I can make an install for ANY windows machine that has no uninstall -- this has been trivial since the days of Win95.
omibus (and apparently the modders) must not have even read the article summary. This is occurring for programs that DO have an uninstaller, and that were present and able to be uninstalled prior to the most recent Vista update. After the update, those programs were no longer able to be installed. That is a problem.
1) Office 200x saves the files in the format they were created in. It WILL NOT change the file format. (This even applies to older non Office imported file formats. A Lotus format saves as Lotus, a CSV saves as a CSV, a TXT or RTF or WP files saves as the original format, and yes even Office 97, 2000, XP, or 2003 saves as the ORIGINAL FORMAT. PERIOD.)
Also, Office 200x saves in the most current format by default, which will not be able to be read if you move back to a previous version. Any Word or Excel documents he created with the trial would be unusable with a previous version of Office, right?
2) Office 200x Outlook DOES NOT CHANGE the PST structure, and keeps the previous structure in the PREVIOUS VERSION FORMAT. Yes there is a new unicode format in 2003 and 2007, but you have to SPECIFICALLY convert the PST, and this is for users that are close to the previous 2GB pst store limit in previous versions of Outlook.
What is the default when installing the trial? How would Joe User know that they didn't want to 'upgrade' their file format and that they couldn't go back?
So if files were 'changed' or converted to the newer format, the USER FREAKING DID IT SPECIFICALLY! And as with Access, the non changed version IS STILL THERE!
So the backup of his old email files is there, which doesn't contain any email received in the 30 days or whatever he was using the trial, and which he cannot use anyway since he can't get the old version of Office working again. That is why this is NOT "so f**king ridiculous"...
The original copyright term was for 14 years with the option to extend another 14 years at the end... It's time we took back the public domain...
Also I think copyright must be updated for software. Currently you must only send in the first and last 10 pages of source code. This is ridiculous. The source code for countless works has been lost, and it was never made available to the public. In 100 years when the copyright runs out in Windows Vista (if they don't extend it again), we still won't have the source code available in the public domain. We won't be able to even install it anymore since the activation servers will no longer be running. The public is losing information...
I think that if you wish to receive copyright protection for software, you must send in the entire source code. The Library of Congress could store it digitally until the copyright expires and it enters the public domain.
They don't just say they want to make $80k take-home, they'll take all the money they can get. Oil companies continue to generate record profits, yet spend less on new refineries that would lower the cost of gas to us. Why did the price of gas go up $0.20 the week of memorial day, then immediately go down $0.15? The companies knew that people would be driving more and they would have to buy more gas for their cars so they could gouge a little more from our pocketbooks.
Of course if they want to do this, they should really be charging for amount of energy in the form of gasoline. That would cause the price of ethanol blends to go up since ethanol only contains about 70% of the energy of gasoline by volume. It should go up about 3% or 9 cents a gallon.
As long as they refrained from making any sequels. I found "Rendezvous with Rama" to be one of the most compelling science fiction stories ever. It was well written and had interesting characters you could empathize with and root for. It also had a great plot with realistic and entertaining challenges for the characters to overcome. The sequels were a huge letdown. Instead of being about exploring this mysterious alien craft and protecting it from hasty actions by planetary governments, the second book is more of a soap opera with the human characters fighting petty squabbles and acting in ways that strain credibility.
KINETICA OPENING DELAYED: Due to some technical difficulties caused by the intense heat from camera lighting, Steorn's demonstration of its 'Orbo' free energy technology has been slightly delayed. As a consequence, Kinetica Museum will not be open to the public today (5th July). A technical assessment is currently underway and information will be posted on the websites of Steorn and Kinetica as soon as it becomes available. We apologise for this delay and appreciate your patience.
Steorn's 'Orbo' technology is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and allows the production of clean, free and constant energy. 'Orbo' technology is fully scalable and can be applied to virtually all devices requiring energy, from cellular phones to cars.
So this technology is fully scalable and can be applied to virtually all devices requiring energy, including cars. As long as you operate them at NIGHT I guess since the camera lights were too much for the machine to handle. That tells you something fishy is going on...
It looks nothing like the REAL perpetual motion machine I designed and scratched on paper in junior high. If I just had any mechanical aptitude I would build it and make a lot of money.
However he may be able to force google to hand over the gmail.com domain. Then everyone who has your email address will have to update it to 'googlemail.com'.
Let me put it this way: Until HDTV gives me something other than sub-microscopic picture quality, there's nothing I can't get from it that I can get from my video iPod.
He types as he watches on his 15" monitor running at 640x480 resolution...
Come on people, they were only offering a link to "CNET Download.com". They were no more distributing Ubuntu than Slashdot was distributing porn by messages linking to Goatse.cx.
Question I thought that United States currency was legal tender for all debts. Some businesses or governmental agencies say that they will only accept checks, money orders or credit cards as payment, and others will only accept currency notes in denominations of $20 or smaller. Isn't this illegal?
Answer The pertinent portion of law that applies to your question is the Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," which states: "United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy.
And after so much speculation on how aliens must have done it because of how the corn was bent at the stalk and how we cannot produce that effect, it was shown that some of them were created by a couple people walking and dragging a log behind them.
The universe outside the door is far more full of possibility than most people choose to be aware of.
Yet it operates on rules, not magic. If those rules didn't exist, the universe simply wouldn't exist as we know it.
Are you honestly suggesting that we have reached the "end of science?"
No, I think there are still things to learn, I just doubt that I'm suggesting that the general theory of relativity hasn't failed a test yet (although it doesn't explain the tiny world of quantum physics), and has predicted many things that are still being proven true in experiments almost a century later. The only way of fast travel that obeys the rules in General Relativity would be a wormhole. Wormholes aren't proven to exist and I doubt they do. How do you create one? The most likely way would be collapse of a star into a black hole, I don't think I want that to happen to Sol. Then you'd also need some matter with negative mass (which we haven't observed) to keep it from collapsing completely. Oh, and a white hole at the other end, which would violate the third law of thermodynamics. And so we have a wormhole, we need to move one end to another star, which is more difficult than taking a simple trip there in the first place so let's rule wormholes out for now.
Fire was taming something that occurred naturally. Gravity can be seen just by dropping something. Magnetism occurred in natural stones. Traveling across the ocean was merely daring to try it. Electricity was harnessing forces we can see in lightning or when walking across a rug. Flight was possible, we saw birds do it. We saw chemicals interacting (rusting for instance) long before we understood what was happening. You just have to look up on a clear day to see nuclear fusion in action. Where's the observable phenomenon that will let things travel faster than light or switch unharmed into another dimension and back?
I'm not saying that we've reached the "end of science" by any means, but I do believe that the universe obeys certain laws, and that traveling faster than light from one point in our universe to another is about as likely using science as it is by waving a magic wand.
Weight of 1 Tsar [sic] bomb: 27 tons
Weight of theoretical payload for an interstellar journey used in calculations: 1 ton
Number of Tsar bombs required to accellerate 1 ton to 0.1c: 10
Weight of Tsar bombs: 270 tons
Maximum speed of Tsar bomb accellerating itself using 100% efficiency of energy produced into momentum: 0.0003c
Speed taken into account instant acceleration and slowing down at target: 0.00015c
Time to reach nearest star: 23,000 years
The only possible way of doing it in our lifetime is to generate the power on earth and have an efficient means of beaming the power over interstellar distances.
My point is that Magic Wands are the safe bet here.
If you listened to sci-fi authors, we'd already have a colony on Mars now with existing or close technology. The problem is that it is just too hard to justify. Getting to a nearby star is so much more difficult than getting to Mars that it's like taking one step or walking across the United States, so a magic wand is definitely required. The problem right now is that we have a pretty good understanding of the universe, and magic ain't in it. Having "magic" like warp drive would require laws of physics that are contradictory to the ones that we have been able to prove through experimentation.
"Point 1: The Distances are really huge! If your hut was this sea shell, and the next city down the coast (which as we all know takes a full week to paddle to in our finest grass row-boat), is this pink rock I place one hand span away from the sea shell, then the Land Across the Ocean would be, -wait for it- fifty Aztec miles away! Think about that! It can't be done, durn it!"
Hut: 20ft (generous)
Village down the coast, taking a week to paddle (paddle at 2 mph [low estimate], 8 hours a day): 112 miles (591360 ft)
Distance across the ocean: 3000 miles (15,840,000 feet)
Hand span: six inches (0.5 feet)
Ratio of village down coast to ocean: 26.8
From your example (if the elder knew the distance as we do), the village would be 6 inches away, but instead of being 50 Aztec miles away, the other coast would be 13.4 feet away, still inside the hut. The "seashell" representing the hut would only be 5 microns in size however. Let's look at your example, but use a hand-width to represent the distance to the moon, the furthest a human has ever traveled from earth.
Distance to moon: 1.28 light-seconds
Distance to nearest start: 4.3 light-years
Ratio: 1 to 24,637,500
so instead of the destination being 13 feet away, it would be over 12 million feet away or about 2400 miles
The scale difference between your example (which is already a scale example) and interstellar travel is like backing out of the garage (not even onto the street) compared with driving cross-country. And backing out of the garage is the furthest humans have ever gone. By itself, it would be like backing out of the garage (still in the driveway) compared to driving cross-country 26 times.
Let us say that sailing around the world is a 25,000 mile trip (actually longer, but using the circumference of the earth here as a low number), and a round trip to the moon is about 480,000 miles. Sir Francis Drake sailed around the world in 1519. It took us 450 years to get to the moon, just 20 times as far. That's the difference between pulling out of the garage and driving one block, not cross-country. And we went to the moon a few times, but haven't been back there in 30 years. Why? It's just too damn hard.
Our current understanding of the universe is pretty good. Special and General relativity have been tested and they work. We've used particle colliders to delve into matter at the subatomic level. We know the major forces of the universe, and our theoretical best source of energy, combining matter and antimatter, still wouldn't get us that quickly to another star. If we used hydrogen from interstellar space and antimatter brought as fuel (Bussard Ramjets just don't work partly because of drag, look it up on Wikipedia), we could still probably only get to about 1/4 light-speed theoretically with near-perfect efficiency in converting energy into motion, so we'd have to live on the ship for 16 year to get to the nearest star. We couldn't even get an experiment on Earth to last nearly that long, without any worries about the rigors of space travel.
The only way we will get to another star I believe is if there is the discovery of a "free" energy source and a complete jump in our understanding of the universe. The limiting theories we have now have survived rigorous testing however, and I don't believe it likely that they will be shown to be false. Science fiction has repeatedly over-estimated what is possible, it cannot be taken as accurate predictions of the future. I think it about as likely that we will have a new understanding of the universe that rewrites all the laws and theories we have as it is that the Aztecs did actually travel across the sea in an instant using their priests' magic.
Like the other replier said, at light speed there is still time. If you were to travel the speed of light, you'd still notice/experience the passing of time, its just the experience of time relative to some one else, or more specifically someone not in your reference frame, thus relativity.
Matter cannot travel at the speed of light. As you accelerated towards the speed of light, time would slow down for you as measured by an observer in the frame you left and distance to other objects would appear to decrease. If you were able to get close enough to the speed of light, it would be a shorter distance to the end of the farthest known quasar than from one end of your ship to the other. Eventually you would experience the heat death of the universe before you ever reached the speed of light.
If you accelerate at 1g (according to an observer in the frame you left), that would happen in about a year (354.06 days at 9.8m/s^2). However you would have to be accelerating at 1g according to you. Since your mass would appear to increase towards infinity to an outside observer as you approached the speed of light so it would take enormous amounts of energy, and the only thing they could use to accelerate you is a laser, which would get weaker and weaker to you as you approached the speed of light. You would need your own means of propulsion then. If you constantly accelerate at 1g according to you, it would look to an outside observer like your acceleration was decreasing as time dilation took effect. At about 0.6c you would experience 25% time dilation. While you saw yourself accelerating at 9.8m/s^2, to an outside observer it would look like you were accelerating at 7.8m/s^2. At 0.9999c it would appear to them like you were accelerating at only 0.14 m/s^2. At that rate it would take you 68.55 years to reach the remaining gap to light speed. At 0.99999999999c it would appear to an outside observer like you were accelerating at only 0.000044 m/s^s and it would take you 217,000 years to reach the speed of light. Since your acceleration keeps decreasing, the target of light-speed according to an outside observer keeps getting further and further away.
Not to mention that there would probably have been relativistic effects making your speed (from your viewpoint) and your speed (from the cop's viewpoint) significantly different!
Not much different actually. The Lorentz factor is only about 1.3% for traveling at 0.16c. To get the expected blue shift from 650nm to 550nm, you would have to have a Lorentz factor of about 1.154. To get this, you would have to be travelling about 50% the speed of light.
Also, speed is constant between the reference frames. Let's say you are approaching a stop light and pass a cop when the stop light is 299,792,458 meters away (the exact distance light travels in a vacuum in one second, let's say you are in a vacuum). The cop clocks you at 47,966,793 meters per second or 172,680,455 km/hour and sees that you pass the stop light 6.25 seconds later (he actually sees it 7.25 seconds later, but he is measuring with a synchronized clock at the stop light). You show yourself as moving relative to the cop and the stop light at the same exact speed, 0.16c, but time is moving about 1.3% slower for you (the Lorentz factor is 1.013051123), how can that be? The answer is that objects shrink in the direction of relative motion, so it appears to you like you only traveled about 295,930,236 meters in about 6.17 seconds. So while it looks to you like you made the trip from the parked cop to the stop light in 0.08 seconds less time than the cop says, it also looks to you like you traveled 3,862,222 meters less than the cop says.
Slashdot Mirror
omibus (and apparently the modders) must not have even read the article summary. This is occurring for programs that DO have an uninstaller, and that were present and able to be uninstalled prior to the most recent Vista update. After the update, those programs were no longer able to be installed. That is a problem.
Also, Office 200x saves in the most current format by default, which will not be able to be read if you move back to a previous version. Any Word or Excel documents he created with the trial would be unusable with a previous version of Office, right?
What is the default when installing the trial? How would Joe User know that they didn't want to 'upgrade' their file format and that they couldn't go back?
So the backup of his old email files is there, which doesn't contain any email received in the 30 days or whatever he was using the trial, and which he cannot use anyway since he can't get the old version of Office working again. That is why this is NOT "so f**king ridiculous"...
No more little death that brings total obliteration. I no longer have to let it pass over me and through me!
The original copyright term was for 14 years with the option to extend another 14 years at the end... It's time we took back the public domain... Also I think copyright must be updated for software. Currently you must only send in the first and last 10 pages of source code. This is ridiculous. The source code for countless works has been lost, and it was never made available to the public. In 100 years when the copyright runs out in Windows Vista (if they don't extend it again), we still won't have the source code available in the public domain. We won't be able to even install it anymore since the activation servers will no longer be running. The public is losing information... I think that if you wish to receive copyright protection for software, you must send in the entire source code. The Library of Congress could store it digitally until the copyright expires and it enters the public domain.
If this were the case, then all of the wacked-out comments hea read on /. would really be hallucinogenic creations of his own subconscious. Freak
They don't just say they want to make $80k take-home, they'll take all the money they can get. Oil companies continue to generate record profits, yet spend less on new refineries that would lower the cost of gas to us. Why did the price of gas go up $0.20 the week of memorial day, then immediately go down $0.15? The companies knew that people would be driving more and they would have to buy more gas for their cars so they could gouge a little more from our pocketbooks.
Of course if they want to do this, they should really be charging for amount of energy in the form of gasoline. That would cause the price of ethanol blends to go up since ethanol only contains about 70% of the energy of gasoline by volume. It should go up about 3% or 9 cents a gallon.
As long as they refrained from making any sequels. I found "Rendezvous with Rama" to be one of the most compelling science fiction stories ever. It was well written and had interesting characters you could empathize with and root for. It also had a great plot with realistic and entertaining challenges for the characters to overcome. The sequels were a huge letdown. Instead of being about exploring this mysterious alien craft and protecting it from hasty actions by planetary governments, the second book is more of a soap opera with the human characters fighting petty squabbles and acting in ways that strain credibility.
It looks nothing like the REAL perpetual motion machine I designed and scratched on paper in junior high. If I just had any mechanical aptitude I would build it and make a lot of money.
However he may be able to force google to hand over the gmail.com domain. Then everyone who has your email address will have to update it to 'googlemail.com'.
Just had to try
The article says there's no record of that lake on any maps prior to 1929, but the area was poorly explored.
Come on people, they were only offering a link to "CNET Download.com". They were no more distributing Ubuntu than Slashdot was distributing porn by messages linking to Goatse.cx.
No, I think there are still things to learn, I just doubt that I'm suggesting that the general theory of relativity hasn't failed a test yet (although it doesn't explain the tiny world of quantum physics), and has predicted many things that are still being proven true in experiments almost a century later. The only way of fast travel that obeys the rules in General Relativity would be a wormhole. Wormholes aren't proven to exist and I doubt they do. How do you create one? The most likely way would be collapse of a star into a black hole, I don't think I want that to happen to Sol. Then you'd also need some matter with negative mass (which we haven't observed) to keep it from collapsing completely. Oh, and a white hole at the other end, which would violate the third law of thermodynamics. And so we have a wormhole, we need to move one end to another star, which is more difficult than taking a simple trip there in the first place so let's rule wormholes out for now.
Fire was taming something that occurred naturally. Gravity can be seen just by dropping something. Magnetism occurred in natural stones. Traveling across the ocean was merely daring to try it. Electricity was harnessing forces we can see in lightning or when walking across a rug. Flight was possible, we saw birds do it. We saw chemicals interacting (rusting for instance) long before we understood what was happening. You just have to look up on a clear day to see nuclear fusion in action. Where's the observable phenomenon that will let things travel faster than light or switch unharmed into another dimension and back?
I'm not saying that we've reached the "end of science" by any means, but I do believe that the universe obeys certain laws, and that traveling faster than light from one point in our universe to another is about as likely using science as it is by waving a magic wand.
Are you writing a paper on using human computation by posting on slashdot? :)
Thanks!
Weight of 1 Tsar [sic] bomb: 27 tons
Weight of theoretical payload for an interstellar journey used in calculations: 1 ton
Number of Tsar bombs required to accellerate 1 ton to 0.1c: 10
Weight of Tsar bombs: 270 tons
Maximum speed of Tsar bomb accellerating itself using 100% efficiency of energy produced into momentum: 0.0003c
Speed taken into account instant acceleration and slowing down at target: 0.00015c
Time to reach nearest star: 23,000 years
The only possible way of doing it in our lifetime is to generate the power on earth and have an efficient means of beaming the power over interstellar distances.
If you listened to sci-fi authors, we'd already have a colony on Mars now with existing or close technology. The problem is that it is just too hard to justify. Getting to a nearby star is so much more difficult than getting to Mars that it's like taking one step or walking across the United States, so a magic wand is definitely required. The problem right now is that we have a pretty good understanding of the universe, and magic ain't in it. Having "magic" like warp drive would require laws of physics that are contradictory to the ones that we have been able to prove through experimentation.
From your example (if the elder knew the distance as we do), the village would be 6 inches away, but instead of being 50 Aztec miles away, the other coast would be 13.4 feet away, still inside the hut. The "seashell" representing the hut would only be 5 microns in size however. Let's look at your example, but use a hand-width to represent the distance to the moon, the furthest a human has ever traveled from earth.
The scale difference between your example (which is already a scale example) and interstellar travel is like backing out of the garage (not even onto the street) compared with driving cross-country. And backing out of the garage is the furthest humans have ever gone. By itself, it would be like backing out of the garage (still in the driveway) compared to driving cross-country 26 times.
Let us say that sailing around the world is a 25,000 mile trip (actually longer, but using the circumference of the earth here as a low number), and a round trip to the moon is about 480,000 miles. Sir Francis Drake sailed around the world in 1519. It took us 450 years to get to the moon, just 20 times as far. That's the difference between pulling out of the garage and driving one block, not cross-country. And we went to the moon a few times, but haven't been back there in 30 years. Why? It's just too damn hard.
Our current understanding of the universe is pretty good. Special and General relativity have been tested and they work. We've used particle colliders to delve into matter at the subatomic level. We know the major forces of the universe, and our theoretical best source of energy, combining matter and antimatter, still wouldn't get us that quickly to another star. If we used hydrogen from interstellar space and antimatter brought as fuel (Bussard Ramjets just don't work partly because of drag, look it up on Wikipedia), we could still probably only get to about 1/4 light-speed theoretically with near-perfect efficiency in converting energy into motion, so we'd have to live on the ship for 16 year to get to the nearest star. We couldn't even get an experiment on Earth to last nearly that long, without any worries about the rigors of space travel.
The only way we will get to another star I believe is if there is the discovery of a "free" energy source and a complete jump in our understanding of the universe. The limiting theories we have now have survived rigorous testing however, and I don't believe it likely that they will be shown to be false. Science fiction has repeatedly over-estimated what is possible, it cannot be taken as accurate predictions of the future. I think it about as likely that we will have a new understanding of the universe that rewrites all the laws and theories we have as it is that the Aztecs did actually travel across the sea in an instant using their priests' magic.
This is only appropriate when talking about ridiculous business models. For instance, an appropriate use would be:
1. Sue customers for downloading music
2. ???
3. Profit
This story seems to be about public relations and not a particular business strategy.
Matter cannot travel at the speed of light. As you accelerated towards the speed of light, time would slow down for you as measured by an observer in the frame you left and distance to other objects would appear to decrease. If you were able to get close enough to the speed of light, it would be a shorter distance to the end of the farthest known quasar than from one end of your ship to the other. Eventually you would experience the heat death of the universe before you ever reached the speed of light.
If you accelerate at 1g (according to an observer in the frame you left), that would happen in about a year (354.06 days at 9.8m/s^2). However you would have to be accelerating at 1g according to you. Since your mass would appear to increase towards infinity to an outside observer as you approached the speed of light so it would take enormous amounts of energy, and the only thing they could use to accelerate you is a laser, which would get weaker and weaker to you as you approached the speed of light. You would need your own means of propulsion then. If you constantly accelerate at 1g according to you, it would look to an outside observer like your acceleration was decreasing as time dilation took effect. At about 0.6c you would experience 25% time dilation. While you saw yourself accelerating at 9.8m/s^2, to an outside observer it would look like you were accelerating at 7.8m/s^2. At 0.9999c it would appear to them like you were accelerating at only 0.14 m/s^2. At that rate it would take you 68.55 years to reach the remaining gap to light speed. At 0.99999999999c it would appear to an outside observer like you were accelerating at only 0.000044 m/s^s and it would take you 217,000 years to reach the speed of light. Since your acceleration keeps decreasing, the target of light-speed according to an outside observer keeps getting further and further away.
Not much different actually. The Lorentz factor is only about 1.3% for traveling at 0.16c. To get the expected blue shift from 650nm to 550nm, you would have to have a Lorentz factor of about 1.154. To get this, you would have to be travelling about 50% the speed of light.
Also, speed is constant between the reference frames. Let's say you are approaching a stop light and pass a cop when the stop light is 299,792,458 meters away (the exact distance light travels in a vacuum in one second, let's say you are in a vacuum). The cop clocks you at 47,966,793 meters per second or 172,680,455 km/hour and sees that you pass the stop light 6.25 seconds later (he actually sees it 7.25 seconds later, but he is measuring with a synchronized clock at the stop light). You show yourself as moving relative to the cop and the stop light at the same exact speed, 0.16c, but time is moving about 1.3% slower for you (the Lorentz factor is 1.013051123), how can that be? The answer is that objects shrink in the direction of relative motion, so it appears to you like you only traveled about 295,930,236 meters in about 6.17 seconds. So while it looks to you like you made the trip from the parked cop to the stop light in 0.08 seconds less time than the cop says, it also looks to you like you traveled 3,862,222 meters less than the cop says.