If they only last 1/2 as long as the reds and greens, why not put two blues by each red and green? During normal use, the backup blues wouldn't be used. When the original blues start to go bad, switch to using the backup blues. You could double the effective lifespan of the display and I don't think it would add that much cost...
They claim 8 years of normal use. NAND flash can last to 100,000 write cycles and read cycles don't affect the life of the memory. They use an algorithm to spread the write usage around so the whole memory will wear evenly. With the 640 gig drive, you can write to it at 96 megabytes per second for 21 years before it will go bad (640,000 mb / 96mb/s / 365 days/year / 24 hours/day / 3600 seconds/hour * 100,000 write cycles). They also use error detection and correction algorithms, but I'd still recommend creating a software RAID array of these as you would any other drive.
Well, Windows requires a lot of swap space. Let's say I have 1 gig of memory... Microsoft recommends your page file be a minimum of 1.5 times your ram size and maximum 3 times. So my swap file is 1.5gb to 3gb in size. Now let's say I purchase 3 more gig of memory, now I have to have a swap file that is 4.5gb to 9gb in size. The problem is also that Windows and it's applications are memory-greedy. So while the max I could fit in virtual memory was 4 gig before (1 gig ram and 3 gig swap), now I can have up to 13 gig in virtual memory, and WINDOWS WILL USE some of it. I would rather be able to disable the swap file altogether and just use ram. There are reasons for that, but in actuality I think my system would be faster without the swap file.
I don't think putting your swap space on a ramdisk is anything to worry about, the way virtual memory works doesn't allow for that. Otherwise you could be paging out the ramdisk to the swap file on the ramdisk. When a page is swapped out, I don't think ram can be accessed until the operation is complete, so there would be no way for the ramdisk driver to access the ram.
This is what I've been waiting for, I bought over 160 songs last night... The experience is great, one click will buy and import into iTunes just like apple. The 30 second previews load in just a couple of seconds. The music for the most part is cheaper than Apple. I got a couple of double-CD sets for under $10. I think this is one reason Universal is snubbing Apple, they wanted some control over song pricing and Apple only allows the flat 99 cent rate ($1.29 for the non-DRM songs). Some songs are more expensive on Amazon, I think I saw a few that were $1.99, but most are only 89 cents.
I love previewing the songs, what would be perfect is if Amazon had radio stations to play the song previews. I could sit all day and just listen to the previews to find new music. I spent four hours yesterday looking for music. If it was just playing in the background all day I could open my browser and buy a song when I heard one I liked...
It does NOT forbid dynamic linking at all, because the.so or DLL loader combines the two works at the same time that it loads them into memory, and copying into memory is not regarded as an act of copying that invokes copyright.
[...]
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead of this License.
First of all, loading into memory IS an act of copying that invokes copyright in the United States. Look up U.S. Code Title 17, Section 117. The courts have held that in several cases. The reason that we can use them is because congress specifically carved out exceptions so that a person who rightfully posesses software can load it into memory to use it and also to make an archival backup copy. Second, the FSF's position is that dynamic linking creates a derivative work that must be distributed under the GPL. I'm not sure whether that would legally constitute copyright infringement on its own, but by using teh library at all you are agreeing to the GPL, so contract law might be used to force compliance.
I am not a lawyer, seek a lawyer out if you want legal advice.
I believe this specific feature is on page 4,357 of the Microsoft OOXML spec, paragraph 2. Anyone that implements the OOXML spec must calculate the same way.
To calculate cost-making sense we need to know the following: The price per instant energy production and the length of time energy will be produced. You first call into question the $1 per watt value, and I that is the cost to produce. I'd expect the retail cost to be 2-3 times that as you show, so let's say $3 per watt of maximum capacity. Now how many hours will we be sunlit? Thankfully someone put out a chart for us displaying low, high, and average Sun Hours / day so we don't have to calculate based on weather data and seasons. Let's use someplace close to me, Ames, IA, with a relatively low 4.4 sun hours / day. With a $3,000 investment, that would get us 4.4 kwh/day. The typical life of most solar cells is around 20 years, so that turns out to be 32,120 kwh for a $3,000 investment, or around 9.3 cents per kilowatt hour. Pretty close to your calculations. However, this may make more sense for someone living in Las Vegas. With 6.41 average sunlit hours per day, that brings the total to 46,800 kwh over the usable life of the product, or 6.4 cents per kwh. So the price per kwh produced could be anywhere from 2.1 cents ($1 production price per watt with zero markup in Las Vegas) to 9.3 cents (200% markup and in Iowa). I currently pay 8.2 cents per kwh, so the break-even point for me would be if I could get a working unit installed for $2.60 per watt. In Las Vegas, the break-even point would be at $3.80 per watt (if their electricity costs the same as mine).
Now the real issue. Suppose everyone does this. It will have the effect of destabilizing the grid because it puts the power company in the position of standing by ready to supply energy at night and when
the sun doesn't shine but meanwhile when the sun is shinning their expensive infrastructure sits idle. So long before this gets deployed the rules get rewritten.
Peak energy usage hours are usually in the daytime, and when it is sunny. The main reason I believe is air conditioning and because people are at work. This could actually help to stabilize energy usage so the power companies' equipment that struggles to meet demand in the daytime isn't sitting idle at night anymore. The electric company would have instant additional unused capacity without making a capital investment and a more constant demand for energy.
[...] or face a "civil war" that could lead to total Linux annihilation."
Because when you have two sides fighting in a civil war, neither wins? It may be stressful, but two products will probably emerge, and one will probably end up being the most successful. I don't think civil war is the right term. I would see it as move of a divorce with a custody battle over who gets the users.
But Mossberg was right--Linux is typically not for the mainstream. And why should it be? If we want unstable systems, we can buy a Windows box and if we want a pretty design with far less functionality than a Linux machine, we can buy a Mac.
Linux should be for the mainstream. The larger the user base, the more interest there will be in it. The more interest, the more likely hardware manufacturers will open up their specs, making it easier to develop drivers and leading to increased support for all users. The larger the user base, the more applications and games will be available, leading to a snowball effect of more users. Another reason to not just use a Mac or Windows is cost. What if Linux had Apple's ease of use and Microsoft's hardware support and software repository? Not only that, but an easier to use Linux will probably improve the productivity of even the geeks, even if it is only a little when they have to install Linux on another computer...
Interesting... On stories (the many, many out there) about Microsoft security holes, I always see people posting excuses for Microsoft in the same manner ("There's nothing Microsoft can do", "Other operating systems have bugs too", "It was the user's fault for clicking on the attachment"). I think you've just discovered a natural law of Slashdot...
The company's lawsuit claims that the griping posters violated federal trademark laws by saying negative things about the company,
There's no trademark law that says people cannot say negative things about your company or products if you register a trademark. A trademark simply reserves the trademark for your commercial use. It is also restricted to an area of business. Someone does not violate trademark law unless the products can reasonably be confused with another product. This prevents some jerk from starting a company called 'Apple' or selling 'Apple' computers or electronic products that the consumer may think are genuine Apple products. Here the posters are merely commenting on the actual product, there is no confusion in the marketplace. Read U.S. Code Title 15 Chapter 22.
As for defamation, what is said must be false (in the U.S. at least, I don't think this is a requirement in some cases abroad like if insulting the Queen in the U.K.). If these people are lying about Video Professor, then they should get sued and the court should award damages to Video Professor. If they are not, then Video Professor should have to pay attorney's fees to all 100 of them for filing a frivolous lawsuit.
I am not a lawyer, just a person interested in the law. If you have any legal questions, consult an attorney.
Check the exchange rates, the pound is killing the dollar. Compare AT&T plans with O2 plans. AT&T costs $80 for 900 minutes and 200 sms, but with unlimited nights/weekends and mobile to mobile AT&T customers. O2 costs 55 pounds for 1200 minutes and 500 sms. For one thing, if you use 500 SMS, you can increase the AT&T plan by $30, equalizing the plans if you convert currency. The problem is you can't convert currency as the O2 plan is available in the UK and the AT&T plan is avialable in the US. Everything costs more in the UK. Get a pint of beer in a pub and you'll probably spend 3 pounds. Get a pint of beer in the US and you'll probably spend $3. Buy a coffee at Starbucks in the UK and you'll spend 4 pounds. Buy one in the US and you'll spend $4. I think the O2 plan is actually quite a deal...
Stop pulling the Microsoft card as justification. It's getting very, very old. Microsoft and the fear of Microsoft (and other such corporations) are just about the only thing that anyone who advocates the GPL can use to justify its' existence.
The other thing that you're not looking at is, said corporations using BSD licensed code hasn't destroyed the BSDs; if anything, in the case of OSX, it's been good for them.
I use Microsoft because it is the most familiar software company, that is known to use BSD code. I could have used Apple which is known to be based completely on BSD, or any of the UNIX vendors since Unix contains a lot of BSD code. There could be countless applications out there that make use of BSD code, you'd never know it. It's not fear-mongering, I fail to see how what I wrote has any effect of that sort. You fail to address my point at all, but what you say tends to support it. Having BSD code in Linux will not destroy BSD either (it hasn't yet). The BSD license specifically allows the use of the code for derivative works as it seems to have been in this case. The code wasn't stolen, the author apparently things that since Linux is open-source as well that the changes should be licensed under the BSD license. That is not required.
it is still a derived work and a few stylistic changes, some code shuffling, and some bug fixes don't allow to change the copyright.
IANAL, but it looks like the copyright wasn't changed, another person made changes and added their copyright. The author of a derivative work is the one that made changes to the preexisting work. While they enjoy no ownership of the pre-existing work, they enjoy complete ownership over their changes and ownership of the derivative work as a whole. The author of the original gets no ownership rights whatsoever in the derivative work, only in the pre-existing work.
For instance, say a movie producer licenses a book to create a movie. The producer owns the movie, not the book's author. The producer must have a license from the book's author to use his copyrighted materials, but he can license the movie however he wishes, if allowed by the license granted by the book author. The book author has no rights to control stills from the movie for instance. Here we have an author of some code that licensed it under the BSD license. The license specifically allows others to copy, modify, and distribute, with the sole requirement that the copyright notice and permission notice appear, which they do.
The BSD license requires no licensing of derivative works under the BSD license. Here they choose to license the derivative work under the GPL, which is perfectly fine. I fail to see the problem. Microsoft could take this driver tomorrow and put it in Vista without ever making the code available or acknowledging that they got it from BSD, and charge for distributing it to all their customers. If you don't want people to be able to create derivative works and do with them as they please, then don't use BSD as your license. I fail to see how any ethical boundary has been crossed. They seem to be arguing by the fact that people can now make changes to the GPL code and that they won't be able to use those changes under the BSD license. Dude, you should be using the GPL! That's what it is designed to prevent.
By all means, let's slow down our network by a factor of 10 or more. Throughput is limited to 150-180 mbps compared to 1000 mbps with standard gigabit ethernet. But that 180 mbps has to be shared also, while the gigabit is normally switched, allowing each connection the most possible bandwidth. While we're at it, lets buy new networking hardware for every one of our computers and waste IT's time to install it and the software. Nearly every computer motherboard made today has support for gigabit ethernet built in, and the ones that don't have 100mbps Ethernet which would still be faster than wireless. Also why not open up a huge security hole to let anyone in the building or parking lot have access to hacking our network? Normally the only hacking point for external people is the company's internet connection which has a firewall (I know, many attacks occur by employees). If someone can hack 802.11n, they'll have full access to our corporate network. Not only that, but they may gain the ability to read all of the packets flying around. At the very least we will be opened up to denial-of-service attacks and access-point spoofing. Someone on another floor could setup an access point that looks like a valid one in my company. If an employee has the ability to choose access points, they may connect to mine by mistake. Someone could also build a device to jam our access points.
There are many great ways to enjoy astronomy. The easiest and cheapest is to get binoculars (50mm or more) and a star chart. In dark skies, you can see some really cool things with just those, and trying to find the constellations and nebula/globular clusters is fun and gives you a feeling of accomplishment. Check out Stellarium (free and open-source) or Starry Night to get a view of the sky and find some things to look at. You can also explore the sky now in Google Earth.
For just viewing, I'd recommend a Dobsonian telescope. They are the cheapest and lightest. The Orion Skyquests I linked to are great. It took me maybe 45-60 minutes to get it put together for the first time, and it's really easy to take around if you get the bag. You can carry the bag in one hand and the base in the other with the handle. The IntelliScope computer worked great, it only takes a couple minutes to get it going and have it point you to the right place in the sky. Basically you find a few bright objects that you know, point the telescope to center on them, and push a button on the controller. Then you type the identifier for something you want to see onto the controller and it gives you a reading of how far to move (around and up/down). You just move the telescope until both numbers reach 0 and the object is centered for you. Grab a wide-field lens to see faint objects like nebula, galaxies and globular clusters. narrow-field lenses make an object seem larger, but they actually make nebula and galaxies look dimmer.
However, Dobsonians are not good for astrophotography. They rely on you to move them, so there's no tracking. You'd be surprised how fast the sky moves across your field of view. At high magnification you can actually see Saturn moving across your field of view for instance. To get good photographs, you need to have longer exposures, which means your telescope needs to be able to move itself. For a good Schmidt-Cassegrain that can track itself you are looking at more like $2,000... Those are usually heavier as well, my 10" weighs about 80 lbs.
Whatever you do, realize that light-gathering ability goes up by the square of the mirror dimensions (roughly). So if you get a telescope
with an 8" mirror, that is about 50 square inches of light-gathering ability. If you move up to a 10" mirror you get an area of 78.5 square inches. You could use a 19 second exposure instead of a 30 second exposure if you're doing astrophotography.
My nephew got a laptop with Vista Home Premium preinstalled from NewEgg. A few weeks later, it stopped booting up and made him activate. The online activation didn't work, and the phone activation didn't work the first time either. After about 30 minutes of messing around, I got on the phone with an actual person, read him the numbers just like I had just read to the automated phone system, then he gave me ANOTHER code to enter in, and everything worked. Pain in the ass....
Most likely, none of the above if it can be used for fingerprinting systems. (No, I did not RTFA.)
Basically some bits are more likely to be 0, some are more likely to be 1 and some are apparently random. Many cycles are done to identify which bits fall into which category. The ones more likely to be 0 or 1 are used to determine the fingerprint. The ones that appear to be totally random are used to generate random data.
All of this trouble, and all we seem to have gotten from it is a picture of the Earth (telescope pointed at a giant space mirror?) and a picture of one of the telescopes themselves (don't know how they got that one).
I've though we needed a mechanism for this since I started receiving a ton of spam seven years ago. I attempted to contact the ISPs registered for the IPs that were sending me SPAM and they didn't seem to care. There should be a repository and an easy way to flag that you think an IP address is being used for SPAM. ISPs should check this and contact their users. What user wouldn't want to know that their computer has been compromised and criminals could be scouring their computers for information like their credit card numbers?
Why should people expect rebates if they willingly buy some stuff that's overpriced and it gets cheaper a few months later?
Because Apple wants people to go buy the new touch iPods and not wait for three months to see if the price drops. It's not the feeling of entitlement of the early adopters, it's Apple's marketing and their desire to take care of customers.
it's really simple... Scientology doesn't involve the supernatural. There is no creation story. It starts with emperor xenu, who might not even have been the first emperor. Thetans and everything else are represented in scientific terms, not as supernatural but as natural. Xenu was an emperor of the people and he used space jumbo jets and atom bombs, technology and not the supernatural. Technology is used to detect and remove the body thetans.
Americans who vote for a third party's luck-to-get-one-percent candidates, though, are just being fools.
I think you have it opposite. If you do not vote for the person that you think would do the best job, then you are abdicating your responsibility as a citizen. You might as well vote "guilty" on a jury because you don't like the way the guy looked...
Why should I be forced to act a certain way just because they decided to make me inhale poison?
I'll think about that the next time I'm walking down the street and you pass me in your pollution-belching SUV... There should be a law against automobiles because I don't like the pollution.
They wish to distribute what they develop under the very unrestrictive BSD license. They can't go using other people's code however unless they get a license for it. The people that wrote the Broadcom wireless driver wished to release it under the GPL. They share it with everyone, the only condition being that improvements must also be shared and that people know it's free and can get the source code if they wish.
Slashdot Mirror
If they only last 1/2 as long as the reds and greens, why not put two blues by each red and green? During normal use, the backup blues wouldn't be used. When the original blues start to go bad, switch to using the backup blues. You could double the effective lifespan of the display and I don't think it would add that much cost...
They claim 8 years of normal use. NAND flash can last to 100,000 write cycles and read cycles don't affect the life of the memory. They use an algorithm to spread the write usage around so the whole memory will wear evenly. With the 640 gig drive, you can write to it at 96 megabytes per second for 21 years before it will go bad (640,000 mb / 96mb/s / 365 days/year / 24 hours/day / 3600 seconds/hour * 100,000 write cycles). They also use error detection and correction algorithms, but I'd still recommend creating a software RAID array of these as you would any other drive.
Well, Windows requires a lot of swap space. Let's say I have 1 gig of memory... Microsoft recommends your page file be a minimum of 1.5 times your ram size and maximum 3 times. So my swap file is 1.5gb to 3gb in size. Now let's say I purchase 3 more gig of memory, now I have to have a swap file that is 4.5gb to 9gb in size. The problem is also that Windows and it's applications are memory-greedy. So while the max I could fit in virtual memory was 4 gig before (1 gig ram and 3 gig swap), now I can have up to 13 gig in virtual memory, and WINDOWS WILL USE some of it. I would rather be able to disable the swap file altogether and just use ram. There are reasons for that, but in actuality I think my system would be faster without the swap file.
I don't think putting your swap space on a ramdisk is anything to worry about, the way virtual memory works doesn't allow for that. Otherwise you could be paging out the ramdisk to the swap file on the ramdisk. When a page is swapped out, I don't think ram can be accessed until the operation is complete, so there would be no way for the ramdisk driver to access the ram.
This is what I've been waiting for, I bought over 160 songs last night... The experience is great, one click will buy and import into iTunes just like apple. The 30 second previews load in just a couple of seconds. The music for the most part is cheaper than Apple. I got a couple of double-CD sets for under $10. I think this is one reason Universal is snubbing Apple, they wanted some control over song pricing and Apple only allows the flat 99 cent rate ($1.29 for the non-DRM songs). Some songs are more expensive on Amazon, I think I saw a few that were $1.99, but most are only 89 cents.
I love previewing the songs, what would be perfect is if Amazon had radio stations to play the song previews. I could sit all day and just listen to the previews to find new music. I spent four hours yesterday looking for music. If it was just playing in the background all day I could open my browser and buy a song when I heard one I liked...
DRM-Free music is what I've been waiting for, I just bought 170 songs....
First of all, loading into memory IS an act of copying that invokes copyright in the United States. Look up U.S. Code Title 17, Section 117. The courts have held that in several cases. The reason that we can use them is because congress specifically carved out exceptions so that a person who rightfully posesses software can load it into memory to use it and also to make an archival backup copy. Second, the FSF's position is that dynamic linking creates a derivative work that must be distributed under the GPL. I'm not sure whether that would legally constitute copyright infringement on its own, but by using teh library at all you are agreeing to the GPL, so contract law might be used to force compliance.
I am not a lawyer, seek a lawyer out if you want legal advice.
I believe this specific feature is on page 4,357 of the Microsoft OOXML spec, paragraph 2. Anyone that implements the OOXML spec must calculate the same way.
To calculate cost-making sense we need to know the following: The price per instant energy production and the length of time energy will be produced. You first call into question the $1 per watt value, and I that is the cost to produce. I'd expect the retail cost to be 2-3 times that as you show, so let's say $3 per watt of maximum capacity. Now how many hours will we be sunlit? Thankfully someone put out a chart for us displaying low, high, and average Sun Hours / day so we don't have to calculate based on weather data and seasons. Let's use someplace close to me, Ames, IA, with a relatively low 4.4 sun hours / day. With a $3,000 investment, that would get us 4.4 kwh/day. The typical life of most solar cells is around 20 years, so that turns out to be 32,120 kwh for a $3,000 investment, or around 9.3 cents per kilowatt hour. Pretty close to your calculations. However, this may make more sense for someone living in Las Vegas. With 6.41 average sunlit hours per day, that brings the total to 46,800 kwh over the usable life of the product, or 6.4 cents per kwh. So the price per kwh produced could be anywhere from 2.1 cents ($1 production price per watt with zero markup in Las Vegas) to 9.3 cents (200% markup and in Iowa). I currently pay 8.2 cents per kwh, so the break-even point for me would be if I could get a working unit installed for $2.60 per watt. In Las Vegas, the break-even point would be at $3.80 per watt (if their electricity costs the same as mine).
Peak energy usage hours are usually in the daytime, and when it is sunny. The main reason I believe is air conditioning and because people are at work. This could actually help to stabilize energy usage so the power companies' equipment that struggles to meet demand in the daytime isn't sitting idle at night anymore. The electric company would have instant additional unused capacity without making a capital investment and a more constant demand for energy.
Because when you have two sides fighting in a civil war, neither wins? It may be stressful, but two products will probably emerge, and one will probably end up being the most successful. I don't think civil war is the right term. I would see it as move of a divorce with a custody battle over who gets the users.
Linux should be for the mainstream. The larger the user base, the more interest there will be in it. The more interest, the more likely hardware manufacturers will open up their specs, making it easier to develop drivers and leading to increased support for all users. The larger the user base, the more applications and games will be available, leading to a snowball effect of more users. Another reason to not just use a Mac or Windows is cost. What if Linux had Apple's ease of use and Microsoft's hardware support and software repository? Not only that, but an easier to use Linux will probably improve the productivity of even the geeks, even if it is only a little when they have to install Linux on another computer...
Interesting... On stories (the many, many out there) about Microsoft security holes, I always see people posting excuses for Microsoft in the same manner ("There's nothing Microsoft can do", "Other operating systems have bugs too", "It was the user's fault for clicking on the attachment"). I think you've just discovered a natural law of Slashdot...
There's no trademark law that says people cannot say negative things about your company or products if you register a trademark. A trademark simply reserves the trademark for your commercial use. It is also restricted to an area of business. Someone does not violate trademark law unless the products can reasonably be confused with another product. This prevents some jerk from starting a company called 'Apple' or selling 'Apple' computers or electronic products that the consumer may think are genuine Apple products. Here the posters are merely commenting on the actual product, there is no confusion in the marketplace. Read U.S. Code Title 15 Chapter 22.
As for defamation, what is said must be false (in the U.S. at least, I don't think this is a requirement in some cases abroad like if insulting the Queen in the U.K.). If these people are lying about Video Professor, then they should get sued and the court should award damages to Video Professor. If they are not, then Video Professor should have to pay attorney's fees to all 100 of them for filing a frivolous lawsuit.
I am not a lawyer, just a person interested in the law. If you have any legal questions, consult an attorney.
Check the exchange rates, the pound is killing the dollar. Compare AT&T plans with O2 plans. AT&T costs $80 for 900 minutes and 200 sms, but with unlimited nights/weekends and mobile to mobile AT&T customers. O2 costs 55 pounds for 1200 minutes and 500 sms. For one thing, if you use 500 SMS, you can increase the AT&T plan by $30, equalizing the plans if you convert currency. The problem is you can't convert currency as the O2 plan is available in the UK and the AT&T plan is avialable in the US. Everything costs more in the UK. Get a pint of beer in a pub and you'll probably spend 3 pounds. Get a pint of beer in the US and you'll probably spend $3. Buy a coffee at Starbucks in the UK and you'll spend 4 pounds. Buy one in the US and you'll spend $4. I think the O2 plan is actually quite a deal...
I use Microsoft because it is the most familiar software company, that is known to use BSD code. I could have used Apple which is known to be based completely on BSD, or any of the UNIX vendors since Unix contains a lot of BSD code. There could be countless applications out there that make use of BSD code, you'd never know it. It's not fear-mongering, I fail to see how what I wrote has any effect of that sort. You fail to address my point at all, but what you say tends to support it. Having BSD code in Linux will not destroy BSD either (it hasn't yet). The BSD license specifically allows the use of the code for derivative works as it seems to have been in this case. The code wasn't stolen, the author apparently things that since Linux is open-source as well that the changes should be licensed under the BSD license. That is not required.
IANAL, but it looks like the copyright wasn't changed, another person made changes and added their copyright. The author of a derivative work is the one that made changes to the preexisting work. While they enjoy no ownership of the pre-existing work, they enjoy complete ownership over their changes and ownership of the derivative work as a whole. The author of the original gets no ownership rights whatsoever in the derivative work, only in the pre-existing work.
For instance, say a movie producer licenses a book to create a movie. The producer owns the movie, not the book's author. The producer must have a license from the book's author to use his copyrighted materials, but he can license the movie however he wishes, if allowed by the license granted by the book author. The book author has no rights to control stills from the movie for instance. Here we have an author of some code that licensed it under the BSD license. The license specifically allows others to copy, modify, and distribute, with the sole requirement that the copyright notice and permission notice appear, which they do.
The BSD license requires no licensing of derivative works under the BSD license. Here they choose to license the derivative work under the GPL, which is perfectly fine. I fail to see the problem. Microsoft could take this driver tomorrow and put it in Vista without ever making the code available or acknowledging that they got it from BSD, and charge for distributing it to all their customers. If you don't want people to be able to create derivative works and do with them as they please, then don't use BSD as your license. I fail to see how any ethical boundary has been crossed. They seem to be arguing by the fact that people can now make changes to the GPL code and that they won't be able to use those changes under the BSD license. Dude, you should be using the GPL! That's what it is designed to prevent.
By all means, let's slow down our network by a factor of 10 or more. Throughput is limited to 150-180 mbps compared to 1000 mbps with standard gigabit ethernet. But that 180 mbps has to be shared also, while the gigabit is normally switched, allowing each connection the most possible bandwidth. While we're at it, lets buy new networking hardware for every one of our computers and waste IT's time to install it and the software. Nearly every computer motherboard made today has support for gigabit ethernet built in, and the ones that don't have 100mbps Ethernet which would still be faster than wireless. Also why not open up a huge security hole to let anyone in the building or parking lot have access to hacking our network? Normally the only hacking point for external people is the company's internet connection which has a firewall (I know, many attacks occur by employees). If someone can hack 802.11n, they'll have full access to our corporate network. Not only that, but they may gain the ability to read all of the packets flying around. At the very least we will be opened up to denial-of-service attacks and access-point spoofing. Someone on another floor could setup an access point that looks like a valid one in my company. If an employee has the ability to choose access points, they may connect to mine by mistake. Someone could also build a device to jam our access points.
There are many great ways to enjoy astronomy. The easiest and cheapest is to get binoculars (50mm or more) and a star chart. In dark skies, you can see some really cool things with just those, and trying to find the constellations and nebula/globular clusters is fun and gives you a feeling of accomplishment. Check out Stellarium (free and open-source) or Starry Night to get a view of the sky and find some things to look at. You can also explore the sky now in Google Earth.
For just viewing, I'd recommend a Dobsonian telescope. They are the cheapest and lightest. The Orion Skyquests I linked to are great. It took me maybe 45-60 minutes to get it put together for the first time, and it's really easy to take around if you get the bag. You can carry the bag in one hand and the base in the other with the handle. The IntelliScope computer worked great, it only takes a couple minutes to get it going and have it point you to the right place in the sky. Basically you find a few bright objects that you know, point the telescope to center on them, and push a button on the controller. Then you type the identifier for something you want to see onto the controller and it gives you a reading of how far to move (around and up/down). You just move the telescope until both numbers reach 0 and the object is centered for you. Grab a wide-field lens to see faint objects like nebula, galaxies and globular clusters. narrow-field lenses make an object seem larger, but they actually make nebula and galaxies look dimmer.
However, Dobsonians are not good for astrophotography. They rely on you to move them, so there's no tracking. You'd be surprised how fast the sky moves across your field of view. At high magnification you can actually see Saturn moving across your field of view for instance. To get good photographs, you need to have longer exposures, which means your telescope needs to be able to move itself. For a good Schmidt-Cassegrain that can track itself you are looking at more like $2,000... Those are usually heavier as well, my 10" weighs about 80 lbs.
Whatever you do, realize that light-gathering ability goes up by the square of the mirror dimensions (roughly). So if you get a telescope with an 8" mirror, that is about 50 square inches of light-gathering ability. If you move up to a 10" mirror you get an area of 78.5 square inches. You could use a 19 second exposure instead of a 30 second exposure if you're doing astrophotography.
My nephew got a laptop with Vista Home Premium preinstalled from NewEgg. A few weeks later, it stopped booting up and made him activate. The online activation didn't work, and the phone activation didn't work the first time either. After about 30 minutes of messing around, I got on the phone with an actual person, read him the numbers just like I had just read to the automated phone system, then he gave me ANOTHER code to enter in, and everything worked. Pain in the ass....
Basically some bits are more likely to be 0, some are more likely to be 1 and some are apparently random. Many cycles are done to identify which bits fall into which category. The ones more likely to be 0 or 1 are used to determine the fingerprint. The ones that appear to be totally random are used to generate random data.
All of this trouble, and all we seem to have gotten from it is a picture of the Earth (telescope pointed at a giant space mirror?) and a picture of one of the telescopes themselves (don't know how they got that one).
I've though we needed a mechanism for this since I started receiving a ton of spam seven years ago. I attempted to contact the ISPs registered for the IPs that were sending me SPAM and they didn't seem to care. There should be a repository and an easy way to flag that you think an IP address is being used for SPAM. ISPs should check this and contact their users. What user wouldn't want to know that their computer has been compromised and criminals could be scouring their computers for information like their credit card numbers?
Because Apple wants people to go buy the new touch iPods and not wait for three months to see if the price drops. It's not the feeling of entitlement of the early adopters, it's Apple's marketing and their desire to take care of customers.
it's really simple... Scientology doesn't involve the supernatural. There is no creation story. It starts with emperor xenu, who might not even have been the first emperor. Thetans and everything else are represented in scientific terms, not as supernatural but as natural. Xenu was an emperor of the people and he used space jumbo jets and atom bombs, technology and not the supernatural. Technology is used to detect and remove the body thetans.
I think you have it opposite. If you do not vote for the person that you think would do the best job, then you are abdicating your responsibility as a citizen. You might as well vote "guilty" on a jury because you don't like the way the guy looked...
I'll think about that the next time I'm walking down the street and you pass me in your pollution-belching SUV... There should be a law against automobiles because I don't like the pollution.
They wish to distribute what they develop under the very unrestrictive BSD license. They can't go using other people's code however unless they get a license for it. The people that wrote the Broadcom wireless driver wished to release it under the GPL. They share it with everyone, the only condition being that improvements must also be shared and that people know it's free and can get the source code if they wish.