Perfect skin is nice at all but it is very unrealistic skin. That is why computer generated characters still fail the reality test to the eye.. or at least one reason. Any natural thing is somewhat imperfect and not quite asymmetrical for instance take the left half of a face and mirror it in a graphics program so it is perfectly symmetrical. it looks...odd.. You may not be able to quite put your finger on it ( if it's well done ) but it doesn't look real.
disk access and ram access have always and will always be orders of magnitude apart from one another. milliseconds vs nanoseconds.
see :
http://www.buycomputermemory.com/measuring-ram-spe ed.html
for more info on memory speed.
and http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/per f/perf/spec/posAccess.html
really the reason we use disks is because they are a cheaper yet slower memory for the computer. There have from time to time been systems built with memories that don't erase when the power goes down. If disks were as fast as chips.. why use chips at all.
hopefully I'm not straying too far from the original topic. But one reason for hardware requirements change can be ( as is the case with win200 and winXP ) technology change in the software industry. For instance by writing more generic code so you can port to more platforms there is a tendency to make use of indirection which inevitably slows things down. I personally believe( IMHO disclaimer) the reason for XP's sluggishness vs win2000 is because XP was written ( for the most part) using.NET components and software, to showcase the new technology in part. The rewrite moved a large amount of code from compiled native code to code running on a virtual machine something kind of like rewriting xwindows in java. the level of indirection of running pcode on a virtual machine slows things down for several reasons not the least of which is that you can no longer making function calls by pushing things onto the CPU registers.
I actually at the moment work for the military in the mission planning field. Much of the mission planning that is already done is done on computers. Some plains ( bigger ones) carry laptops to be able to replay their mission in flight if needed. I'd think the advantage in something like this is as much in the fact that it will not shatter or crack when dropped/ stepped on ect. Not to mention it is lightweight.
i didn't read every comment it here so excuse me if i repeat something. But wouldn't it be funny if through careful analysis and testimony IBM is able to prove that the engineers working on AIX actually copied code from the Linux source code instead of Vice versa? Thus require AIX to be open sourced in compliance with the GPL.
The laws already exist to punish computer owners for allowing people to break into their computer. I hope there will never be further laws passed. As it is you can be held liable ( as in sued for money) for any damages done by any property ( read computer ) if you were negligent in taking care of it or securing it and someone else is damaged by that property. I don't think we need any further law because.
1) you should not be jailed for stupidity
2) the possibility of being sued will eventually
force better security ( as soon as lawyers see money to be made here).
3) it makes no sense to have greater punishment for this then any other negligence.
that being said I think the liability is interesting. How many companies that are hacked sustain enough damages to make it worth suing the person that owned the computer and how often does the person that owns it have enough money to pay them even if they won.
"You are of course falling into the unfortunately common mistake of equating the kernel to the OS"
I understand the intent of what you are saying. that the OS does not the user experience make, but the reason for this is because in all honestly the user seldom sees or interacts in anyway with the true OS.
This misstatement is the kind of thing that Microsoft loves to see pushed. The fact of the matter is that the kernel almost certainly DOES equal the operating system, because the OPERATING system is by definition the software that is responsible for OPERATING the hardware. Thus, the GUI's the Command line applications , the installers, the applications , the shells ect. ect. ect. are NOT the operating system but rather are really applications that provide different UI. The real operating system does not provide a UI of any kind only and application interface. It is statements like the one you made that makes it easier for Microsoft to extend it's monopoly, because they just keep making more and more things "part of the OS". That is how they killed many many applications that were making money in the windows realm and it is how they get into so much monopoly trouble. The browser it part of the OS. Disk compression that's part of the OS( which is untrue unless the kernel does it.) A/V and DRM that should be part of the OS. The programming IDE is part of the OS? what's next the word processor is part of the OS?
If people don't understand the model of what their building then how can you hope to build it at all. This kind of ambiguity is one of the MAJOR reasons why Microsoft code remains so buggy. Another good example is the Microsoft definition of a thread. I've been employed programming windows for 5 years now. If you really study it there definition of a thread is very different from what the industry standard ideas are and extremely different from what you learn in school. There documentation for what THEY mean by a thread is ambiguous and misleading until you read it very deeply. Why , so Microsoft's marketing machine can use buzz words like "multi-threaded" and if the meanings are ambiguous enough then nobody can argue with them. Blur the lines of what an OS is enough and no body can argue with the fact that browsers really are a reasonable part of the OS, or A/V players or... ect.
Just thought it was something worth thinking about
Maybe I am just being dense. But given that running linux is a lagitimate use of the XBOX under the law... wouldn't it be possible to file suit agianst them to get them to sign a boot loader. It seems to me that the maker of a hardware platform should not have the right to dictate who can and cannot program for it. What's next? if you are not MSME certified we will not let you create paladium enabled apps? See there is a leagal issue here that seems to need serious exploration to me. Microsoft as a corparation has control over the XBOX platform... it seems to me it should be illegal for them to prevent people from making use of it as they see fit since they sell the product? has there ever been a legal case or precident like this set?
i know this topic is probably almost dead, but i had a thought about liability. I mean. If the automated computer on a car messes up and because of that someone rear ends you or you rear end someone else. Who is responsible. Reality is that equipment failure is at fault, but the insurance companies are not going to like that answer because they want to have someone blamed so they know who's rates to raise. Or maybe they will just refuse to insure cars with this type of equipment on them.
" if you scream anything loud enough and long enough, esecially the more absurd it is, eventually people will start to believe you" -- Aldolf Hitler "Mine conft"( no idea how to spell that last bit).
Maybe this is a stupid question and it would probably take a lawyer to answer, but Iâ(TM)ll ask it anyway. SCO is suing IBM for contract violation any possibly copywriter infringement yes? So, even if IBM were blatantly and intentionally guilty. How does this affect Linux users. No seriously how can SCO expect to extract money from the behavior of IBM from anybody other then IBM? Maybe I'm missing something about the claim but the code isn't identical to anyoneâ(TM)s description so it isn't a copyright violation. SCO has no patents, so where is the Linux liability? Especially for the people who use Linux. I mean if Ford makes a copy of a patented Chevy part and puts it the Ford Torus. Chevy can't go after everyone who bought a Torus for extra money because Ford didn't have permission. I don't see the difference here.
As i stated earlier. The term disorder is a term that is left undefined. Along the same idea as that of a mathematical set. The problem is that then people try to say... 'well this is a disorder and this is not a disorder etc.'... but there is no way to prove one way or another that something is or isn't a disorder and it becomes a matter of opinion. basically anything "abnormal" CAN be a disorder and then you can consider to what extent it exists in a given individual. I.E. does it cause a PROBLEM. This type of logic is why for instance the DSM( a book the classifies different disorders and there symptoms) changed homosexuality form being a disorder to not being a disorder because it was basically decided that even though homosexuality is abnormal. If it doesnâ(TM)t' bother people that they are homosexual then they don't have a problem. Of coarse the same book goes on to make statements like "rape is never a disorder for legal reasons" and "pedophilia is always a disorder", with complete disregard for the fact that pedophilia is just as illegal as rape. It is a very contradictory book because of the fact there is no scientific way to categorize things as disorders on not disorders. ( other then basically general consensus ). So, the book isn't scientific at all which shows really bad for the people who put it out. I believe that is the American Psychiatric institute, but could be wrong.
1) as to the idea the ADHD is or isn't a disorder. Any first year psychology book will tell you that a disorder is a intentionally vague term that is supposedly innately understood, something like the mathematical construct of a set but with fewer easily discernible characteristics. As such it is impossible to scientifically prove that ANYTHING is or isn't a disorder because there are NO concrete criteria for a disorder. Psychologies attempt to classify everything into being a disorder or not a disorder is one of the greatest travesties of modern science.
2) many people who at first are thought to have ADHD have been shown to actually have dyslexia. One characteristics of most dyslexics is high intelligence which means they get easily board by mundane tasks.
3) may i make a suggestion. rather then trying to treat your bodies adaptation to a rapidly changing world by diminishing it have you tried USING it to your advantage. Why not alternate back and forth between 2 or three things at a time while you are at work. If you developed a good habit of this you will probably get more work done then your co-workers and please your boss. Maybe one of your tasks can be work, another learning a foreign language and the third slashdot. ( i've been known to do that sometimes;)
The Automobile, when it was invented was a novelty at best. see its history laid out here:
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarsst eama.htm
It was difficult to get it onto the muddy( read dirt ) roads of the day. At best you would consider such things a diversionary hobby and certainly not practical for real travel.... until Ford. Enough said about that article i guess. On the others hand there has been more then a few negative effects of cars along with the good ones. Maybe we should all simplify our lives and become Amish?
That is not nessary true about the need for montians. You would note that it is also quite possible to build windmills in very flat areas because the wind picks up well there. IE. North Dakota has a lot of wind and so do most places in the ocean. I read an article. I thought it was around here somewhere about how all the greenpeace people who live on cape cod were suffering from not in my back yard syndrome over a proposed windmill project out in the ocean that would provide 70% of the power new england needed.
did anyone really , given Microsoftâ(TM)s history , really expect them to abide by any anti-trust suit. The only reason they weren't broken up is because we have a republican president who believe in free enterprise at all costs and wasn't really interested in attacking one of America's most successful corporations because of the conservative political backlash. They deserve to be broken up for there tactics just as much as standard oil , or any of the companies that the anti-trust laws were written to prevent from strangling the market. I think this is the kind of thing that the pendulum swings back and forth on. We have slowly allowed anti-trust laws to be abused and weakened by all kinds of unfair business practices. That's why corporations like Disney have so much power. One concept that has been completely ignored for years in the corporate law is the idea of a company charter. The statement about what is your company given the right to do by the government. ( it's part of your incorporation papers i believe.) they are never enforced. If they were 3M would not have been allowed to leave the Mining and Manufacture market sector and it's owners would have had to sell there assets and create a new corporation. What it should prevent is over diversification of a business. corporations should not be allowed to do everything and anything they want. If you make an operating system you should not be allowed to also make a word processor and a cell phone because they are different products and should require a different corporation to make them. I wish they would go back to this kind of law. Then again there all kinds of abuse of IP law as well , both copywriter and patent by people who are happy to entirely pervert the intent of the original laws to make more money and we have corrupt legislators and administrators who are happy to see it happen because after all if it is "good for big business" it must also be "good for the economy". The REAL problem is this. When laws become unjust the citizens stop obeying them. When the average citizen does not obey the law then the law itself is weakened and must be re-enforced by police action. The police action eventually leads to rebellion. I worry about what kind of a revelation can be had in a day and age when everything we do and say even in our homes can be monitored, but one way or another it will probably eventually come. All societies live, die and morph into another. It will happen with this one too and in the long run all this is part of that happening. Still a person likes to stay healthy as long as possible and breaking Microsoft up would help keep the U.S. a healthy society. One day some president will have the guts to do it, I hope.
Striking has to be done in a large enough mass that you can't all be replaced quickly enough or the company goes out of business. Historically there is another way of..."convincing" employers. You might also look into a "work slowdown". I mean if everyone in the department just basically starts showing up minimum hours and doing only the work you can do during that time... or less by doing it in a relaxed manor... what is your manager going to do? do you log your hours? How do they know what you logged is correct? what if the whole group does this together and everybody covers each other in saying... well, there is just so much work we can get done? ( every manager understands that is true at in any department... perhaps you should make it clear that in his attempt to get more done the "burn out" factor is actually hurting overall productivity. He/She will believe that when they see the numbers. Or maybe they will just fire the lot of you. Although historically they fire only the mouthpiece/ spokesperson and/or those viewed to be the ring leaders.
Also, be careful of betrayal from within. My dad was fired one time for tring to start a union when the person from teamsters turned over the list of everyone who had been at the first meeting to his employer. We suspect "for the right price".
In any case beware that it is a dangerous game that is a foot. Americans want to be treated like human beings, that's why employers like to outsource to other countries where a dollar goes a long way and poverty is high.
I guess that is one advantage this would have had if it had been open source. Because someone else would have taken over the source even if the company was sold out or went under. But that is part of the whole open/closed source argument. sorry for you guy who got the shaft by not using completely open source software. I don't know if there is an alternative or not
"In my view, there's not much of anything the body can't handle in modest amounts." In small enough amounts your body will tolerate almost anything including arsenic and cyanide. It is always a matter of AMOUNT. The problem is with drugs people build up a tolerance and need to keep increasing the amount to what eventually becomes an unreasonable level. Alcohol is along with pretty much any drug a poison in high enough doses. That's why the can make you puke it is your bodies defense mechanism.
I was a very heavy caffeine drinker. My tolerance had gotten to the point where a 2 liter bottles of mountain dew drank in about an hours time hardly phased me. I routinely drank 3 or 4 large cherry cokes ( equivalent to about 6 cans. ) with my lunch. One day i decided to give up caffeine because i was worried about health effects. I had splitting throbbing headaches for about 2 or three days and I nearly fell asleep at my desk for almost 2 weeks. If that those aren't sings of withdrawal from addiction I don't know what is.
Other then that I know many heavy coffee drinkers who later in their life developed high blood pressure and hypertension but most of the smoked as well for some part of their lives so i don't know of any direct correlation
well, i think i might be able to give a better insight into this topic then many because i was in college for 5 years starting in 1992 and finishing in 1997. The vast shift in technology at that time gave me a chance to actually witness the quite rise of the internet. To give an example, i remember the old z-80 terminals and green and white paper and have seen how things were done when most work in the CS department was still on the mainframe ( they were still in use when i started) but i also saw the birth and death of mosaic and the birth of Netscape and internet explorer not the mention the rise and fall of OS/2 before I graduated. During all of that time i worked in the college computer center and had a chance to see how these changes in technology affected people. When i started college ( and especially a few years before ) the internet/ file sharing all that kind of thing was a geeks only activity. I remember people having debates about weather or not it would be a good thing for commercial traffic to be allowed on the internet, because it was considered banned activity on what at the time was thought of a government funded research network. It wasn't something that the people on the football team knew anything about unless they were majoring in CS. E-mail too was used only by people in the CS department and the like. In contrast by the time i graduated people were assigned an e-mail account at the time they registered for school and were expected to use it for things like getting their homework assignment for Home economics 100. I think the effect for the most part has been positive. From what Iâ(TM)ve seen there reason why the technology was adopted is BECAUSE it makes peoples lives easier. That after all the point of technology isnâ(TM)t it. I think if it fails that test the non geeks lose interest in it real quick. I think people coordinate the schedules better and have an easier time doing research then they otherwise did.
There are also some major down shots that come to mind. The down shot on the research side is a I think there is a lot of debate right now on how to judge the academic value of web pages as a primary source. People have problems with them for 3 reasons. 1) they can be written by anyone ( sometimes crackpots) 2) it is difficult to get an idea of how credible the author is from an academic standpoint 3) what good is a reference that can be erased or taken down tomorrow in a research paper that you hope to be able to shelve and come back to in 20 years. So there is an on going debate that you would never have had if it wasnâ(TM)t for the internet coming into use. The last time i checked, which was about 4 years ago there was a major problem developing in academic environments and that involved the administration of the computer resources. This comes from experience Iâ(TM)ve drawn from two college campuses My own and that of someone I was dating.
Often times the lowly computer department on campuses was suddenly thrust to the status of near demigod amongst administrative departments because they have the power to turn on and off your computing resources. Now if you do something ( put up the wrong kind of web page or run a not so approved of server for instance.) you may not be able to do your homework for classes and you may be cut out of most of your social network by loss of your e-mail account. This would result in a de-facto expulsion of sorts because it would almost guarantee the failure of student that couldn't do there work double that affect if you happen to be in a computer related major, but many majors on campus REQUIRE you to use e-mail as part of the class. To get announcements etc.. To make matters worse when i left school there was very little being done to police the activity of the administrators in these departments they were making a lot of rules based on things like. This makes our job easier ( regardless of academic merit or lack there of of what you are doing.) And penalizing peopl
I think i know a really simple way of locating
almost anything within a given radius of a certain point on earth. Degrees minutes seconds degrees minutes seconds. And Guess what it only has 2 more digits then the proposed code, and is already universally understood. SOOO I don't see how this other system would be any simpler. I mean if the issue is grid squares vs circles just define your square as being the grid square south west of the co-ordinate given and all is done. More granularity use more numbers. That's why the system was designed in the first place. besides the only way it would become really global would be if every government in the world decided to use it isn't it?
Oh well another day another MicoDollar i guess.
I'm not well versed in this area. I'm software engineer(read not working for IS) by trade. However one of the companies I worked at used Lotus Notes to do all the things you are talking about. I'm pretty sure it works under Linux. It isn't of coarse Open source, but I remember it being much better then MS stuff I have to use at work now from a user perspective. ( Some of that may have been very competent admins though.)
When i was in high school my advanced physics class prepared a set of experiments that could teach scientific principles to elementary children.
the ones i remember most fondly we're
1) laying a bed of nails a volunteer has a concrete brick placed on their stomach that is broken by a sledge hammer to the brink.
-- this demonstrates the distribution of force
2) one team used an ethanol cannon ( bottle with spikes and ethanol in it.. set off with a tesla coil) to shoot a cork at a paper monkey ( weighted down by a few pennies suspended from the ceiling by paperclips and string. The strings put into the bottle and held in place with the cork in such a way that when the cork left the bottle it would let the paper drop.
-- demonstrates that objects of different mass always fall at the same rate ( because the cork will always hit the monkey if it was aiming at it before the explosion
3) there was the ever popular timing or clock reaction " where a set of chemicals, once mixed goes through several color changes at regular intervals that can be measured with a watch"
-- i don't remember what principle they where trying to demonstrate with that one.
4) i used "dust" explosions to demonstrate the scientific method. I had several kinds of "dust"
lychapodium powder ( I have no idea how to spell that word. I guessed it is a fungal spore), flour, corn starch.
We started with research, formed a "hypothesis" as to which of these would explode most violently and then did experimentation.
THE EXPERIMENT: take a coffee can and suspend it on a ring stand. Knock a whole in the bottom of the coffee can and place a piece of rubber hose with a funnel attached to it through the hole. Put a cotton ball in the funnel and a candle in the can. Place powder in the funnel. Light the candle and put the cover ( i had a metal one , i think plastic might burn) then blow lightly to make the dust circulate in the can. the lid will be blown off the can with a smoke and flame and loud pop.
Don't make the mistake of blowing on the cotton ball to put it out if it happens to be on fire in the can when you are done. My science teacher went eyebrow less for a while because of that mistake.
for those of you who don't know dust explosions are a chain reaction that occurs when a normally inert substance ( like flower or grain dust ) get enough air between the particles that a small spark causes an explosive chain reaction.
This was more relevant to the kids I was demoing for also because we were in rural Minnesota and this is what is responsible for the occasional violent explosion of grain elevators due to static electric spark and poor ventilation of grain dust. ( which has been known to kill people that work in grain elevators) since many of the children lived on farms and there parents would take produce to the elevator.
Slashdot Mirror
Perfect skin is nice at all but it is very unrealistic skin. That is why computer generated characters still fail the reality test to the eye .. or at least one reason. Any natural thing is somewhat imperfect and not quite asymmetrical for instance take the left half of a face and mirror it in a graphics program so it is perfectly symmetrical. it looks ...odd.. You may not be able to quite put your finger on it ( if it's well done ) but it doesn't look real.
disk access and ram access have always and will always be orders of magnitude apart from one another. milliseconds vs nanoseconds. see : http://www.buycomputermemory.com/measuring-ram-spe ed.html
for more info on memory speed.
and http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/per f/perf/spec/posAccess.html
really the reason we use disks is because they are a cheaper yet slower memory for the computer. There have from time to time been systems built with memories that don't erase when the power goes down. If disks were as fast as chips .. why use chips at all.
hopefully I'm not straying too far from the original topic. But one reason for hardware requirements change can be ( as is the case with win200 and winXP ) technology change in the software industry. For instance by writing more generic code so you can port to more platforms there is a tendency to make use of indirection which inevitably slows things down. I personally believe( IMHO disclaimer) the reason for XP's sluggishness vs win2000 is because XP was written ( for the most part) using .NET components and software, to showcase the new technology in part. The rewrite moved a large amount of code from compiled native code to code running on a virtual machine something kind of like rewriting xwindows in java.
the level of indirection of running pcode on a virtual machine slows things down for several reasons not the least of which is that you can no longer making function calls by pushing things onto the CPU registers.
I actually at the moment work for the military in the mission planning field. Much of the mission planning that is already done is done on computers. Some plains ( bigger ones) carry laptops to be able to replay their mission in flight if needed. I'd think the advantage in something like this is as much in the fact that it will not shatter or crack when dropped/ stepped on ect. Not to mention it is lightweight.
i didn't read every comment it here so excuse me if i repeat something. But wouldn't it be funny if through careful analysis and testimony IBM is able to prove that the engineers working on AIX actually copied code from the Linux source code instead of Vice versa? Thus require AIX to be open sourced in compliance with the GPL.
The laws already exist to punish computer owners for allowing people to break into their computer. I hope there will never be further laws passed. As it is you can be held liable ( as in sued for money) for any damages done by any property ( read computer ) if you were negligent in taking care of it or securing it and someone else is damaged by that property. I don't think we need any further law because. 1) you should not be jailed for stupidity 2) the possibility of being sued will eventually force better security ( as soon as lawyers see money to be made here). 3) it makes no sense to have greater punishment for this then any other negligence. that being said I think the liability is interesting. How many companies that are hacked sustain enough damages to make it worth suing the person that owned the computer and how often does the person that owns it have enough money to pay them even if they won.
"You are of course falling into the unfortunately common mistake of equating the kernel to the OS"
... ect.
I understand the intent of what you are saying. that the OS does not the user experience make, but the reason for this is because in all honestly the user seldom sees or interacts in anyway with the true OS.
This misstatement is the kind of thing that Microsoft loves to see pushed. The fact of the matter is that the kernel almost certainly DOES equal the operating system, because the OPERATING system is by definition the software that is responsible for OPERATING the hardware. Thus, the GUI's the Command line applications , the installers, the applications , the shells ect. ect. ect. are NOT the operating system but rather are really applications that provide different UI. The real operating system does not provide a UI of any kind only and application interface. It is statements like the one you made that makes it easier for Microsoft to extend it's monopoly, because they just keep making more and more things "part of the OS". That is how they killed many many applications that were making money in the windows realm and it is how they get into so much monopoly trouble. The browser it part of the OS. Disk compression that's part of the OS( which is untrue unless the kernel does it.) A/V and DRM that should be part of the OS. The programming IDE is part of the OS? what's next the word processor is part of the OS?
If people don't understand the model of what their building then how can you hope to build it at all. This kind of ambiguity is one of the MAJOR reasons why Microsoft code remains so buggy. Another good example is the Microsoft definition of a thread. I've been employed programming windows for 5 years now. If you really study it there definition of a thread is very different from what the industry standard ideas are and extremely different from what you learn in school. There documentation for what THEY mean by a thread is ambiguous and misleading until you read it very deeply. Why , so Microsoft's marketing machine can use buzz words like "multi-threaded" and if the meanings are ambiguous enough then nobody can argue with them. Blur the lines of what an OS is enough and no body can argue with the fact that browsers really are a reasonable part of the OS, or A/V players or
Just thought it was something worth thinking about
Maybe I am just being dense. But given that running linux is a lagitimate use of the XBOX under the law... wouldn't it be possible to file suit agianst them to get them to sign a boot loader. It seems to me that the maker of a hardware platform should not have the right to dictate who can and cannot program for it. What's next? if you are not MSME certified we will not let you create paladium enabled apps?
See there is a leagal issue here that seems to need serious exploration to me. Microsoft as a corparation has control over the XBOX platform... it seems to me it should be illegal for them to prevent people from making use of it as they see fit since they sell the product? has there ever been a legal case or precident like this set?
i know this topic is probably almost dead, but i had a thought about liability. I mean. If the automated computer on a car messes up and because of that someone rear ends you or you rear end someone else. Who is responsible. Reality is that equipment failure is at fault, but the insurance companies are not going to like that answer because they want to have someone blamed so they know who's rates to raise. Or maybe they will just refuse to insure cars with this type of equipment on them.
" if you scream anything loud enough and long enough, esecially the more absurd it is, eventually people will start to believe you" -- Aldolf Hitler "Mine conft"( no idea how to spell that last bit).
Maybe this is a stupid question and it would probably take a lawyer to answer, but Iâ(TM)ll ask it anyway. SCO is suing IBM for contract violation any possibly copywriter infringement yes? So, even if IBM were blatantly and intentionally guilty. How does this affect Linux users. No seriously how can SCO expect to extract money from the behavior of IBM from anybody other then IBM?
Maybe I'm missing something about the claim but the code isn't identical to anyoneâ(TM)s description so it isn't a copyright violation. SCO has no patents, so where is the Linux liability?
Especially for the people who use Linux. I mean if Ford makes a copy of a patented Chevy part and puts it the Ford Torus. Chevy can't go after everyone who bought a Torus for extra money because Ford didn't have permission. I don't see the difference here.
As i stated earlier. The term disorder is a term that is left undefined. Along the same idea as that of a mathematical set. The problem is that then people try to say ... 'well this is a disorder and this is not a disorder etc.' ... but there is no way to prove one way or another that something is or isn't a disorder and it becomes a matter of opinion. basically anything "abnormal" CAN be a disorder and then you can consider to what extent it exists in a given individual. I.E. does it cause a PROBLEM. This type of logic is why for instance the DSM( a book the classifies different disorders and there symptoms) changed homosexuality form being a disorder to not being a disorder because it was basically decided that even though homosexuality is abnormal. If it doesnâ(TM)t' bother people that they are homosexual then they don't have a problem. Of coarse the same book goes on to make statements like "rape is never a disorder for legal reasons" and "pedophilia is always a disorder", with complete disregard for the fact that pedophilia is just as illegal as rape. It is a very contradictory book because of the fact there is no scientific way to categorize things as disorders on not disorders. ( other then basically general consensus ). So, the book isn't scientific at all which shows really bad for the people who put it out. I believe that is the American Psychiatric institute, but could be wrong.
1) as to the idea the ADHD is or isn't a disorder.
;)
Any first year psychology book will tell you that a disorder is a intentionally vague term that is supposedly innately understood, something like the mathematical construct of a set but with fewer easily discernible characteristics. As such it is impossible to scientifically prove that ANYTHING is or isn't a disorder because there are NO concrete criteria for a disorder. Psychologies attempt to classify everything into being a disorder or not a disorder is one of the greatest travesties of modern science.
2) many people who at first are thought to have ADHD have been shown to actually have dyslexia.
One characteristics of most dyslexics is high intelligence which means they get easily board by
mundane tasks.
3) may i make a suggestion. rather then trying to treat your bodies adaptation to a rapidly changing world by diminishing it have you tried
USING it to your advantage. Why not alternate back and forth between 2 or three things at a time while you are at work. If you developed a good habit of this you will probably get more work done then your co-workers and please your boss. Maybe one of your tasks can be work, another learning a foreign language and the third slashdot. ( i've been known to do that sometimes
The Automobile, when it was invented was a novelty at best. see its history laid out here: http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarsst eama.htm
It was difficult to get it onto the muddy( read dirt ) roads of the day. At best you would consider such things a diversionary hobby and certainly not practical for real travel. ... until Ford. Enough said about that article i guess. On the others hand there has been more then a few negative effects of cars along with the good ones. Maybe we should all simplify our lives and become Amish?
That is not nessary true about the need for montians. You would note that it is also quite possible to build windmills in very flat areas because the wind picks up well there. IE. North Dakota has a lot of wind and so do most places in the ocean. I read an article. I thought it was around here somewhere about how all the greenpeace people who live on cape cod were suffering from not in my back yard syndrome over a proposed windmill project out in the ocean that would provide 70% of the power new england needed.
did anyone really , given Microsoftâ(TM)s history , really expect them to abide by any anti-trust suit. The only reason they weren't broken up is because we have a republican president who believe in free enterprise at all costs and wasn't really interested in attacking one of America's most successful corporations because of the conservative political backlash. They deserve to be broken up for there tactics just as much as standard oil , or any of the companies that the anti-trust laws were written to prevent from strangling the market. I think this is the kind of thing that the pendulum swings back and forth on. We have slowly allowed anti-trust laws to be abused and weakened by all kinds of unfair business practices. That's why corporations like Disney have so much power. One concept that has been completely ignored for years in the corporate law is the idea of a company charter. The statement about what is your company given the right to do by the government. ( it's part of your incorporation papers i believe.) they are never enforced. If they were 3M would not have been allowed to leave the Mining and Manufacture market sector and it's owners would have had to sell there assets and create a new corporation. What it should prevent is over diversification of a business. corporations should not be allowed to do everything and anything they want. If you make an operating system you should not be allowed to also make a word processor and a cell phone because they are different products and should require a different corporation to make them. I wish they would go back to this kind of law. Then again there all kinds of abuse of IP law as well , both copywriter and patent by people who are happy to entirely pervert the intent of the original laws to make more money and we have corrupt legislators and administrators who are happy to see it happen because after all if it is "good for big business" it must also be "good for the economy". The REAL problem is this. When laws become unjust the citizens stop obeying them. When the average citizen does not obey the law then the law itself is weakened and must be re-enforced by police action. The police action eventually leads to rebellion. I worry about what kind of a revelation can be had in a day and age when everything we do and say even in our homes can be monitored, but one way or another it will probably eventually come. All societies live, die and morph into another. It will happen with this one too and in the long run all this is part of that happening. Still a person likes to stay healthy as long as possible and breaking Microsoft up would help keep the U.S. a healthy society. One day some president will have the guts to do it, I hope.
Striking has to be done in a large enough mass that you can't all be replaced quickly enough or the company goes out of business. Historically there is another way of ..."convincing" employers. You might also look into a "work slowdown". I mean if everyone in the department just basically starts showing up minimum hours and doing only the work you can do during that time ... or less by doing it in a relaxed manor ... what is your manager going to do? do you log your hours? How do they know what you logged is correct? what if the whole group does this together and everybody covers each other in saying ... well, there is just so much work we can get done? ( every manager understands that is true at in any department... perhaps you should make it clear that in his attempt to get more done the "burn out" factor is actually hurting overall productivity. He/She will believe that when they see the numbers. Or maybe they will just fire the lot of you. Although historically they fire only the mouthpiece/ spokesperson and/or those viewed to be the ring leaders.
Also, be careful of betrayal from within. My dad was fired one time for tring to start a union when the person from teamsters turned over the list of everyone who had been at the first meeting to his employer. We suspect "for the right price".
In any case beware that it is a dangerous game that is a foot. Americans want to be treated like human beings, that's why employers like to outsource to other countries where a dollar goes a long way and poverty is high.
I guess that is one advantage this would have had if it had been open source. Because someone else would have taken over the source even if the company was sold out or went under. But that is part of the whole open/closed source argument. sorry for you guy who got the shaft by not using completely open source software. I don't know if there is an alternative or not
"In my view, there's not much of anything the body can't handle in modest amounts."
In small enough amounts your body will tolerate almost anything including arsenic and cyanide.
It is always a matter of AMOUNT. The problem is with drugs people build up a tolerance and need to keep increasing the amount to what eventually becomes an unreasonable level. Alcohol is along with pretty much any drug a poison in high enough doses. That's why the can make you puke it is your bodies defense mechanism.
I was a very heavy caffeine drinker. My tolerance had gotten to the point where a 2 liter bottles of mountain dew drank in about an hours time hardly phased me. I routinely drank 3 or 4 large cherry cokes ( equivalent to about 6 cans. ) with my lunch. One day i decided to give up caffeine because i was worried about health effects. I had splitting throbbing headaches for about 2 or three days and I nearly fell asleep at my desk for almost 2 weeks. If that those aren't sings of withdrawal from addiction I don't know what is.
Other then that I know many heavy coffee drinkers who later in their life developed high blood pressure and hypertension but most of the smoked as well for some part of their lives so i don't know of any direct correlation
well, i think i might be able to give a better insight into this topic then many because i was in college for 5 years starting in 1992 and finishing in 1997. The vast shift in technology at that time gave me a chance to actually witness the quite rise of the internet. To give an example, i remember the old z-80 terminals and green and white paper and have seen how things were done when most work in the CS department was still on the mainframe ( they were still in use when i started) but i also saw the birth and death of mosaic and the birth of Netscape and internet explorer not the mention the rise and fall of OS/2 before I graduated.
During all of that time i worked in the college computer center and had a chance to see how these changes in technology affected people. When i started college ( and especially a few years before ) the internet/ file sharing all that kind of thing was a geeks only activity. I remember people having debates about weather or not it would be a good thing for commercial traffic to be allowed on the internet, because it was considered banned activity on what at the time was thought of a government funded research network. It wasn't something that the people on the football team knew anything about unless they were majoring in CS. E-mail too was used only by people in the CS department and the like. In contrast by the time i graduated people were assigned an e-mail account at the time they registered for school and were expected to use it for things like getting their homework assignment for Home economics 100.
I think the effect for the most part has been positive. From what Iâ(TM)ve seen there reason why the technology was adopted is BECAUSE it makes peoples lives easier. That after all the point of technology isnâ(TM)t it. I think if it fails that test the non geeks lose interest in it real quick. I think people coordinate the schedules better and have an easier time doing research then they otherwise did.
There are also some major down shots that come to mind.
The down shot on the research side is a I think there is a lot of debate right now on how to judge the academic value of web pages as a primary source. People have problems with them for 3 reasons.
1) they can be written by anyone ( sometimes crackpots)
2) it is difficult to get an idea of how credible the author is from an academic standpoint
3) what good is a reference that can be erased or taken down tomorrow in a research paper that you hope to be able to shelve and come back to in 20 years.
So there is an on going debate that you would never have had if it wasnâ(TM)t for the internet coming into use.
The last time i checked, which was about 4 years ago there was a major problem developing in academic environments and that involved the administration of the computer resources. This comes from experience Iâ(TM)ve drawn from two college campuses
My own and that of someone I was dating.
Often times the lowly computer department on campuses was suddenly thrust to the status of near demigod amongst administrative departments because they have the power to turn on and off your computing resources. Now if you do something ( put up the wrong kind of web page or run a not so approved of server for instance.) you may not be able to do your homework for classes and you may be cut out of most of your social network by loss of your e-mail account. This would result in a de-facto expulsion of sorts because it would almost guarantee the failure of student that couldn't do there work double that affect if you happen to be in a computer related major, but many majors on campus REQUIRE you to use e-mail as part of the class. To get announcements etc.. To make matters worse when i left school there was very little being done to police the activity of the administrators in these departments they were making a lot of rules based on things like. This makes our job easier ( regardless of academic merit or lack there of of what you are doing.) And penalizing peopl
I think i know a really simple way of locating almost anything within a given radius of a certain point on earth. Degrees minutes seconds degrees minutes seconds. And Guess what it only has 2 more digits then the proposed code, and is already universally understood. SOOO I don't see how this other system would be any simpler. I mean if the issue is grid squares vs circles just define your square as being the grid square south west of the co-ordinate given and all is done. More granularity use more numbers. That's why the system was designed in the first place. besides the only way it would become really global would be if every government in the world decided to use it isn't it? Oh well another day another MicoDollar i guess.
what else can be said. I'm always amazed at all the complexity that is involved in modern computing and the mathematics that make it happen.
I'm not well versed in this area. I'm software engineer(read not working for IS) by trade. However one of the companies I worked at used Lotus Notes to do all the things you are talking about. I'm pretty sure it works under Linux. It isn't of coarse Open source, but I remember it being much better then MS stuff I have to use at work now from a user perspective. ( Some of that may have been very competent admins though.)
When i was in high school my advanced physics class prepared a set of experiments that could teach scientific principles to elementary children. the ones i remember most fondly we're 1) laying a bed of nails a volunteer has a concrete brick placed on their stomach that is broken by a sledge hammer to the brink. -- this demonstrates the distribution of force 2) one team used an ethanol cannon ( bottle with spikes and ethanol in it .. set off with a tesla coil) to shoot a cork at a paper monkey ( weighted down by a few pennies suspended from the ceiling by paperclips and string. The strings put into the bottle and held in place with the cork in such a way that when the cork left the bottle it would let the paper drop.
-- demonstrates that objects of different mass always fall at the same rate ( because the cork will always hit the monkey if it was aiming at it before the explosion
3) there was the ever popular timing or clock reaction " where a set of chemicals, once mixed goes through several color changes at regular intervals that can be measured with a watch"
-- i don't remember what principle they where trying to demonstrate with that one.
4) i used "dust" explosions to demonstrate the scientific method. I had several kinds of "dust"
lychapodium powder ( I have no idea how to spell that word. I guessed it is a fungal spore), flour, corn starch.
We started with research, formed a "hypothesis" as to which of these would explode most violently and then did experimentation.
THE EXPERIMENT: take a coffee can and suspend it on a ring stand. Knock a whole in the bottom of the coffee can and place a piece of rubber hose with a funnel attached to it through the hole. Put a cotton ball in the funnel and a candle in the can. Place powder in the funnel. Light the candle and put the cover ( i had a metal one , i think plastic might burn) then blow lightly to make the dust circulate in the can. the lid will be blown off the can with a smoke and flame and loud pop.
Don't make the mistake of blowing on the cotton ball to put it out if it happens to be on fire in the can when you are done. My science teacher went eyebrow less for a while because of that mistake.
for those of you who don't know dust explosions are a chain reaction that occurs when a normally inert substance ( like flower or grain dust ) get enough air between the particles that a small spark causes an explosive chain reaction.
This was more relevant to the kids I was demoing for also because we were in rural Minnesota and this is what is responsible for the occasional violent explosion of grain elevators due to static electric spark and poor ventilation of grain dust. ( which has been known to kill people that work in grain elevators) since many of the children lived on farms and there parents would take produce to the elevator.