It is pretty impressive that he can pound on it with a hammer, even lightly- that's far better than anything else...
Which is the whole point of it: It won't have to resist more than occasional ellbow punches or accidents caused by ballpen-toting coworkers in a typical environment - all of which would (and routinely do) easily wreck similarly-priced conventional displays.
Few will worry that it might crack under assault by an even more powerful bow&arrow, or when facing an incoming bullet or truck with the LS201's name on it.
Now if only it was available in WUXGA (i.e. somewhat larger and at a resolution sufficient for FullHD) and with a more advanced panel than TN (the less glossy the better of course)...
for those of living north of the 50th parallel (many Canadians, many Europeans, almost all Brits) the changing day-length through the year is a PITA. Daylight Saving makes it slightly less inconvenient.
So its exactly something like weather changing with the seasons, and something that needs to be addressed (and probably always has been) in exactly the same way too: By adapting one's activities to the constraints of the local environment that are inevitable anyway, rather than tweaking with the time (and inconsistently so) at the expense of billions (and everyone's safety) all across the planet. In the South it may be too hot to work on mid-summer afternoons; in the far north you won't have all that much light in a polar night. One simply cannot expect to be able to do everything, everywhere, all year long, and no amount of time-tweaking is going to change that, so it's better to set local working hours and seasonal habits according to the circumstances on which they depend anyway.
If one little (leap) second is worth all the fuss, where's the uproar to finally rid us of the dangerous practice of needlessly, senselessly changing almost all clocks in existence (in an age where every other gadget has one) twice a year by one whole whopping hour, with all the trouble that entails?
The patents are a meaningless threat in the EU at this time, as software patents are currently not legal or enforceable across the EU.
While "the jury is still out on this" (i.e. the above is one view, albeit quite likely the most convincing one, rather than a clear-cut consensus), insightful analysis on both software patents in Europe (actually not exactly the EU, see article for details) and their use by the likes of Microsoft has indeed been compiled when the EU tried to change that.
Fortunately they are not into consumer electronics.
Otherwise there'd be a DRM on these rovers, one they would have retired 3 years ago in a cruel, wanton act of planned obsolescence.
Try explaining to one of your non-geek acquaintances what procmail does, and why it's useful. About 4 hours into the explanation, it'll dawn on you that non-geeks won't ever be able to comprehend stuff in Slashdot - we speak/write in a language that isn't recognisable as English to 99% of people out there.
There's a *huge* impedance mismatch between IT people and legal people
There are some lawyers at l(e)ast who seem to grasp (i.e. grok, for the übergeeks) these issues pretty well.
Incidentally these also happen to be the ones skillfully and convincingly taking software patents to bits (root and all).
Talk is cheap, even if the language is Legalese (though then maybe the one who's talking isn't...;-)).
Certainly you don't really think the judge would be happy with such terms if you took an ISP to court for making a change such as:
All fees are tripled retroactively as of January 1, 2001.
From now on service will be available only on Sundays, 1-2 a.m., and limited to port 80 of sites from our approved list (also subject to change without notice), at no more than 64kBit/s.
- or that you couldn't ever terminate contracts if the other party had actually managed to validly reserve and exercise the right to change their terms to your disadvantage.
Many jurisdictions have even explicitly outlawed the use of various "rip-off" clauses wielded against consumers.
Unless there is a legal loophole allowing them to unilaterally change the terms of consumer contracts from Internet to Throttled Censornet, only customers having no other choice would stay with companies trying to force them back to the days of scary time- or traffic-based metering (especially given the risk of excessive traffic due to botnets these days) and/or walled gardens with little content exclusively picked at the mercy of one's provider.
I don't care whether it can be logically demonstrated. It's been around for quite a while, so the question isn't "logically, should this work", but rather "has this been observed to *actually* work". And I kinda get the impression that the answer to that is "it depends" and "somewhat, but not as well as we'd think".
Links to lots of insightful analysis on this question have recently been posted here.
1. Set up a surveillance society,
2. Watch everybody all the time,
3. ???
4. Profit
Steps 1 & 2 are already happening whether we want them to or not. Its a done deal.
[...] patent it too.
In a networked, computerized world where accurate, continuous time- and record-keeping is of the essence, it has become one of the worst ideas ever to mess around with the clocks twice a year (in particular now that everyone has about a dozen of them in various devices), at different dates and points in time all around the globe. High time indeed, literally, to put an end to this tremendous waste of resources (and everyone's time) that is Daylight Saving Time.
...and this side-by-side comparison against plasma and LCD, along with images explaining how this is actually a kind of "flat-screen CRT with millions of ray-guns": http://www.behardware.com/art/imprimer/593/
However many academic papers and spam filters throw their ever-more-elaborate algorithms at this issue, it is an arms race that cannot be won by the "good guys", as long as lawmakers keep pretending that technology alone could prevent the effects of sociopathic behavior: unsolicited bulk messages won't go away unless sending them is severely punishable and vigorously prosecuted in all nations that contribute to the problem. This should have happened more than a decade ago, but now the world is simply running out of storage, bandwidth and CPU cycles much too quickly to afford waiting another decade (or even a year) for serious, intransigent anti-spam legislation that is long overdue.
...developped in a joint research project by PETA and the DoD, will feature an autonomous targetting and self-defense system that fires back at persistent poachers to hand out harsher punishments than just fines.;-)
The achievements of these organizations are commendable, but portraying the FSF (or e.g. the EFF) as entirely neutral on technology issues probably wouldn't be "entirely accurate" either.;-) And indeed neutral they shouldn't (even need to) be - journalists ought to be able to see (i.e. find and expose) the truth behind the whole range of different views, rather than exclude the ones with the most obvious bias (some of whom might be right nonetheless)...
It seems to work here in Europe: after a big campaign of small IT businesses and citizens, the European Parliament rejected a proposal for introducing software patents in the EU.
An article and book just out show why rejecting software patents is the only sound policy from the perspective of every discipline that has looked at them, be it IP law, economics, or computer science.
Because the public TV programming is available as an IP stream, every computer that could be hooked to the Internet is "being ready for reception". And don't try to argue that your computer is running Linux and thus not "ready". It is able to run an operating system that could display the TV stream, even though it is not running it right now.
the TV stream has to be available to everyone indiscriminately. [...] the whole idea is that the programming should be free to anyone who is ready to receive it, subventioned by the fees of all people who want programming in general, independently of the source of THEIR programming.
Could you enlighten us as to exactly where (deep-link URLs!) those 24/7 live streams for all public stations are? In particular the TV ones...
Needless to say, if the fee is supposed to be justified by the "programming being made available to everyone (with a license)", then it would really have to be
available (under load - and that means during the evening news or blockbusters, and even at the end game's last minute of a soccer world cup)
free of Digital Restrictions Management (if only to ensure anonymous access!) and not tied to any particular operating system, let alone a closed-source and expensive one
at a fee that is substantially lower than for conventional over-the-air transmissions, as the receiver rather than the sender pays almost the entire distribution/infrastructure this way! (Everyone look at your ISP bills, in particular volume-based ones, or care to compute how many TV sets a day you could buy from the fees charged by German wireless operators for receiving IP streaming video, and Internet access in general, on your mobile phone...)
Three more things to consider:
Most enterprises just don't have cars where they already pay for radio, so they are hit by yet another fee now.
Typically, in a group or office building, there may be many different legal entities (1..n employees each) per location, each one charged with yet another new fee (and probably then again for their mobile phones, and/or home offices, etc.), separately.
Experience has it that employers who give staff a choice between either doing their jobs or watching TV on company time usually don't exist for long enough to be worth working there (or enjoying the media, for that matter)... Possibly not even long enough to pay the wages "earned" that way (if any)... So the businesses' outrage at these surreal fees is quite justified.
Slashdot Mirror
Few will worry that it might crack under assault by an even more powerful bow&arrow, or when facing an incoming bullet or truck with the LS201's name on it.
Now if only it was available in WUXGA (i.e. somewhat larger and at a resolution sufficient for FullHD) and with a more advanced panel than TN (the less glossy the better of course)...
Most would consider this question answered, as the founders of computer science, renowned lawyers and Nobel-laureate economists agree that software patents are not defensible on any grounds.
If one little (leap) second is worth all the fuss, where's the uproar to finally rid us of the dangerous practice of needlessly, senselessly changing almost all clocks in existence (in an age where every other gadget has one) twice a year by one whole whopping hour , with all the trouble that entails?
This being /. it's strange not to see anyone posting these famous words recollecting the era...
Fortunately they are not into consumer electronics. Otherwise there'd be a DRM on these rovers, one they would have retired 3 years ago in a cruel, wanton act of planned obsolescence.
Shush, next thing you're gonna tell journalists one doesn't even need to be a rocket scientist to figure out maths? ;-)
Incidentally these also happen to be the ones skillfully and convincingly taking software patents to bits (root and all).
Certainly you don't really think the judge would be happy with such terms if you took an ISP to court for making a change such as:- or that you couldn't ever terminate contracts if the other party had actually managed to validly reserve and exercise the right to change their terms to your disadvantage.
Many jurisdictions have even explicitly outlawed the use of various "rip-off" clauses wielded against consumers.
...the end of a few of these ISPs?
Unless there is a legal loophole allowing them to unilaterally change the terms of consumer contracts from Internet to Throttled Censornet, only customers having no other choice would stay with companies trying to force them back to the days of scary time- or traffic-based metering (especially given the risk of excessive traffic due to botnets these days) and/or walled gardens with little content exclusively picked at the mercy of one's provider.
The tag the world's been waiting for since 1994...
repeat:byte; 0 = ad nauseam
With MOD support - of course!
In a networked, computerized world where accurate, continuous time- and record-keeping is of the essence, it has become one of the worst ideas ever to mess around with the clocks twice a year (in particular now that everyone has about a dozen of them in various devices), at different dates and points in time all around the globe. High time indeed, literally, to put an end to this tremendous waste of resources (and everyone's time) that is Daylight Saving Time.
However many academic papers and spam filters throw their ever-more-elaborate algorithms at this issue, it is an arms race that cannot be won by the "good guys", as long as lawmakers keep pretending that technology alone could prevent the effects of sociopathic behavior: unsolicited bulk messages won't go away unless sending them is severely punishable and vigorously prosecuted in all nations that contribute to the problem. This should have happened more than a decade ago, but now the world is simply running out of storage, bandwidth and CPU cycles much too quickly to afford waiting another decade (or even a year) for serious, intransigent anti-spam legislation that is long overdue.
...developped in a joint research project by PETA and the DoD, will feature an autonomous targetting and self-defense system that fires back at persistent poachers to hand out harsher punishments than just fines. ;-)
The achievements of these organizations are commendable, but portraying the FSF (or e.g. the EFF) as entirely neutral on technology issues probably wouldn't be "entirely accurate" either. ;-) And indeed neutral they shouldn't (even need to) be - journalists ought to be able to see (i.e. find and expose) the truth behind the whole range of different views, rather than exclude the ones with the most obvious bias (some of whom might be right nonetheless)...
Needless to say, if the fee is supposed to be justified by the "programming being made available to everyone (with a license)", then it would really have to be
- available (under load - and that means during the evening news or blockbusters, and even at the end game's last minute of a soccer world cup)
- free of Digital Restrictions Management (if only to ensure anonymous access!) and not tied to any particular operating system, let alone a closed-source and expensive one
- at a fee that is substantially lower than for conventional over-the-air transmissions, as the receiver rather than the sender pays almost the entire distribution/infrastructure this way! (Everyone look at your ISP bills, in particular volume-based ones, or care to compute how many TV sets a day you could buy from the fees charged by German wireless operators for receiving IP streaming video, and Internet access in general, on your mobile phone...)
Three more things to consider:So the businesses' outrage at these surreal fees is quite justified.
We may be sending out the wrong signals though by telling them this world is not just pre-Warp, but even pre-Wardrobe. ;-)
Anyway, there's reason to be afraid someone may also have seriously misunderstood mankind's actual role in reproduction for Aliens...
Sincerely, The alien operators of FireWall@Dipper.Big