IANAL, of course, but I'm sure WalMart sees prices not as "prices" but as notices of "strategic intent."
They can see prices as whatever they want to see them, that's their point of view, and although perfectly valid, it won't change the reality of how everyone sees them: as prices.
And AFAIK Walmart doesn't rule the world (yet), and cannot decide what is called what and how laws should apply.
So my boggle is this: Until the first "observer" evolved, nothing observed the universe, so it existed in all quantum states simultaneously. If so, how did that first observer ever evolve? Or is she posutlating that the universe's existence is its own observation?
Exactly the idea.
Another point is that an observer, because of the same limit on light speed within the spatio-temporal universe, doesn't just observe his own time-frame, but sees backwards in time. We can observe stars that have been dead since before humanity arose on this planet. We can, through our gamma ray detectors, "see" the first few seconds after the creation of the universe.
I've switched to Opera many months ago, and I haven't looked back. It's fast, works well with most web sites (I keep Mozilla installed for the very few that give me troubles), and has all the features I need (tabbed browsing, skins, pop-up killing, very good cookie management).
And although you can't really remove Explorer from windows, as long as you don't use it and have another browser as default, it can't be opened without user intervention or having certain software installed (like spyware).
And yes, with all the security flaws that are known (or unknown) in Explorer, I can't recommend it to anyone who values privacy and stability.
This is NO different from burning books, or having an index, or restricting knowledge in any sort of way.
It is indeed WORSE than what other agencies (RIAA and MPAA) have been doing, although now they we are used to their behavior, it only seems like a small step, no? And now we see where this is leading.
It starts small, with stuff that is somewhat legal from some people's point of view, but which is ethically disputable (RIAA going after Napster), then this small step leads to another small step (attacking P2P networks), then it becomes an attack on individuals (hacking people's computers???) and finally you criminalize something that used to be legal (sharing music and books...).
Then someone else catches on the bandwagon, and other industries do the same thing. They start small, with less known web sites, and manage to get them shut under reasons that may seem somewhat-ok, then they go after more, and more, until they are in control of information.
You think a government that controls/restricts information is a bad thing? Wait until CORPORATIONS are in control!
And governments are helping them! They are so afraid of looking weak and not helping the economy (or not helping those who finance their elections) that they are starting to do all they can to help corporations continue making money, even though their business models may not be viable or may be ethically disputable.
And so we have a new variation on the old 1.2.3:
1- Create business model
2- Have the government pass a law that makes the model profitable
3- Profit!!!
There are two things that make me REALLY sick in this world: needless destruction (especially of knowledge or pieces of art) and witch hunts (I don't mean real witch hunts, but the accusation of innocent people by people who are convinced they are right; see The Crucible by Arthur Miller, or watch "The Drumhead", ST:TNG episode if you want to know what I mean).
And this is starting to smell of both. File sharing for non-commercial purposes is LEGAL and ETHICAL. To punish or restrict the freedom of individuals to protect monetary interests is WRONG and UNETHICAL. To restrict access to knowledge is WORSE.
Because that would be just the beginning. If corporations are in control of distributing knowledge, they will be able to decide which knowledge we have access to, and which we don't. Governments shouldn't have that right, and they are supposed to look after the well-being of the people, corporations intend only to make more money, and if someone pays them to "make disappear" a piece of research detrimental to another corporation, what of it?
So where is this leading us? I don't know, but I certainly don't like it.
It doesn't solve the problem for large organisations, or for a university campus, where various people may have access to different computers with little logging done, and anyone from the inside could do the job.
A local university ehre is having some serious issues with that. Of course, people using Macs or Linux are once again quite exuberant about the fact that they aren't affected.
And closing the port or disabling the service on individual systems may not be possible, because different applications need to use the service for other uses. Printer servers for example use it for notification of print job status.
It's time the batteries finally caught up to the way we want to use our laptops.
With the popularity of wireless networks, it has become a pain to have to plug in the laptop to the electric outlet while you spent that money to set up a wireless entwork so that you could stay on the net without any wires.
Although network technology is much newer, it seems it has managed to progress faster than battery technology sofar.
Apple is one company who has done all they could to extend battery life (the G3 processor uses so little juice it helps a lot), but every company is still at the mercy of the limits of the battery companies.
So we'll have a second Great Firewall, except that instead of a country keeping everyone else out, this one will be every other country keeping one in...
Re:According to my calculations...
on
Unmaking The Game
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· Score: 1
as a completely artificial construct Verant can adjust it any way they wish.
And how is the modern economy not an artificial construct? It's not that different really, our economy is based on speculation, our money on confidence in its value and in the capacity of a country to produce, a value that can change unexpectedly.
Some parts of the modern economy, namely manufacturing, is actual, but in Everquest the same can be said of the people spending time in the game "manufacturing" goods by killing monsters.
The REAL difference here in EQ is that the economy can be controlled and adjusted by a single entity. Although the government (federal reserve, regulations, etc) can make adjustments, no single entity is in control of our modern economy.
What about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? I mean, it would be impossible for the device to actually ascertain the direction AND location of the light coming at it, and it would thus be difficult to reproduce it perfectly.
I'm not sure how it would translate in reality, but all the little errors would certainly amount to a significant shimmering effect, or artifacts that would appear weird to the eye, but might pass off in an environment with shadows.
It would also be easy to actually detect such a person with the appropriate equipment by using a simple variation on quantum light-encryption methods, by sending light particles (laser would do nicely) and record their polarity at the ouput and at the receiving end. Any significant disparity (there would always be some due to air interfering) would indicate abnormal light absorption and resending.
And what about heat? Such a device would produce a significant output of heat, which added to a human being's output would probably alarm even a normal sensitive human being to something being weird around, and would be easily visible to infrared cameras.
A simple light-refraction device like this would not work very well to produce invisibility, IMHO. It might have some specific applications but little practical use.
Re:Or if you prefer your own light saber
on
An R2 Of Your Own
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· Score: 1
No, they're not glass, they're polycarbonate (the same stuff Apple's iMacs are made of, and I've never seen one's plastics break), and would NOT break unless you actually applied extreme pressure to them.
For whatever it's worth, nothing can move in time, forward or backward.
What?? I move forward in time ALL the time. At a rate of 1, of course, but still, EVERYTHING moves in time. I can slow down the rate at which I move through time (relative to another thing) by going faster, but I can't go faster.
Of course it's not time travel per se, time travel being going somwhere and arriving there before you started (in case of past travel) or going at a rate faster than 1 (relative to everything else) in the case of future travel...
are not a good measure for memory performance!
All these benchmarks are essentially CPU-intensive, or CPU-bound benchmarks. Even if the RAM is 1000x faster, it will hardly show on them.
It's so easy to lie in a benchmark...
No, actually you download it from Apple's web site and verify the integrity of the downloaded file using the instructions on the web site, using sha1 to get a checksum and compare it to the one they give there. That way you ensure the update is the right file, and from now on you can use software update securely.
The biggest problem of Fantasy / Science Fiction at the moment is that people find one writer / style and refuse to read outside it.
Strange, my biggest problem in Fantasy is to find authors who do things differently. I can take a few authors who do things that relate and look somewhat alike, each in a good way, but not 30.
Maybe I'm not looking at the right section at the library; all I see is ST and SW novels which I can't stomach anymore (I had my period of those but it's over).
Who would connect Teilhard de Chardin to that ugly spiky-thing, indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds pretty significant to me.
They can see prices as whatever they want to see them, that's their point of view, and although perfectly valid, it won't change the reality of how everyone sees them: as prices.
And AFAIK Walmart doesn't rule the world (yet), and cannot decide what is called what and how laws should apply.
Exactly the idea.
Another point is that an observer, because of the same limit on light speed within the spatio-temporal universe, doesn't just observe his own time-frame, but sees backwards in time. We can observe stars that have been dead since before humanity arose on this planet. We can, through our gamma ray detectors, "see" the first few seconds after the creation of the universe.
And although you can't really remove Explorer from windows, as long as you don't use it and have another browser as default, it can't be opened without user intervention or having certain software installed (like spyware).
And yes, with all the security flaws that are known (or unknown) in Explorer, I can't recommend it to anyone who values privacy and stability.
It is indeed WORSE than what other agencies (RIAA and MPAA) have been doing, although now they we are used to their behavior, it only seems like a small step, no? And now we see where this is leading.
It starts small, with stuff that is somewhat legal from some people's point of view, but which is ethically disputable (RIAA going after Napster), then this small step leads to another small step (attacking P2P networks), then it becomes an attack on individuals (hacking people's computers???) and finally you criminalize something that used to be legal (sharing music and books...).
Then someone else catches on the bandwagon, and other industries do the same thing. They start small, with less known web sites, and manage to get them shut under reasons that may seem somewhat-ok, then they go after more, and more, until they are in control of information.
You think a government that controls/restricts information is a bad thing? Wait until CORPORATIONS are in control!
And governments are helping them! They are so afraid of looking weak and not helping the economy (or not helping those who finance their elections) that they are starting to do all they can to help corporations continue making money, even though their business models may not be viable or may be ethically disputable.
And so we have a new variation on the old 1.2.3:
1- Create business model
2- Have the government pass a law that makes the model profitable
3- Profit!!!
There are two things that make me REALLY sick in this world: needless destruction (especially of knowledge or pieces of art) and witch hunts (I don't mean real witch hunts, but the accusation of innocent people by people who are convinced they are right; see The Crucible by Arthur Miller, or watch "The Drumhead", ST:TNG episode if you want to know what I mean).
And this is starting to smell of both. File sharing for non-commercial purposes is LEGAL and ETHICAL. To punish or restrict the freedom of individuals to protect monetary interests is WRONG and UNETHICAL. To restrict access to knowledge is WORSE.
Because that would be just the beginning. If corporations are in control of distributing knowledge, they will be able to decide which knowledge we have access to, and which we don't. Governments shouldn't have that right, and they are supposed to look after the well-being of the people, corporations intend only to make more money, and if someone pays them to "make disappear" a piece of research detrimental to another corporation, what of it?
So where is this leading us? I don't know, but I certainly don't like it.
A local university ehre is having some serious issues with that. Of course, people using Macs or Linux are once again quite exuberant about the fact that they aren't affected.
And closing the port or disabling the service on individual systems may not be possible, because different applications need to use the service for other uses. Printer servers for example use it for notification of print job status.
With the popularity of wireless networks, it has become a pain to have to plug in the laptop to the electric outlet while you spent that money to set up a wireless entwork so that you could stay on the net without any wires.
Although network technology is much newer, it seems it has managed to progress faster than battery technology sofar.
Apple is one company who has done all they could to extend battery life (the G3 processor uses so little juice it helps a lot), but every company is still at the mercy of the limits of the battery companies.
So we'll have a second Great Firewall, except that instead of a country keeping everyone else out, this one will be every other country keeping one in...
And how is the modern economy not an artificial construct? It's not that different really, our economy is based on speculation, our money on confidence in its value and in the capacity of a country to produce, a value that can change unexpectedly.
Some parts of the modern economy, namely manufacturing, is actual, but in Everquest the same can be said of the people spending time in the game "manufacturing" goods by killing monsters.
The REAL difference here in EQ is that the economy can be controlled and adjusted by a single entity. Although the government (federal reserve, regulations, etc) can make adjustments, no single entity is in control of our modern economy.
the First Amendment?
Uh no, the Superdrive is Pioneer's DVD-R/CD-RW drive. The 1.44mb and 120MB floppy drive is the Superdisk.
I'm not sure how it would translate in reality, but all the little errors would certainly amount to a significant shimmering effect, or artifacts that would appear weird to the eye, but might pass off in an environment with shadows.
It would also be easy to actually detect such a person with the appropriate equipment by using a simple variation on quantum light-encryption methods, by sending light particles (laser would do nicely) and record their polarity at the ouput and at the receiving end. Any significant disparity (there would always be some due to air interfering) would indicate abnormal light absorption and resending.
And what about heat? Such a device would produce a significant output of heat, which added to a human being's output would probably alarm even a normal sensitive human being to something being weird around, and would be easily visible to infrared cameras.
A simple light-refraction device like this would not work very well to produce invisibility, IMHO. It might have some specific applications but little practical use.
No, they're not glass, they're polycarbonate (the same stuff Apple's iMacs are made of, and I've never seen one's plastics break), and would NOT break unless you actually applied extreme pressure to them.
What?? I move forward in time ALL the time. At a rate of 1, of course, but still, EVERYTHING moves in time. I can slow down the rate at which I move through time (relative to another thing) by going faster, but I can't go faster. Of course it's not time travel per se, time travel being going somwhere and arriving there before you started (in case of past travel) or going at a rate faster than 1 (relative to everything else) in the case of future travel...
are not a good measure for memory performance! All these benchmarks are essentially CPU-intensive, or CPU-bound benchmarks. Even if the RAM is 1000x faster, it will hardly show on them. It's so easy to lie in a benchmark...
So in essence you're saying that Bill Gates has control of windows?
Checksum info
But there is! Virus Myths
The biggest problem of Fantasy / Science Fiction at the moment is that people find one writer / style and refuse to read outside it.
Strange, my biggest problem in Fantasy is to find authors who do things differently. I can take a few authors who do things that relate and look somewhat alike, each in a good way, but not 30.
Maybe I'm not looking at the right section at the library; all I see is ST and SW novels which I can't stomach anymore (I had my period of those but it's over).
Who would connect Teilhard de Chardin to that ugly spiky-thing, indeed.