Re:My iPod + iRock = devalued radio (wasted ads)
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Who needs radio? I won't go back to radio until there is some kind of cellular packet radio with multicast distribution. Then I could listen to my favorite stations cross country.
Who needs radio? How about people who don't want cross country homogenized ClearChannel radio? For some, this might be a matter of principle--they want to listen to local deejays spin discs with a local flavour. For the rest of us, it's a matter of practicality--I have a passing interest in local news and weather forecasts, and while driving I'm very much interested in local traffic reports.
Indeed, that's why the presidential electors from SOME states are winner-take-all and from others are proportional to the popular vote. It depends on what the state decided.
Actually, no states choose their electors based on proportion of the popular vote. Refer to here. In all states except for Maine, Nebraska, and Florida, the winner of the popular vote (most votes received statewide, not even necessarily a majority) receives all of the electoral college votes for the state.
In Maine and Nebraska, two of the electoral college votes are decided that way, and the remainder are decided by popular vote within each Congressional district. (This is demonstrably not necessarily proportional to the statewide popular vote.)
In Florida, of course, the United States Supreme Court chooses decides who receives all of the electoral college votes.
Secondly, the Aussies have a better system than we do. Their vote-counting scheme is far better, and their election-administration system pays for itself, so it's $0.00 cost per taxpayer.
How does an election administration system pay for itself? They aren't supposed to be producing anything that they can sell...oh. That's not good...:)
I suppose they could sell technology and expertise to other jurisdictions, but not everybody could do that--you would eventually run out of clients.
The officials from Elections Canada do all the counting. The scruitineers are allowed only to observe the process, to ensure that there are no irregularities. In the three elections I scruitineered for, I did not witness any irregularities. And, in all three, no members of the public remained to watch the ballot counting.
Most members of the public realize that there's no point to staying to watch the ballot count. It's quite uneventful--I've worked an election before.
It should be noted that the local Elections Canada officials are nominated by the local parties. There are two officials (a deputy returning officer and a poll clerk) at each polling location, one named by each of the two parties winning the most votes in the previous election. Each candidate in the election also is welcome to send scrutineers around to each polling location to monitor the voting and counting process.
So...every party sends their own independent investigators out to watch the counting...the counting is conducted by individuals who, being affiliated with separate parties, watch each other...nobody but the Elections Canada staff are allowed to even touch the ballots...it's a good, reliable, trustworthy system. Canadians aren't apathetic, they've just realized that they have a system that works.
Also, the dynamic range of B&W emulsions is worlds beyond what *any* digital capture can currently achieve. Ansel's books discuss capturing, in the final print, 11 different zones of tonality (Zones 0-10). Sorry, digital simply cannot do that. Period. It is a fact of physics that cannot be disputed.
Although I quite agree with you that CCDs don't (yet) offer the same resolution as large-format films, I must disagree with you on one point: the dynamic range of a top quality CCD is far superior to that of silver emulsion film. As a photographer, I am but an amateur, but I am a physicist for a living--please do be careful when making indisputable assertions about physics facts.
Take, for example, the 22 megapixel Kodak KAF-22000CE CCD. The spec indicates a linear dynamic range of 73 dB--that's a factor of better than ten million between the darkest and the lightest tones. It's designed for use in the most demanding scientific applications, including optical astronomy and microscopy, as well as for conventional photography.
Depending on the source you look at, the optical density of film runs from 0 to anywhere between 3.2 and 4 (for good quality black and white emulsions). That's a factor of up to ten thousand. (Ten f-stops is a factor of one thousand.)
This was the main reason why Ansel never did much with color (he dabbled with Kodachrome in the 1940s but didn't like the lack of tonal control it gave you - something slide film shares with digital, only digital suffers from it more severely).
I honestly don't know what you're trying to say about digital here. It is certainly true that a new CCD camera may not have the response that one expects--this gray will look too light, while that gray will seem too dark. The palette can be tuned in the digital darkroom--with Photoshop--to accurately reflect the goals of the photographer. When a digital image is printed, each numeric pixel value is mapped to a corresponding amount of ink on the page. This mapping can be adjusted essentially completely arbitrarily, to suit whatever whims the photographer wishes to satisfy.
So Ansel wouldn't be happy with digital (yet) because he would have to sacrifice resolution, but the argument that the dynamic range isn't there just doesn't hold water, nor does the idea that he would lack 'tonal control'.
Some forms of radiation (e.g. alpha and beta) are not even a serious threat! Alpha radiation is incapable of penetrating the skin. Beta radiation can only do so in large quantities, and then it's akin to getting a strong electric shock. (i.e. Lots of burns and such.)
Are you smoking crack? Alpha emissions are indeed incapable of penetrating our dead outer layer of skin--but that does not make them harmless. If ingested or inhaled, alpha emitters are extremely dangerous. Alpha radiation is a much more effective mutagen (and consequently carcinogen) than beta or gamma radiation, precisely because it has poor penetrating power. All of the energy each alpha particle carries is deposited along a short path, doing significantly more damage--causing things like double-stranded DNA breaks. One mechanism by which cigarettes may cause cancer is mutations in the lungs caused by inhaled polonium-210 particles from tobacco. (Po-210 is an alpha emitter.)
Many alpha emitters are also potent chemical poisons, such that their direct toxic effects on exposure (ingestion) can kill more quickly than their radiological ones. (Plutonium, for instance, falls into this basket.)
People will crush these things inadvertantly, they'll leave them out in the rain, they'll lose them, they'll leave dozens of cells in their office drawers, they'll throw them out with the regular trash, they'll dispose of them by incineration. (All the stupid things that people do with batteries now.)
Power cells containing high specific activity nuclear materials are an interesting concept, but they do not belong in consumer products--because consumers will do incredibly stupid things with them. Radioisotopes require competent supervision.
So much for the Europeans living up to their liberal ideals and standing up for the little guy....
Eh? People shouldn't expect a court system to 'stand up for the little guy'. Courts should impartially apply the laws of the land. If by so doing, the 'little guy' wins, then so be it.
If this court has correctly applied the law (and come on, people, it's not that big a stretch to see that the name Lindows might have been deliberately chosen to be readily associated with Windows) then that's the way that I suspect most people expect the European courts to work.
One should also note that trademark laws in Europe versus trademark laws in the United States though similar are not identical. That court cases on different sides of the ocean produced different outcomes may be a consequence of those legal differences.
Note also that trademark law is not uniform across Europe. Microsoft may have deliberately chosen Finnish and Swedish courts to pursue these claims first, because they felt the laws would be most amenable in those jurisdictions. (I don't know anything about Finnish law--this is a hypothesis.)
Finally, this is a preliminary injunction. Microsoft has asserted that Lindows is doing them harm, and until those claims are fully tested in court, Lindows has been temporarily barred from the use of their name. If it is later determined that they are not diluting Microsoft's trademarks, Lindows can sue MS for damages associated with the injunction.
Actually, they'll get sympathy from a whole lot of people, since a whole lot of people cheat on their taxes. In fact, if you count the small stuff (like use tax), just about everyone cheats on their taxes.
That's a charming rationalization, from which I conclude that you have a bit of a guilty conscience about cheating on your own taxes.
Realistically, the IRS isn't going to go after someone who fudges by fifty bucks on their return. (At least, they're not going to waste the time of a live auditor on it--their computers might catch it and automagically generate a bill...but I digress.) This sort of thing would be used to support criminal charges of tax evasion, where someone is concealing tens of thousands of dollars worth of income.
Would it be wrong for a police officer to sit at the side of the bridge and write down all the license plate numbers that go past? Where is the difference--except that people who pay cash then get caught, too?
Sympathy? Aside from the toll road for which the costs may or may not be recovered through the user fees (tolls) the cheater in question is travelling on taxpayer-funded roads. Somebody has to pay for that infrastructure--and if he's not paying his taxes, then the roads are being paid for out of mine. Sympathy my ass. Nail the bastard to the wall.
that the virginia state gov't can put this guy away for twenty years for this. twenty years! isn't this a bit drastic?
Twenty years is what you get for the four infractions, each at the maximum of their 1 to 5 year sentence.
What will actually happen--if jail time is awarded at all--is that he'll get the minimum, and the judge will allow him to serve the terms concurrently (all four sentences at the same time) rather than consecutively. With time off for good behaviour, he'll be out by Easter.
I'm (reasonably) sure that judges recognize that twenty years for spamming is a bit excessive, and will sentence accordingly. Given a few similar cases, judges will get a handle on how long these sentences should be, and life will go on. (Remember, most judges and legislators aren't nearly as hyperactive over spam as they are about drugs. This will be seen as, at best, a slap-on-the-wrist white-collar crime.)
Technically, you should get *better* range across water than straight vertical because the water acts a conductor and reflects the radio waves, doubling the number of waves that reach you compared to straight vertical.
True over short distances, but unless you put your transmitter or retriever (or both) on a mast of some sort, then your range 'horizontally' over water gets cut off by the curvature of the earth. Of course, the ranges we're talking about (less than a mile) do certainly qualify as "short" in this context.
Lastly, none of this stops voter fraud. In many states, it's very easy to vote. Show up with a Drivers' License or a neighbor to vouch, and you're in. You only need to be a resident for 30 days. If you don't have a neighbor, or a drivers' license, you can show up in Minnesota with a utility bill in your name, and that's enough to vote.
True, this may be a problem--but it's not the problem that these electronic voting systems are supposed to solve. These are counting devices and that is all. That is what these systems are designed to do. To complain that these tabulation systems don't do voter verification is akin to complaining that new counterfeit-resistant currency does nothing to combat money laundering.
Verification that an individual is eligible to vote takes place before the potential elector gets to the booth, whether they vote with pen, paper, touchscreen, or pine cones. It can be handled entirely separately from the voting mechanisms, and almost certainly is best managed that way--why generate a more complex piece of equipment, particularly one that could inadvertantly or deliberately associate a person with his or her vote?
I see from some other posters you can install Moz/Firebird without admin privileges. You can also install Opera on a locked down machine.
I, too, am unable to adjust my clock (right now it is nineteen minutes slow), but I had no problem with setting up Opera. (You cannot, however, install its supplied Java Virtual Machine.)
Who modded this Offtopic? It's a quote from the article (do the mods even bother to RTFA anymore?) that is concise and on point.
This technology could be of great use to the handicapped. I have been in many libraries where the aisles are just wide enough to squeeze through--wheelchair-bound users are out of luck.
Also, some libraries have closed stacks where library staff have to retrieve books for all library users, able-bodied and otherwise. Why not get a robot to do it? Save the people for jobs that require thinking, like managing the collection.
My wife works for the NHS here in London. We dual-boot here and she finds linux too difficult. She's OK to read email and the like but installation of hardware or software is just too difficult under linux for your average NHS worker (not that they're stupid, they just know about other things).
It sounds like it's a satisfactory solution, then. Individual users--especially in a medical environment--should not be doing system administration, software installation, or (God forbid!) hardware setup. You're dealing with confidential records and time sensitive information. Nobody except authorized individuals (read: IT) should be able to make any changes--and even they shouldn't be allowed to do so until they've tested proposed modifications thoroughly.
Physicians, nurses, medical technicians--they need to be able to send and receive email, do basic word processing, and use a few pieces of specialized software for recordkeeping. The do not need to (nor should they be expected to) do anything else. If an x-ray machine goes down, the radiologist doesn't pry open the case and start tinkering--he calls in an appropriately trained technician. The NHS' IT staff need to provide access to certain services (communcation, recordkeeping). The users don't need to know or care about how that is done--it just needs to work.
es, of course its a good thing that they are looking at Linux, but it is wholly bizzare that these kind of things are still centerally planned in England, and that these kind of day-to-day technical decisions are made by a government minister in Whitehall and distributed down the hiereachy - presumably all the way to the cleaning in the end.
Why would this be bizarre? Should each hospital and physician choose a different format and platform for all of their records?
Let's suppose my family physician suspects I have an ulcer. He takes notes in his office. He sends off some specimens for lab tests, there's another site he has to communicate with. He might arrange for a ultrasound at a local radiology clinic to check for gall bladder trouble. He then refers me to a specialist, who holds a consultation and performs an exam in hisoffice. The specialist needs to perform another diagnostic procedure--this includes a trip to the local hospital for endoscopy. He prescribes some medication, and squirts the relative info off to the pharmacy.
That's half a dozen sites right there that need to be able to communicate--share a wide range of medical records, and do so accurately and seamlessly. Enforcing some sort of standards across the entire health system means that information and people (both medical professionals and their patients) can travel from site to site with a minumum of inconvenience.
The photons from a laser source will all carry on in phase and in the same direction (subject to the effects of diffraction) in a vacuum. Once they enter a medium--any medium, even air--they will tend to scatter. In pure, clear air, there is relatively little scattering, though it can still be measured. (It is this Rayleigh scattering to which our blue sky is attributed.) I've worked with powerful pulsed laser systems where scattering in clear, dry air has still been sufficient for the beam to be visible.
Of course in much of our atmosphere, we definitely do not have pure, clear air. There are particulates, there are water droplets, there is all manner of crud. These particles are much more effective scatterers, and they are the primary targets of the instrument being tested. (The instrument name, CALIPSO, stands for Cloud Aerosol LIDAR and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations, after all.)
From this NASA page, the CALIPSO laser is identified as a Nd:YAG, diode-pumped, Q-switched laser. The repetition rate is 20 Hz, and the operating wavelengths are 1064 nm (infrared) and the frequency-doubled 532 nm (visible, green.)
There's a PDF here that describes the prototype laser as delivering 110 mJ per pulse. At 20 pulses per second, that's about 2 watts average power--but of course the peak power in each (short) pulse will be much higher.
Focus on SCO's theft of the work of thousands of people. Use words like "theft", and "stolen". Keep mentioning that SCO did not write Linux and has only the limited rights to it given them by the General Public License. Those rights don't include converting it to a proprietary product.
No, no, no. This sort of deliberate misstatement is entirely inappropriate, and/.ers are regularly up in arms over it when the RIAA/MPAA do it. (For example, when they describe the use of Kazaa as theft.) "Theft" is a term that has a very specific meaning in law, and it involves actual property (real property or chattels, not intellectual property--a term which doesn't have a specific legal meaning.) "Conversion" does not apply to this situation either, for the same reason.
Unless SCO was taking physical CDs from Linus and reselling them, then their offenses are limited to (potentially) copyright infringement, fraud, and various flavours of corporate malfeasance. If you need a word to inflame public opinion, try using "fraud". It accurately conveys the notion that SCO is attempting to deceive the public, their stockholders, and the courts for financial gain. Comparisons to Enron might also be appropriate.
IANAL, but I do know it casts doubt on the legitimate concerns of the open source community if its advocates start making inaccurate (even if only technically inaccurate) accusations.
Even if people just donated $1 on their tax forms, imagine how much money that would generate for NASA.
Not quite $300 million. Nothing to sneeze at, but still less than 5% of NASA's current budget.
On the other hand, Americans are involuntarily contributing $300 or so per person to fund the Iraq invasion--this year...hm. Sometimes it's interesting to divide a budget line item by a nation's population. Helps to put things in perspective.
600 km/h maglevs will increase considerably the distance over which a train's travel times are comparable to city-airport-airport-city.
Indeed, though even at 200 to 300 km/h, conventional high-speed rail has an advantage for a lot of journeys. Many airports and airlines are now advising passengers to arrive at least two hours before their flight in order to allow for security checks and whatnot. Additionally, airports are usually located well outside the city centre (noise concerns, and incompatibility between jet aircraft and tall buildings), adding a half hour of travel time at each end in and out of the city. Allow an hour to disembark and get your checked luggage.
Compare rail travel, where I can arrive a half hour before my trip, and I don't have to check my (single) suitcase, and the train station is often in the heart of the city. (I know that in Toronto I don't have to even go outdoors to get to the financial district, the theatre district, or city hall from the train station.)
So, air travel has an extra 3.5 hours of overhead, before one even accounts for time in flight. That's more than 1000 km at 300 km/h, and a respectable 700 km at 200 km/h.
I've bought things from Dell for maybe 2 years now. About 3 months ago I began getting spam addressed to "dell@...".
Was it a deliberate thing they did to provide customer email addresses to spammers? Was it an employee smuggling customer data out? Was it an outsource employee doing as much?
Was it just a dictionary attack on your domain? Are you now just getting spam on that account because it didn't bounce? Maybe the spammers also tried davis@foo.com and donald@foo.com, but dell@foo.com was the only one that went through. Quite frankly, I think that is much more likely than the idea that Dell's customer email list was stolen. Finally, Dell would never do something so incredibly stupid as sell their email list to spammers deliberately. (And even if it did happen, don't you think there would be a front page Slashdot story about it?)
TechSupport and CustomerService were absolutely clueless, but that's not surprising; although it was funny to see how well they can embarrass themselves.
Who is embarrassing whom? They're probably genuinely not responsible, so now they're in the awkward position of dealing with a customer who mistakenly blames them for something that's not their fault. There's a saying in medicine that doctors tend to make the worst patients--I suspect that a similar notion might apply in tech support.
Hp computer bought from Compusa had...all the spyware shit on it.
Dell is obviously getting paid for all this crap they are installing on your computers.
Eh? Just because Hpaq distributors sell crappy computers loaded with spyware, doesn't mean that every other manufacturer does.
If you were to RTFA, you would note that Dell is not installing spyware--they're just telling their techs not to deal with third-party spyware or removal products. It's a bit unhelpful, but fully within their rights, and certainly not abusive.
This is a flimsy plot about a giant ape who develops an obsession about a tiny blonde human woman pet. (Hollywood metaphor anyone?). Big monkey lives on a distant island; whites come; they capture him (somehow); they take him to New York, he flips out, smashes up some shti, climbs a building, and gets shot down. Duh, end of story.
Dude! You've ruined it for me! How about a spoiler warning next time, eh?
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Who needs radio? How about people who don't want cross country homogenized ClearChannel radio? For some, this might be a matter of principle--they want to listen to local deejays spin discs with a local flavour. For the rest of us, it's a matter of practicality--I have a passing interest in local news and weather forecasts, and while driving I'm very much interested in local traffic reports.
Actually, no states choose their electors based on proportion of the popular vote. Refer to here. In all states except for Maine, Nebraska, and Florida, the winner of the popular vote (most votes received statewide, not even necessarily a majority) receives all of the electoral college votes for the state.
In Maine and Nebraska, two of the electoral college votes are decided that way, and the remainder are decided by popular vote within each Congressional district. (This is demonstrably not necessarily proportional to the statewide popular vote.)
In Florida, of course, the United States Supreme Court chooses decides who receives all of the electoral college votes.
How does an election administration system pay for itself? They aren't supposed to be producing anything that they can sell...oh. That's not good... :)
I suppose they could sell technology and expertise to other jurisdictions, but not everybody could do that--you would eventually run out of clients.
Most members of the public realize that there's no point to staying to watch the ballot count. It's quite uneventful--I've worked an election before.
It should be noted that the local Elections Canada officials are nominated by the local parties. There are two officials (a deputy returning officer and a poll clerk) at each polling location, one named by each of the two parties winning the most votes in the previous election. Each candidate in the election also is welcome to send scrutineers around to each polling location to monitor the voting and counting process.
So...every party sends their own independent investigators out to watch the counting...the counting is conducted by individuals who, being affiliated with separate parties, watch each other...nobody but the Elections Canada staff are allowed to even touch the ballots...it's a good, reliable, trustworthy system. Canadians aren't apathetic, they've just realized that they have a system that works.
Although I quite agree with you that CCDs don't (yet) offer the same resolution as large-format films, I must disagree with you on one point: the dynamic range of a top quality CCD is far superior to that of silver emulsion film. As a photographer, I am but an amateur, but I am a physicist for a living--please do be careful when making indisputable assertions about physics facts.
Take, for example, the 22 megapixel Kodak KAF-22000CE CCD. The spec indicates a linear dynamic range of 73 dB--that's a factor of better than ten million between the darkest and the lightest tones. It's designed for use in the most demanding scientific applications, including optical astronomy and microscopy, as well as for conventional photography.
Depending on the source you look at, the optical density of film runs from 0 to anywhere between 3.2 and 4 (for good quality black and white emulsions). That's a factor of up to ten thousand. (Ten f-stops is a factor of one thousand.)
This was the main reason why Ansel never did much with color (he dabbled with Kodachrome in the 1940s but didn't like the lack of tonal control it gave you - something slide film shares with digital, only digital suffers from it more severely).
I honestly don't know what you're trying to say about digital here. It is certainly true that a new CCD camera may not have the response that one expects--this gray will look too light, while that gray will seem too dark. The palette can be tuned in the digital darkroom--with Photoshop--to accurately reflect the goals of the photographer. When a digital image is printed, each numeric pixel value is mapped to a corresponding amount of ink on the page. This mapping can be adjusted essentially completely arbitrarily, to suit whatever whims the photographer wishes to satisfy.
So Ansel wouldn't be happy with digital (yet) because he would have to sacrifice resolution, but the argument that the dynamic range isn't there just doesn't hold water, nor does the idea that he would lack 'tonal control'.
Are you smoking crack? Alpha emissions are indeed incapable of penetrating our dead outer layer of skin--but that does not make them harmless. If ingested or inhaled, alpha emitters are extremely dangerous. Alpha radiation is a much more effective mutagen (and consequently carcinogen) than beta or gamma radiation, precisely because it has poor penetrating power. All of the energy each alpha particle carries is deposited along a short path, doing significantly more damage--causing things like double-stranded DNA breaks. One mechanism by which cigarettes may cause cancer is mutations in the lungs caused by inhaled polonium-210 particles from tobacco. (Po-210 is an alpha emitter.)
Many alpha emitters are also potent chemical poisons, such that their direct toxic effects on exposure (ingestion) can kill more quickly than their radiological ones. (Plutonium, for instance, falls into this basket.)
People will crush these things inadvertantly, they'll leave them out in the rain, they'll lose them, they'll leave dozens of cells in their office drawers, they'll throw them out with the regular trash, they'll dispose of them by incineration. (All the stupid things that people do with batteries now.)
Power cells containing high specific activity nuclear materials are an interesting concept, but they do not belong in consumer products--because consumers will do incredibly stupid things with them. Radioisotopes require competent supervision.
For the record, I am a physicist.
Well, you're obviously not INTP, because then you'd know that there is no INTS. :)
The sixteen Myers-Briggs types are based on binary selections from the following four traits.
Introvert / Extrovert
iNtuitive / Sensing
Thinking / Feeling
Judging / Perceiving
As an INTP, I am inherently precise and picky (on Slashdot, I must work hard to curb my grammar Nazi tendencies.)
Eh? People shouldn't expect a court system to 'stand up for the little guy'. Courts should impartially apply the laws of the land. If by so doing, the 'little guy' wins, then so be it.
If this court has correctly applied the law (and come on, people, it's not that big a stretch to see that the name Lindows might have been deliberately chosen to be readily associated with Windows) then that's the way that I suspect most people expect the European courts to work. One should also note that trademark laws in Europe versus trademark laws in the United States though similar are not identical. That court cases on different sides of the ocean produced different outcomes may be a consequence of those legal differences.
Note also that trademark law is not uniform across Europe. Microsoft may have deliberately chosen Finnish and Swedish courts to pursue these claims first, because they felt the laws would be most amenable in those jurisdictions. (I don't know anything about Finnish law--this is a hypothesis.)
Finally, this is a preliminary injunction. Microsoft has asserted that Lindows is doing them harm, and until those claims are fully tested in court, Lindows has been temporarily barred from the use of their name. If it is later determined that they are not diluting Microsoft's trademarks, Lindows can sue MS for damages associated with the injunction.
That's a charming rationalization, from which I conclude that you have a bit of a guilty conscience about cheating on your own taxes.
Realistically, the IRS isn't going to go after someone who fudges by fifty bucks on their return. (At least, they're not going to waste the time of a live auditor on it--their computers might catch it and automagically generate a bill...but I digress.) This sort of thing would be used to support criminal charges of tax evasion, where someone is concealing tens of thousands of dollars worth of income.
Would it be wrong for a police officer to sit at the side of the bridge and write down all the license plate numbers that go past? Where is the difference--except that people who pay cash then get caught, too?
Sympathy? Aside from the toll road for which the costs may or may not be recovered through the user fees (tolls) the cheater in question is travelling on taxpayer-funded roads. Somebody has to pay for that infrastructure--and if he's not paying his taxes, then the roads are being paid for out of mine. Sympathy my ass. Nail the bastard to the wall.
Twenty years is what you get for the four infractions, each at the maximum of their 1 to 5 year sentence.
What will actually happen--if jail time is awarded at all--is that he'll get the minimum, and the judge will allow him to serve the terms concurrently (all four sentences at the same time) rather than consecutively. With time off for good behaviour, he'll be out by Easter.
I'm (reasonably) sure that judges recognize that twenty years for spamming is a bit excessive, and will sentence accordingly. Given a few similar cases, judges will get a handle on how long these sentences should be, and life will go on. (Remember, most judges and legislators aren't nearly as hyperactive over spam as they are about drugs. This will be seen as, at best, a slap-on-the-wrist white-collar crime.)
True over short distances, but unless you put your transmitter or retriever (or both) on a mast of some sort, then your range 'horizontally' over water gets cut off by the curvature of the earth. Of course, the ranges we're talking about (less than a mile) do certainly qualify as "short" in this context.
True, this may be a problem--but it's not the problem that these electronic voting systems are supposed to solve. These are counting devices and that is all. That is what these systems are designed to do. To complain that these tabulation systems don't do voter verification is akin to complaining that new counterfeit-resistant currency does nothing to combat money laundering.
Verification that an individual is eligible to vote takes place before the potential elector gets to the booth, whether they vote with pen, paper, touchscreen, or pine cones. It can be handled entirely separately from the voting mechanisms, and almost certainly is best managed that way--why generate a more complex piece of equipment, particularly one that could inadvertantly or deliberately associate a person with his or her vote?
I, too, am unable to adjust my clock (right now it is nineteen minutes slow), but I had no problem with setting up Opera. (You cannot, however, install its supplied Java Virtual Machine.)
This technology could be of great use to the handicapped. I have been in many libraries where the aisles are just wide enough to squeeze through--wheelchair-bound users are out of luck.
Also, some libraries have closed stacks where library staff have to retrieve books for all library users, able-bodied and otherwise. Why not get a robot to do it? Save the people for jobs that require thinking, like managing the collection.
Phrases one should never use in a discussion on Jesus...
It sounds like it's a satisfactory solution, then. Individual users--especially in a medical environment--should not be doing system administration, software installation, or (God forbid!) hardware setup. You're dealing with confidential records and time sensitive information. Nobody except authorized individuals (read: IT) should be able to make any changes--and even they shouldn't be allowed to do so until they've tested proposed modifications thoroughly.
Physicians, nurses, medical technicians--they need to be able to send and receive email, do basic word processing, and use a few pieces of specialized software for recordkeeping. The do not need to (nor should they be expected to) do anything else. If an x-ray machine goes down, the radiologist doesn't pry open the case and start tinkering--he calls in an appropriately trained technician. The NHS' IT staff need to provide access to certain services (communcation, recordkeeping). The users don't need to know or care about how that is done--it just needs to work.
Why would this be bizarre? Should each hospital and physician choose a different format and platform for all of their records?
Let's suppose my family physician suspects I have an ulcer. He takes notes in his office. He sends off some specimens for lab tests, there's another site he has to communicate with. He might arrange for a ultrasound at a local radiology clinic to check for gall bladder trouble. He then refers me to a specialist, who holds a consultation and performs an exam in hisoffice. The specialist needs to perform another diagnostic procedure--this includes a trip to the local hospital for endoscopy. He prescribes some medication, and squirts the relative info off to the pharmacy.
That's half a dozen sites right there that need to be able to communicate--share a wide range of medical records, and do so accurately and seamlessly. Enforcing some sort of standards across the entire health system means that information and people (both medical professionals and their patients) can travel from site to site with a minumum of inconvenience.
Of course in much of our atmosphere, we definitely do not have pure, clear air. There are particulates, there are water droplets, there is all manner of crud. These particles are much more effective scatterers, and they are the primary targets of the instrument being tested. (The instrument name, CALIPSO, stands for Cloud Aerosol LIDAR and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations, after all.)
There's a PDF here that describes the prototype laser as delivering 110 mJ per pulse. At 20 pulses per second, that's about 2 watts average power--but of course the peak power in each (short) pulse will be much higher.
No, no, no. This sort of deliberate misstatement is entirely inappropriate, and /.ers are regularly up in arms over it when the RIAA/MPAA do it. (For example, when they describe the use of Kazaa as theft.) "Theft" is a term that has a very specific meaning in law, and it involves actual property (real property or chattels, not intellectual property--a term which doesn't have a specific legal meaning.) "Conversion" does not apply to this situation either, for the same reason.
Unless SCO was taking physical CDs from Linus and reselling them, then their offenses are limited to (potentially) copyright infringement, fraud, and various flavours of corporate malfeasance. If you need a word to inflame public opinion, try using "fraud". It accurately conveys the notion that SCO is attempting to deceive the public, their stockholders, and the courts for financial gain. Comparisons to Enron might also be appropriate.
IANAL, but I do know it casts doubt on the legitimate concerns of the open source community if its advocates start making inaccurate (even if only technically inaccurate) accusations.
Not quite $300 million. Nothing to sneeze at, but still less than 5% of NASA's current budget.
On the other hand, Americans are involuntarily contributing $300 or so per person to fund the Iraq invasion--this year...hm. Sometimes it's interesting to divide a budget line item by a nation's population. Helps to put things in perspective.
Indeed, though even at 200 to 300 km/h, conventional high-speed rail has an advantage for a lot of journeys. Many airports and airlines are now advising passengers to arrive at least two hours before their flight in order to allow for security checks and whatnot. Additionally, airports are usually located well outside the city centre (noise concerns, and incompatibility between jet aircraft and tall buildings), adding a half hour of travel time at each end in and out of the city. Allow an hour to disembark and get your checked luggage.
Compare rail travel, where I can arrive a half hour before my trip, and I don't have to check my (single) suitcase, and the train station is often in the heart of the city. (I know that in Toronto I don't have to even go outdoors to get to the financial district, the theatre district, or city hall from the train station.)
So, air travel has an extra 3.5 hours of overhead, before one even accounts for time in flight. That's more than 1000 km at 300 km/h, and a respectable 700 km at 200 km/h.
Was it a deliberate thing they did to provide customer email addresses to spammers? Was it an employee smuggling customer data out? Was it an outsource employee doing as much?
Was it just a dictionary attack on your domain? Are you now just getting spam on that account because it didn't bounce? Maybe the spammers also tried davis@foo.com and donald@foo.com, but dell@foo.com was the only one that went through. Quite frankly, I think that is much more likely than the idea that Dell's customer email list was stolen. Finally, Dell would never do something so incredibly stupid as sell their email list to spammers deliberately. (And even if it did happen, don't you think there would be a front page Slashdot story about it?)
TechSupport and CustomerService were absolutely clueless, but that's not surprising; although it was funny to see how well they can embarrass themselves.
Who is embarrassing whom? They're probably genuinely not responsible, so now they're in the awkward position of dealing with a customer who mistakenly blames them for something that's not their fault. There's a saying in medicine that doctors tend to make the worst patients--I suspect that a similar notion might apply in tech support.
Dell is obviously getting paid for all this crap they are installing on your computers.
Eh? Just because Hpaq distributors sell crappy computers loaded with spyware, doesn't mean that every other manufacturer does.
If you were to RTFA, you would note that Dell is not installing spyware--they're just telling their techs not to deal with third-party spyware or removal products. It's a bit unhelpful, but fully within their rights, and certainly not abusive.
Dude! You've ruined it for me! How about a spoiler warning next time, eh?