a reason. If they are not strong enough, that is a job for the legislature, not the judiciary.
Sure it's important to catch these jackasses, but it's not so important that we should forget why we have written laws in the first place. A person should be able to know very clearly what they can and cannot do.
Rulings like this are very dangerous, as the judge if effectively just making shit up and ruling by analogy.
Can they start charging people who call on the phone too? We don't know.
With judgment like this, you could be declared a criminal at any moment.
No matter what you do, with enough bad analogies and hyperbole, it could be compared with something illegal. Is that really what you want?
Think about it. Do they call a person "pro-choice" or "pro-abortion"? The term you choose shows your bias.
Pro-choice vs pro-abortion is like saying "pro freedom of speech" vs "pro racist propaganda". It's deliberately imflammatory. It's a delierately lack of acknowedgement between advocating the RIGHT to do something, and suggesting that someone actually does it. It's simply incorrect.
Your example shows just how skewed your idea of liberal vs conservative is.
NPR isn't really liberal. That's like calling the BBC liberal.
Maybe they don't run stories about how evolution might be wrong, or that the moon landing might have been faked, but that's not liberal, it's REASONABLE.
Now saying these guys are on the same level as Fox news is simply ludicrous. These are the guys who sued Al Franken claiming to own the phrase "fair and balanced". They've been censured in the UK for irresponbile journalism.
I could list cases where the network as a whole has been irrespobsible and biased, and make an argument that it was set up that way from the start... but you should just use Google. Why trust me when you can confirm things from multiple sources?
But the arguement isn't to transfer control from the US to another country; rather, it's to transfer control from one country to all countries (or, strictly, an agency representing all/most countries).
No it's not.
It's about transfer of control to the UN.
The UN is an organization that is dominated by a handful of large countries.
Many (probably most of the major players in the UN) don't have very good guarantees as to freedom of speech, seizure, etc. They would like to be able to implement these policies on the internet.
If control of domain registrations is handed over to what is (basically) a GOVERNMENT organization, you can bet there will be abuses for politcal gain. It seems pretty likely to me that the whole reason they're doing all this bitching in the first place, it's that right now it's too hard to get sites like Chinasucks.org taken down.
the Internet is governed by consensus rather than hope (that the US won't pull the plug on, say, Venezeula).
THE US DOESN'T CONTROL DOMAIN REGISTRATIONS. It's a US company that does. There's a BIG difference.
AbiWord: Frequent goofs with drawing the screen. Annoying, unpredictable bugs in typesetting paragraphs. Output doesn't seem compatible with Apple Preview, but works with Adobe Reader; in output, some formatting is lost, such as italics. Doesn't support X-style cut and paste.
1) Lack of italics screams, "I don't have my fonts configured properly." I've had font problems with Abiword before, but they haven't been very hard to fix.
2) I just used "X-style" cut and paste in Abiword and it worked fine.
Computers with Windows XP are stuffed to the roof with trialware and services that kick back the cost. Those with empty hard drives are, well, empty. What's so hard to grasp here?
Do you honestly beleive that Microsoft isn't charging Dell for copies or Windows, and this cost isn't being passed onto consumers? I think I have a bridge to sell you....