I can suggest a cheaper, significantly more effective way: full body henna tattoo.
There is no physical discomfort for the user; they can wear the same clothing, perform their usual activities in real-world scenarios, and their sensations are not altered. The same cannot be said with VR gear.
The effect would be immediate, and while not permanent, the user cannot stop participation because of some slight discomfort: they'd have to live the life of a non-white person for several weeks. You're not going to get the same kind of emotional reactions unless participants are all-in, and some reactions are going to take time to develop after the initial shock.
Mine's been offline since 3.15. I haven't used 'Install Other OS' (yet), but I still get to see it.
What about new games? I'm not buying new games until Sony relents. This probably means I'm not ever going to buy any more PS3 games, but I'm more than willing to wait.
If the console stops playing bluerays/DVDs, I'll replace it with a non-Sony unit and sell off the few games I have.
I've used a carabiner for several decades. Not one of the toy ones sold as key rings, but a small climber's carabiner, about 2.5 inches tall, and the 'tube' is about.25 inches in diameter. The advantages are:
the carabiner can hook on most anything; on a belt loop, my keys are inside the pocket but are suspended, reducing wear and eliminating perforation.
the carabiner makes it easy to organize/separate keys on separae loops; I keep my work keys/RFIDs on one, home/personal on another, and vehicle keys on a third.
the carabiner makes it easy to detach keys as necessary; say for driving, or lending keys.
I've had to replace carabiners twice due to wearing out of the latch spring. A new one costs $3-4 at a local hardware store.
Correct.
It is a rather unfortunate turn of events. My PS3 was used occasionally as a BD player, but the vast majority of the time it was running Life with Playstation; I seldom gamed on it at all. As I do not wish to lose the 'install other OS' option, and Life with Playstation requires signin on PSN to submit work units, the PS3 is now off most of the time and is used solely for BD. The collateral damage is my contribution to protein folding research.
Most of the comments here are from people who are getting tripped up on the market-speak. When they say 'unclonable', most of us here think 'not possible to copy'. And this idea is reinforced with the idea of PUFs, so it's understandable you'd think this way.
However, I think they mean 'not clonable AND still functional'.
See, there's one thing they are doing that other RFID implementors have typically avoided, which is communication with a central database. When you have that, you don't have physical access to the central store, so that is, by itself, a (or the) PUF.
Couple that with read/write storage in the RFID itself, and you have a simple, automated way to make all copies invalid: if you successfully clone a working RFID, if the original is used, the challenge-response counter is incremented in the central database as well as in the original RFID. The clone _cannot_ have the same counter, so it is immediately unusable.
However, if their scheme is mostly that simplistic, then it's ripe for DoS attacks, where you clone an RFID and use the clone before the original can be used again, making the original unworkable.
If there is a defense for such a DoS attack, then they still have an issue: if the central database considers an RFID invalid for any reason (non-malicious, but slow communication with central database causes the RFID to miss its RF power cycle window, perhaps), such that you no longer trust it, is it still an 'id'? If it is, what's all the crypto for? Maybe it's just a sales tool, too?
Anyway, semantics aside, I think someone will prove them wrong in relatively short order.
For crypto products in general, this may always be the case: to me, it seems that there's more unemployed brain power with the right mindset to tackle such problems than there is in employment, in large part, because being employed causes the right mindset to become not-the-right-mindset over time.
I would have no problem with this proposal, provided the following responsibilities were imposed:
1) Transparent accounting of disbursements; every month, the collection agency would have to show how much money was collected, and how the money was disbursed.
2) The collection agency must not favour one industry over another; copyright is copyright. It makes no difference whether the copyrighted item is a bunch of bytes representing a work of music, movie, animation, literature, source code, etc. The disbursement scheme must include all copyright rightsholders.
The problem isn't imposing a levy on Internet connections. The problem is who gets the money. The music industry would like to play itself as the only victim, and demands special treatment. However, every creator/rightsholder should be included in the disbursement formula.
There is an added assumption: if the disbursement formula cannot be made 'fair' without monitoring everyone's traffic to determine which rightsholders should receive disbursements, it is unacceptable.
The description of the act leaves out how they plan to improve terrorist hoaxes.
Hmm, I wonder:
Politician 1: Great! Now we can over-react, and it won't cost us anything!
Politician 2: We should start recovering costs immediately.
Politician 1: What if the citizens get de-sensitized to "cost recovery" actions every 5 minutes?
Politician 2: Simple! We'll use the recovered costs to fabricate more 'exciting' terrorist hoaxes!
'metal' is pretty generic, and 'metals' conduct at varying levels (understatement). TFA actually states 'manganese'. Why distort the original posting in the summary?
...compared to the rare metals such as iridium
WTF? TFA states 'indium'.
Methinks the poster should rely on the copy/paste strategy more often than 'transcribe it manually'.
Anyway, cool stuff. Anyone know enough about display panel construction to give an off-the-cuff estimate of whether this new stuff will take more energy to produce?
You are engaging in equivocation. There are six logically orthogonal dimensions or axes in the SIXAXIS system. The state it returns cannot be fully specified in three dimensions. Yes, it exists in a space with three spatial dimensions, so what? Its state is more than a position in those dimensions.
And you are engaging in semantics. There are three dimensional axes, and the controller returns motion and rotation changes for each axis. That doesn't make more axes, that makes more state information.
No, wrong. Pitch refers to rotation around the horizontal axis, roll to rotation around fore/aft axis, and yaw to rotation around the vertical axis, respectively.
Oops, I see I misspoke slightly. Let me add a word to clarify:
What do you think Pitch, Roll, and Yaw refer to? Those would be vertical, horizontal, and fore/aft rotation respectively.
Pitch, roll and yaw are aviation terms: pitch is whether the nose is up or down, roll is the angle of the horizon, and yaw is the amount of turn left or right.
A location is fully specified by three dimensions, and the orientation of the controller by three more; as the controller reports both position and orientation, it has six independent axes or dimensions.
Sigh. There's three axes, and only three. Whether you're translating, rotating, scaling, it can all be expressed in a single matrix. That you have to record twice as much information to get translation and rotation compared to just translation doesn't multiply the axes, it means you multiply the amount of memory you allocate to store it.
If Sony included a stress sensor to determine how hard a player was squeezing a controller, I'd spot you a 4th 'axis'. but otherwise, all you'll get is 3.
For Sony to claim that sales of their products on eBay for higher than retail prices would constitute a scam, Sony would have to have an immature view of retailing.
Selling goods on eBay is not a scam, it's an auction. Buyers bid what they are willing to pay. If a product is readily available, products on eBay are unlikely to sell for much more than retail. If a product is scarce, then the eBay prices will reflect the demand for the product. Supply/demand; basic economics.
If PS3's show up on eBay for more than Sony wants them priced in retail then the blame rests solely with Sony: make enough of your product to meet the demand, or don't hype your product more than you can supply. Or, Sony simply made a blunder in the pricing of the PS3.
If anyone on eBay claims to be selling a PS3, but that's not what the buyer receives, that's a scam. Casting the 'scam' threat is valid for a small percentage of eBay transactions; for the majority it would be casting aspersions on the sellers. Sony seems to be wanting to blame Internet entreprenerial-minded folks for taking advantage of Sony's own lapse. Wishing the world would change to suit you is a common theme in teenage angst; Sony, grow up and deal with it.
Also, it's funny that Sony is warning people about "any suspicious/unauthorized PlayStation 3 offers". Since when does anyone who buys a Sony product at a retail outlet have to get Sony's permission to sell it to someone else?
Actually, you are referring to 3 dimensions. It is six axes: X (horizontal), Y (vertical), Z (fore/aft), Pitch, Roll, and Yaw.
Do you live in a 6-dimensional world? Really? Tell us what it's like!
What do you think Pitch, Roll, and Yaw refer to? Those would be vertical, horizontal, and fore/aft respectively.
You could invent additional labels to represent the 3 axes of our three dimensional environment, but that doesn't translate into additional axes (although you can translate along an axis... <badum chsh>:-)
Make the little angle icons which represent the depth in the threads be an in-page link to the first comment where a thread branches. This is not the same as 'parent', but would most often be the comment where a new subject was created.
This would make it much snappier when you get into a thread and it turns into a very lengthy bit of trivial nitpicking, and you want to jump back to the original comment and collapse the entire thread.
EA's boss Keith Ramsdale commented that "new product is being made to look almost worthless and some retail outlets are starting to look more like libraries".
No. They're demonstrating their actual worth to game players. You might like every game to be worth $50, but if the marketplace (ie supply and demand) says $20, then your business plan's sales forecasts were unrealistically inflated by 150%. No amount of wrangling or lobbying is going to protect you from market forces. Deal with it.
If the retail outlets are starting to look like libraries, that's because your predecessors in the industry created some fabulous games with real staying power. They only reason the 'library' of games isn't vastly larger is that the hardware required to play great games from a while back is no longer readily available.
That you have to compete, not only with other game studios, but with your past success is simply a reality of the industry. Any efforts to curtail the 2nd-hand market, such as requiring electronic registration without providing a transfer mechanism when a user wishes to sell, is a sign that you have not embraced reality and it means that at some point in the future, you will suffer accordingly... perhaps that is already happening.
If I was providing downloads of a popular TV show and inserting my own commercials in it, the producer of that show would expect compensation.
That's because you would, in effect, be selling the show. You may not charge anything, but you'd increase your ad revenues by promoting the fact that you provide downloads for the show on your site.
This situation is different. Engage is using Counter-strike as a vehicle to sell something else. They're not actually trying to sell or promote Counter-strike itself.
I guess I have to do the/. thing, and use a poor analogy to ask a question somehow related to this discussion: If I make hammers, and someone buys lots of my hammers, slaps Subway stickers on them, and then sells them to contractors working near Subway stores, should I expect a portion of the advertising revenue?
Personally, I think not. I, as the hammer manufacturer, have already been compensated. Any extra revenue a marketing company, or other reseller of my hammers, can make as much or as little money as they can. I would watch the marketplace to determine whether I was selling my hammers at an appropriate price, but otherwise, it's no longer my business what the hammer ultimately sells for.
In this case, Valve has been compensated; users purchased Half-Life (or the appropriate Half-Life 2 bundle), and Counter-strike was provided for free. If someone is using features of the game to advertise that doesn't negatively affect game-play, then why should Valve be afforded any interest whatsoever? If they feel slighted, perhaps they should charge more for Counter-Strike.
If this ever goes to trial, and Valve wins, think of what it will mean. This could be the start of a period where _any_ manufacturer of goods, real or virtual, will claim a percentage of any future use of their product. I know it sounds awfully silly now, but would you be willing to pay a fee to Microsoft every time you visited a site with Internet Explorer that had non-Microsoft advertising on it? Would you be willing to pay a fee every time you opened your refrigerator door (because some of the food within is labelled like an advertisement)?
The book publishing industry has been attempting to make this very claim, despite the first-sale doctrine that says they have no further interest in the disposition of books after they are sold. The video game industry is trying very, very hard to make this claim with respect to used games, because that market is huge and they currently see none of the proceeds from secondary sales. So I can see where Valve thinks this make sense.
I think it's a lot of wishful thinking, and I hope Valve does not succeed in this case.
They left out the key word: Not since June 1987 has the full moon been this low in the sky
Actually, they are not saying "this low in the sky". They are saying "hangs lower in the sky".
The difference is simple:
When the Moon is full (or nearly full depending on how long you have to wait for the Earth to rotate it into view), it can appear right on the horizon for any viewer (excepting those whose horizons block the Moon entirely). This happens roughly monthly, not every 20 years.
"Hangs lower in the sky" is referring to the arc that the Moon appears to travel as the Earth rotates. Since the summer solstice was a few days ago, the tilt of the Earth makes the Sun appear in its most northerly position. Consequently, the Moon appears in its most southerly position, and it appears to 'hang' lower in the sky than during winter months for viewers in the Northern hemisphere (this effect is reversed for Southern hemisphere viewers).
When the Moon 'hangs' lower in the sky, the illusion lasts significantly longer because the Moon appears to be closer to the horizon for a much longer period. As a result, far more people notice the illusion, even those who don't normally watch the Moon on a regular basis.
This is the lowest hanging full Moon in 20 years mostly due to the timing of the full Moon relative to the solstice.
Note: there is some slight magnification of the Moon at the horizon due to observing it through much more atmosphere than when the Moon is overhead. However, this effect makes the Moon look very slightly taller. The illusion being discussed here typically makes the Moon appear to be wider on the horizon.
Note: IANAA (I am not an astronomer), but I'm fighting the urge to sleep in order to become one!
2. Cordon off the area and do a thorough sweep of the Internet Cafe in question.
Okay, sweep floor of cafe. Check.
3. Make sure that and patrons and workers empty their nastly little pocketses.
This is going to seem weird, but I guess I need to sweep up the pocket lint that will fall out. It would probably be better if #3 was done before #2 so I don't have to sweep the entire floor again. Check.
4. Disassemble any electronic hardware that is shielded to make sure the keylogger isn't hidden in its nasty bowels.
Hmmm. I don't have a keylogger identification cheat sheet with me, but I bet the cafe's computers will work better if I sweep out all the accumulated dust! Check.
5. Once the all clear is given, log in to AOL, download porn.
Problem! Now that all the computers are busted (brooms are, by their nature, rather abusive to computer innards), and all the patrons who thought I was a loony for trying to sweep up their pocket line are now _seriously_ angry because now they can't email their friends and family back home, I have a mob that wants to lynch me! Fortunately, I still have a grip on the broom...
I'm just saying...
And now I'm just running! The broom broke over the second guy's head, and the 3rd and 4th patrons held the others up for a few seconds as they choked on the pocket lint and dust I threw in their faces... I had hoped to lose them in these tunnels down by the river, but apparently this shirt I bought at the Gap has an RFID tag in it, and I think I hear angry voices up ahead shouting "this way!"
How about someone from GCC and/or Wine contact Borland and ask how much a license would cost to include SEH in these products? Or, ask them how much they'd be willing to part with the patent for?
If it's feasible, organize a fundraising effort from the OSS community, buy the license/patent from Borland, and immediately release the code under the appropriate xGPL. Many OSS contributors are corporations with a fair bit of money, so I see this as being at least worth discussing.
If nothing else, this is a straightforward way to 'play fair', rather than all the wrangling about submarine patents and how the patent system is so obviously broken. I personally agree with these sentiments, but we've never going to get anywhere yelling about a currently unsolvable problem. Rather than bash Borland in this instance, why not give them a chance to demonstrate how reasonable they could be?
Interesting. Quantum cryptography is supposed to be 'hack proof'. So, why the need for 100 keys per second? One key at the start of the stream should be enough. If your video gets scrambled, it tells you that you have an infrastructure problem, or someone is actively trying to hack into your stream. Either way, continuing the conversation seems kinda moot.
Perhaps this is a 'just because we can' technology which ignores the 'should we?' question. (or, I lack the vision to see how this is useful:)
Testing the GPL in court over an issue like this only strengthens the GPL. As others have already pointed out, the GPL doesn't specify a price for software, so the suit is rather absurd/hard to win.
Once this suit is put to rest, then it will be significantly harder for someone to argue the same point.
The county emergency coordinator laments the resulting unreliability of the communication channel
The county emergency coordinator must be new here (to the Internet/email).
What do their alerts look like? Short blurbs with one or more URLs included, or something more like a short press release followed by pertinent weather stats, and then a URL or two? The former is much more likely to be tagged as spam, even without the alleged problem of subscribers marking these alerts as spam.
Slashdot Mirror
I can suggest a cheaper, significantly more effective way: full body henna tattoo.
There is no physical discomfort for the user; they can wear the same clothing, perform their usual activities in real-world scenarios, and their sensations are not altered. The same cannot be said with VR gear.
The effect would be immediate, and while not permanent, the user cannot stop participation because of some slight discomfort: they'd have to live the life of a non-white person for several weeks. You're not going to get the same kind of emotional reactions unless participants are all-in, and some reactions are going to take time to develop after the initial shock.
The predominant tablet also takes a 30% cut of in-app purchases, so not so enticing to sell e-books via the apps available.
Anyone want to track the features announced prior to availability, and then track how long before each/any are removed for 'security' reasons?
Mine's been offline since 3.15. I haven't used 'Install Other OS' (yet), but I still get to see it.
What about new games? I'm not buying new games until Sony relents. This probably means I'm not ever going to buy any more PS3 games, but I'm more than willing to wait.
If the console stops playing bluerays/DVDs, I'll replace it with a non-Sony unit and sell off the few games I have.
I've had to replace carabiners twice due to wearing out of the latch spring. A new one costs $3-4 at a local hardware store.
Correct. It is a rather unfortunate turn of events. My PS3 was used occasionally as a BD player, but the vast majority of the time it was running Life with Playstation; I seldom gamed on it at all. As I do not wish to lose the 'install other OS' option, and Life with Playstation requires signin on PSN to submit work units, the PS3 is now off most of the time and is used solely for BD. The collateral damage is my contribution to protein folding research.
Most of the comments here are from people who are getting tripped up on the market-speak. When they say 'unclonable', most of us here think 'not possible to copy'. And this idea is reinforced with the idea of PUFs, so it's understandable you'd think this way.
However, I think they mean 'not clonable AND still functional'.
See, there's one thing they are doing that other RFID implementors have typically avoided, which is communication with a central database. When you have that, you don't have physical access to the central store, so that is, by itself, a (or the) PUF.
Couple that with read/write storage in the RFID itself, and you have a simple, automated way to make all copies invalid: if you successfully clone a working RFID, if the original is used, the challenge-response counter is incremented in the central database as well as in the original RFID. The clone _cannot_ have the same counter, so it is immediately unusable.
However, if their scheme is mostly that simplistic, then it's ripe for DoS attacks, where you clone an RFID and use the clone before the original can be used again, making the original unworkable.
If there is a defense for such a DoS attack, then they still have an issue: if the central database considers an RFID invalid for any reason (non-malicious, but slow communication with central database causes the RFID to miss its RF power cycle window, perhaps), such that you no longer trust it, is it still an 'id'? If it is, what's all the crypto for? Maybe it's just a sales tool, too?
Anyway, semantics aside, I think someone will prove them wrong in relatively short order.
For crypto products in general, this may always be the case: to me, it seems that there's more unemployed brain power with the right mindset to tackle such problems than there is in employment, in large part, because being employed causes the right mindset to become not-the-right-mindset over time.
I would have no problem with this proposal, provided the following responsibilities were imposed:
1) Transparent accounting of disbursements; every month, the collection agency would have to show how much money was collected, and how the money was disbursed.
2) The collection agency must not favour one industry over another; copyright is copyright. It makes no difference whether the copyrighted item is a bunch of bytes representing a work of music, movie, animation, literature, source code, etc. The disbursement scheme must include all copyright rightsholders.
The problem isn't imposing a levy on Internet connections. The problem is who gets the money. The music industry would like to play itself as the only victim, and demands special treatment. However, every creator/rightsholder should be included in the disbursement formula.
There is an added assumption: if the disbursement formula cannot be made 'fair' without monitoring everyone's traffic to determine which rightsholders should receive disbursements, it is unacceptable.
The description of the act leaves out how they plan to improve terrorist hoaxes.
Hmm, I wonder:
Politician 1: Great! Now we can over-react, and it won't cost us anything!
Politician 2: We should start recovering costs immediately.
Politician 1: What if the citizens get de-sensitized to "cost recovery" actions every 5 minutes?
Politician 2: Simple! We'll use the recovered costs to fabricate more 'exciting' terrorist hoaxes!
The conductivity is comparable to metal
...compared to the rare metals such as iridium
'metal' is pretty generic, and 'metals' conduct at varying levels (understatement). TFA actually states 'manganese'. Why distort the original posting in the summary?
WTF? TFA states 'indium'.
Methinks the poster should rely on the copy/paste strategy more often than 'transcribe it manually'.
Anyway, cool stuff. Anyone know enough about display panel construction to give an off-the-cuff estimate of whether this new stuff will take more energy to produce?
'And, nobody fast-forwards through any part of Counter-Strike, yet' added Lombardi.
I wonder if people passing on buying games that include in-game advertising would be considered 'fast forwarding'...
And you are engaging in semantics. There are three dimensional axes, and the controller returns motion and rotation changes for each axis. That doesn't make more axes, that makes more state information.
No, wrong. Pitch refers to rotation around the horizontal axis, roll to rotation around fore/aft axis, and yaw to rotation around the vertical axis, respectively.
Oops, I see I misspoke slightly. Let me add a word to clarify:
Pitch, roll and yaw are aviation terms: pitch is whether the nose is up or down, roll is the angle of the horizon, and yaw is the amount of turn left or right.
A location is fully specified by three dimensions, and the orientation of the controller by three more; as the controller reports both position and orientation, it has six independent axes or dimensions.
Sigh. There's three axes, and only three. Whether you're translating, rotating, scaling, it can all be expressed in a single matrix. That you have to record twice as much information to get translation and rotation compared to just translation doesn't multiply the axes, it means you multiply the amount of memory you allocate to store it.
If Sony included a stress sensor to determine how hard a player was squeezing a controller, I'd spot you a 4th 'axis'. but otherwise, all you'll get is 3.
For Sony to claim that sales of their products on eBay for higher than retail prices would constitute a scam, Sony would have to have an immature view of retailing.
Selling goods on eBay is not a scam, it's an auction. Buyers bid what they are willing to pay. If a product is readily available, products on eBay are unlikely to sell for much more than retail. If a product is scarce, then the eBay prices will reflect the demand for the product. Supply/demand; basic economics.
If PS3's show up on eBay for more than Sony wants them priced in retail then the blame rests solely with Sony: make enough of your product to meet the demand, or don't hype your product more than you can supply. Or, Sony simply made a blunder in the pricing of the PS3.
If anyone on eBay claims to be selling a PS3, but that's not what the buyer receives, that's a scam. Casting the 'scam' threat is valid for a small percentage of eBay transactions; for the majority it would be casting aspersions on the sellers. Sony seems to be wanting to blame Internet entreprenerial-minded folks for taking advantage of Sony's own lapse. Wishing the world would change to suit you is a common theme in teenage angst; Sony, grow up and deal with it.
Also, it's funny that Sony is warning people about "any suspicious/unauthorized PlayStation 3 offers". Since when does anyone who buys a Sony product at a retail outlet have to get Sony's permission to sell it to someone else?
Actually, you are referring to 3 dimensions. It is six axes: X (horizontal), Y (vertical), Z (fore/aft), Pitch, Roll, and Yaw.
:-)
Do you live in a 6-dimensional world? Really? Tell us what it's like!
What do you think Pitch, Roll, and Yaw refer to? Those would be vertical, horizontal, and fore/aft respectively.
You could invent additional labels to represent the 3 axes of our three dimensional environment, but that doesn't translate into additional axes (although you can translate along an axis... <badum chsh>
Make the little angle icons which represent the depth in the threads be an in-page link to the first comment where a thread branches. This is not the same as 'parent', but would most often be the comment where a new subject was created.
This would make it much snappier when you get into a thread and it turns into a very lengthy bit of trivial nitpicking, and you want to jump back to the original comment and collapse the entire thread.
From the fine article:
EA's boss Keith Ramsdale commented that "new product is being made to look almost worthless and some retail outlets are starting to look more like libraries".
No. They're demonstrating their actual worth to game players. You might like every game to be worth $50, but if the marketplace (ie supply and demand) says $20, then your business plan's sales forecasts were unrealistically inflated by 150%. No amount of wrangling or lobbying is going to protect you from market forces. Deal with it.
If the retail outlets are starting to look like libraries, that's because your predecessors in the industry created some fabulous games with real staying power. They only reason the 'library' of games isn't vastly larger is that the hardware required to play great games from a while back is no longer readily available.
That you have to compete, not only with other game studios, but with your past success is simply a reality of the industry. Any efforts to curtail the 2nd-hand market, such as requiring electronic registration without providing a transfer mechanism when a user wishes to sell, is a sign that you have not embraced reality and it means that at some point in the future, you will suffer accordingly... perhaps that is already happening.
If I was providing downloads of a popular TV show and inserting my own commercials in it, the producer of that show would expect compensation.
/. thing, and use a poor analogy to ask a question somehow related to this discussion: If I make hammers, and someone buys lots of my hammers, slaps Subway stickers on them, and then sells them to contractors working near Subway stores, should I expect a portion of the advertising revenue?
That's because you would, in effect, be selling the show. You may not charge anything, but you'd increase your ad revenues by promoting the fact that you provide downloads for the show on your site.
This situation is different. Engage is using Counter-strike as a vehicle to sell something else. They're not actually trying to sell or promote Counter-strike itself.
I guess I have to do the
Personally, I think not. I, as the hammer manufacturer, have already been compensated. Any extra revenue a marketing company, or other reseller of my hammers, can make as much or as little money as they can. I would watch the marketplace to determine whether I was selling my hammers at an appropriate price, but otherwise, it's no longer my business what the hammer ultimately sells for.
In this case, Valve has been compensated; users purchased Half-Life (or the appropriate Half-Life 2 bundle), and Counter-strike was provided for free. If someone is using features of the game to advertise that doesn't negatively affect game-play, then why should Valve be afforded any interest whatsoever? If they feel slighted, perhaps they should charge more for Counter-Strike.
If this ever goes to trial, and Valve wins, think of what it will mean. This could be the start of a period where _any_ manufacturer of goods, real or virtual, will claim a percentage of any future use of their product. I know it sounds awfully silly now, but would you be willing to pay a fee to Microsoft every time you visited a site with Internet Explorer that had non-Microsoft advertising on it? Would you be willing to pay a fee every time you opened your refrigerator door (because some of the food within is labelled like an advertisement)?
The book publishing industry has been attempting to make this very claim, despite the first-sale doctrine that says they have no further interest in the disposition of books after they are sold. The video game industry is trying very, very hard to make this claim with respect to used games, because that market is huge and they currently see none of the proceeds from secondary sales. So I can see where Valve thinks this make sense.
I think it's a lot of wishful thinking, and I hope Valve does not succeed in this case.
They left out the key word:
Not since June 1987 has the full moon been this low in the sky
Actually, they are not saying "this low in the sky". They are saying "hangs lower in the sky".
The difference is simple:
When the Moon is full (or nearly full depending on how long you have to wait for the Earth to rotate it into view), it can appear right on the horizon for any viewer (excepting those whose horizons block the Moon entirely). This happens roughly monthly, not every 20 years.
"Hangs lower in the sky" is referring to the arc that the Moon appears to travel as the Earth rotates. Since the summer solstice was a few days ago, the tilt of the Earth makes the Sun appear in its most northerly position. Consequently, the Moon appears in its most southerly position, and it appears to 'hang' lower in the sky than during winter months for viewers in the Northern hemisphere (this effect is reversed for Southern hemisphere viewers).
When the Moon 'hangs' lower in the sky, the illusion lasts significantly longer because the Moon appears to be closer to the horizon for a much longer period. As a result, far more people notice the illusion, even those who don't normally watch the Moon on a regular basis.
This is the lowest hanging full Moon in 20 years mostly due to the timing of the full Moon relative to the solstice.
Note: there is some slight magnification of the Moon at the horizon due to observing it through much more atmosphere than when the Moon is overhead. However, this effect makes the Moon look very slightly taller. The illusion being discussed here typically makes the Moon appear to be wider on the horizon.
Note: IANAA (I am not an astronomer), but I'm fighting the urge to sleep in order to become one!
1. Get professional sweep gear.
Purchase or borrow a broom. Check.
2. Cordon off the area and do a thorough sweep of the Internet Cafe in question.
Okay, sweep floor of cafe. Check.
3. Make sure that and patrons and workers empty their nastly little pocketses.
This is going to seem weird, but I guess I need to sweep up the pocket lint that will fall out. It would probably be better if #3 was done before #2 so I don't have to sweep the entire floor again. Check.
4. Disassemble any electronic hardware that is shielded to make sure the keylogger isn't hidden in its nasty bowels.
Hmmm. I don't have a keylogger identification cheat sheet with me, but I bet the cafe's computers will work better if I sweep out all the accumulated dust! Check.
5. Once the all clear is given, log in to AOL, download porn.
Problem! Now that all the computers are busted (brooms are, by their nature, rather abusive to computer innards), and all the patrons who thought I was a loony for trying to sweep up their pocket line are now _seriously_ angry because now they can't email their friends and family back home, I have a mob that wants to lynch me! Fortunately, I still have a grip on the broom...
I'm just saying...
And now I'm just running! The broom broke over the second guy's head, and the 3rd and 4th patrons held the others up for a few seconds as they choked on the pocket lint and dust I threw in their faces... I had hoped to lose them in these tunnels down by the river, but apparently this shirt I bought at the Gap has an RFID tag in it, and I think I hear angry voices up ahead shouting "this way!"
How about someone from GCC and/or Wine contact Borland and ask how much a license would cost to include SEH in these products? Or, ask them how much they'd be willing to part with the patent for?
If it's feasible, organize a fundraising effort from the OSS community, buy the license/patent from Borland, and immediately release the code under the appropriate xGPL. Many OSS contributors are corporations with a fair bit of money, so I see this as being at least worth discussing.
If nothing else, this is a straightforward way to 'play fair', rather than all the wrangling about submarine patents and how the patent system is so obviously broken. I personally agree with these sentiments, but we've never going to get anywhere yelling about a currently unsolvable problem. Rather than bash Borland in this instance, why not give them a chance to demonstrate how reasonable they could be?
Interesting. Quantum cryptography is supposed to be 'hack proof'. So, why the need for 100 keys per second? One key at the start of the stream should be enough. If your video gets scrambled, it tells you that you have an infrastructure problem, or someone is actively trying to hack into your stream. Either way, continuing the conversation seems kinda moot.
:)
Perhaps this is a 'just because we can' technology which ignores the 'should we?' question. (or, I lack the vision to see how this is useful
Testing the GPL in court over an issue like this only strengthens the GPL. As others have already pointed out, the GPL doesn't specify a price for software, so the suit is rather absurd/hard to win.
Once this suit is put to rest, then it will be significantly harder for someone to argue the same point.
The county emergency coordinator laments the resulting unreliability of the communication channel
The county emergency coordinator must be new here (to the Internet/email).
What do their alerts look like? Short blurbs with one or more URLs included, or something more like a short press release followed by pertinent weather stats, and then a URL or two? The former is much more likely to be tagged as spam, even without the alleged problem of subscribers marking these alerts as spam.
Thanks for that!
It seems to run well so far. It'll be a nice change from the daily few core dumps I was getting with 1.0 PR 1, if it turns out to be more stable.