Accurately predicting the descent could get complicated I think. Isn't the fall caused by atmospheric drag? If so, the atmosphere would get more dense as you descend. Come to think of it, I guess even gravitation in a vacuum doesn't apply uniform acceleration, since you're getting closer to whatever is pulling you in all the time (escape velocity in reverse?) And let's not go into relativism (because I don't really get it)...
Anyhow, I suspect they are not planning to let the ISS coast long enough that its descent rate would exceed 1km/week by much, but maybe I'm wrong.
You would have a point if somebody were claiming 100 million installations, which they're not.
Personally, I tend to prefer relatively simple, objective statistics (like how many downloads were served from some website). What do you propose as a metric? The benchmark of "singular installations" could just as easily be faulted... what about installations on computers nobody uses? What about somebody with 4 computers, should they get 4 "votes"? Or should different installations be weighted by usage, i.e. count page accesses instead? Or we could count "market share," until last month was almost 100% Opera (the only browser somebody tried to charge money for).
My point is not that all benchmarks are equally interesting, just that you can't really fault one benchmark by saying it's a poor proxy for another.
Just like that "AMD tops Intel in retail sales" headline recently.
You might enineer it well enough to measure a wobble of the earth, but to actually package it so it can survive 10.000 years and still have a meaning is not only an engineering feat, it must be an antropology feat as well, to make people long after this understand what it is and leave it in pieces.
I think you're basing your prediction of the future too much on the past. Just because we know hardly anything about 10k years ago, doesn't mean people 10k years from now won't know about us, simply because things now are a lot more advanced than then. I think it's entirely possible these words I'm writing will still be around and comprehensible in 10k years, despite not being very important. Why? Because they're so easy to store and copy now. It's true prehistory wasn't that long ago, but I don't see us going back. Even if you prefer not to see any fundamental distinction between man and animal, it's clear that mankind is on a completely different technological curve than any (other) animal - none has progressed in controlling its environment anywhere near as far or as fast (to me that is a fundamental distinction). Even without that advantage, dinosaurs did quite well for 150 million years or so. It would be disappointing if we don't one-up them:)
So you think HP and others charge a price premium for a free OS to these two guys in particular, but wouldn't for other customers? That's a pretty wacky theory.
Part 2 has a laundry list of deterrents from linux adoption, and none of them is specific to any particular consumer. Which factors are you referring to?
The problem with this is that Microsoft might lose that battle.
Wake up fellas, it already happened. Microsoft gave SCO $10e6 shortly after they launched a legal and PR smear campaign against the GPL. And, yes, SCO went so far as to claim the GPL is unconstitutional, although they didn't pursue that argument very far in court (which is telling).
So does this mean MS has tried to defeat the GPL through the courts, failed, and moved on? Yes IMHO. There just isn't much of a legal leg to stand on, especially now that IBM has taken sides.
No, if it just were population density, then the northeastern US would be better connected.
Besides, whoever said that network cost is proportional to the geographic area, rather than the number of connected hosts and bandwidth? Fiber optic cable isn't that expensive, not compared to the equipment hooked up at either end and the employees who run it. And laying fiber in rural areas is much *cheaper* per mile because urban territory is all paved over and crammed with wires and pipes.
I agree govt. ought to fund research to bridge academic and commercial interests, but that is apart from the parent's argument - that space research sometimes proceeds on weak justification by touting gains in other fields. To me, your argument that "China wants ICMBs" is much more concrete (and believable) than the argument that China wants to discover next-generation Tang or Velcro.
That said, why did the USSR give up on the moon after failing to be first, whereas China still wants to go? Your explanation of demonstrating capability might explain China's actions, but not those of the USSR.
don't buy one of those printers if you care about it that much.
Duh, that's why this whole printer fingerprinting scheme was impelemented in secrecy. It has been going on for years and only just now do we know about it.
To me that's perhaps the biggest issue. At one point this was supposed to be a democracy, now it seems we're sliding into acceptance of secret laws and practices, and a general acceptance that "they" are watching (without even knowing who "they" are). We used to deride "conspiracy theorists" for thinking this kind of stuff was happening. Now we know it is happening, so we just deride the conspiracy theorists for caring.
When will pervasive broadband, peer-to-peer sharing, and availability of downloadable digital media start to improve the quality of the media/content that is available
Simple. Paid downloads give the program producers much more direct and timely information about what people are willing to pay for. That's the key to increasing quality.
In contrast to your other response, I think this could also boost niche programming, because it's a more efficient system overall (more direct feedback + fewer middlemen).
How much you wanna bet the viewership was up for the episode of Lost following the announcement of the video iPod?
What support do you have for this theory? To the affiliates this is maybe a small short-term increase (based on general Lost hype) in exchange for a very real threat of medium-term losses and long-term annihilation.
The affiliates should be scared, because today's TV mechanism is silly and out of date. The very idea of a "channel" is meaningless. And the advertisers are paying approx. $1/per hour to the stations for my time. $1 per hour! At that rate I will gladly outbid the advertisers to reclaim my time. And unlike bittorrent and unrestricted PVR's, legal downloads probably won't have the law working against them. Be afraid, affiliates, be very afraid.
I mean, DNS goes a long way towards turning that hex into something memorable, but as a sysadmin it does NOT make my life easier.
I suppose all the IPv6 addresses under a single administrative domain will be in a block, just as they often are with IPv4. As now, the addresses of machines you administer will only vary in the last byte or two.
i'm sure it'd be very grey ground to look at gpl'd code in order to write say a bsd version.
I think not, but I'll happily admit I'm wrong if you present an instance or two where somebody applied what they learned reading GPL code and legal wrangling ensued.
"You're free to say whatever you want so long as it doesn't infringe on other's rights" is meaningless because there is no real distinction between speech that does and doesn't infringe on others rights. The law is an attempt to draw this distinction, yet in practice whether you get in trouble has little to do with what you say, and more to do with who hears it and what mood they're in and who else is watching and who stands in judgement. The fact is none of us knows what we're free to say. The only way to find out is to say it, and that still doesn't tell you what will happen if you say the same thing again.
Sure there are some clear cut cases like threatening to kill the President (of course the President's rights are different than anyone else's in this case - you can actually get in trouble for threatening him. Say the same thing about anybody else and you're unlikely to have trouble, unless they're a lawyer).
After watching the movie, I don't think it's a conglomeration of photos, but rather a computer-generated rendition of data gleaned from those photos. To me it looks like a rendition of elevation data, snow coverage, etc rather than photos. I'm going by the color of the water, and the effect of the atmosphere on the horizon... and why aren't there any cities at all?
The introductory paragraph says the movies are "a visualization of the dataset [] derived from imagery."
In fact, its tragic that you applaud government for giving away something paid for by taxpayers when there are numerous companies out there providing a similar product (at a very reasonable price).
No, a tragedy is govt. paying MS billions over the years (far more than Office ever cost to develop in the first place), and ending up owning nothing at all. What a massive waste, propping up that 80%+ monopoly profit margin.
Cheering on the govt in standardizing on Microsoft while screaming bloody murder when they try to standardize on an open format is just silly. They have to make a choice one way or the other. You've been spun.
Except OpenOffice can't really interoperate with MSWord. The text will survive, but not the table formatting and so forth. What this means for me is I can't send out a.doc created with OpenOffice - not unless I load it into Word for proofreading, which defeats the whole point.
Full interoperability will never be achieved without open standards. Look at the Web - even with open standards, there is only a very small handful of browsers that can reasonably render an acceptable percentage of pages, and that has been a massive effort spanning years.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyhow, I suspect they are not planning to let the ISS coast long enough that its descent rate would exceed 1km/week by much, but maybe I'm wrong.
Personally, I tend to prefer relatively simple, objective statistics (like how many downloads were served from some website). What do you propose as a metric? The benchmark of "singular installations" could just as easily be faulted... what about installations on computers nobody uses? What about somebody with 4 computers, should they get 4 "votes"? Or should different installations be weighted by usage, i.e. count page accesses instead? Or we could count "market share," until last month was almost 100% Opera (the only browser somebody tried to charge money for).
My point is not that all benchmarks are equally interesting, just that you can't really fault one benchmark by saying it's a poor proxy for another. Just like that "AMD tops Intel in retail sales" headline recently.
Part 2 has a laundry list of deterrents from linux adoption, and none of them is specific to any particular consumer. Which factors are you referring to?
So does this mean MS has tried to defeat the GPL through the courts, failed, and moved on? Yes IMHO. There just isn't much of a legal leg to stand on, especially now that IBM has taken sides.
Besides, whoever said that network cost is proportional to the geographic area, rather than the number of connected hosts and bandwidth? Fiber optic cable isn't that expensive, not compared to the equipment hooked up at either end and the employees who run it. And laying fiber in rural areas is much *cheaper* per mile because urban territory is all paved over and crammed with wires and pipes.
That said, why did the USSR give up on the moon after failing to be first, whereas China still wants to go? Your explanation of demonstrating capability might explain China's actions, but not those of the USSR.
To me that's perhaps the biggest issue. At one point this was supposed to be a democracy, now it seems we're sliding into acceptance of secret laws and practices, and a general acceptance that "they" are watching (without even knowing who "they" are). We used to deride "conspiracy theorists" for thinking this kind of stuff was happening. Now we know it is happening, so we just deride the conspiracy theorists for caring.
In contrast to your other response, I think this could also boost niche programming, because it's a more efficient system overall (more direct feedback + fewer middlemen).
(Granted, this is anticipating future downloads with better quality).
The affiliates should be scared, because today's TV mechanism is silly and out of date. The very idea of a "channel" is meaningless. And the advertisers are paying approx. $1/per hour to the stations for my time. $1 per hour! At that rate I will gladly outbid the advertisers to reclaim my time. And unlike bittorrent and unrestricted PVR's, legal downloads probably won't have the law working against them. Be afraid, affiliates, be very afraid.
(Space travel, that is. Space in itself is quite handy.)
Sure there are some clear cut cases like threatening to kill the President (of course the President's rights are different than anyone else's in this case - you can actually get in trouble for threatening him. Say the same thing about anybody else and you're unlikely to have trouble, unless they're a lawyer).
The introductory paragraph says the movies are "a visualization of the dataset [] derived from imagery."
Spelling isn't science, it's convention.
That's meaningless. Everything you do affects other people, at least a little bit.
Cheering on the govt in standardizing on Microsoft while screaming bloody murder when they try to standardize on an open format is just silly. They have to make a choice one way or the other. You've been spun.
Full interoperability will never be achieved without open standards. Look at the Web - even with open standards, there is only a very small handful of browsers that can reasonably render an acceptable percentage of pages, and that has been a massive effort spanning years.
Then again, the event you reference was career-ending for one of the biggest and longest-running names in news. That is something.