Just to add to this, if a woman is color-blind, then I believe it follows that her offspring will indefinitely be color-blind as well, as the husband has not the genetic material to supply for color-vision?
Interesting enough, I just came across this term while looking up Komodo Dragons (which apparently in some cases have been known to have parthenogenic conception while in captivity). There's a wikipedia article on it here. Apparently it has also been known to occur in some fish/sharks or birds (as noted, in incubated turkey eggs).
Actually the wikipedia article is pretty interesting. I wonder if by discovering ways to do this in a test-tube environment, scientists could pave the way to enabling asexual reproduction within mammals or humans... a scary thought actually.
But then, but my understanding of this, any breach of the contract would be an issue between ebay and the buyer/sell, but not between the buyer/seller themselves until the point where the bid becomes a cash transaction?
That being said, ebay could sue or punish a non-paying buyer for breach of contract, or due the same to a sell that doesn't provide the actual item, but I'm not sure the seller could do so to the buyer or vise-versa until the cash transaction is finalized and/or the goods shipped. At any rate, you'd probably need more info from ebay or paypal to go after the seller/buyer regardless.
However, it appears that at least in Australia they've defined that the closing bid seems to mark the "ink on paper" of the contract implied by the ebay system.
What I wonder about is when a bidder cancels the auction just before close. In one case, I had a really good price on an item, and just before ending the seller closed the auction with the reason "item was found to be lost/broken"
I watched the seller for awhile to see if he re-listed and tried to sell the same item, as I think he just didn't get the high bids he had hoped for, but after a while said to heck with it. What would the obligations of a seller be in this case?
I looked up a few details and found this article, which - if correct - seems to provide a lot of information.
It appears that there are many factors in lithium battery life. Deep-cycling is not good, but neither would repeatedly charging the battery when it is not necessary (using up charge cycles). It also mentions an often-forgotten factor, heat, which as well could be related to overcharging, or constant charging.
As it says in the article "Removing the battery from the laptop when running on fixed power protects the battery from heat."
Perhaps a happy-medium would to charge when it's about halfway down?
It seems to me that the best method would be to have a quick-switch circuit which would combine fixed-power, a capacitor, and the battery. When plugged into wall-power, the battery is charged up and then disconnected from the circuit when around full. The circuit then runs off fixed-power which runs through a capacitor. In the event of a drop or disconnection of fixed-power, the circuit could stay "alive" long enough on the capacitor to switch back over to using the battery. I'm not sure if anyone does this though, but depending on the needs of the capacitor it might be a good fix... it shouldn't have to run on the cap for more than a second or two before swapping over to battery-power.
My question would also be, how quick can one write 50GB on an HD disk. At the very least, I'd expect the early burners (and some are out already, I just haven't tested one) to take a looooong time to burn a disk, not to mention the CPU power and space that would be required to master content if one were maing video.
Well, I'd have to comment that it's probably a combination. It seems to be that in my earlier years I was definitely a bit more focussed on developing my mental attributes as opposed to my physical/social ones. Maybe it's a chicken-and-egg scenario, wherein you're less popular because you're a geek, and eventually you close yourself to the rest of the world because you're unpopular and thus fail to develop proper social skills.
I'll be the first to admit that I lacked many important social graces up to late high school. On the other hand, it often was that after repeated attempts to meet new people and make new friends, and getting summarily rejected if not having my ass kicked, that I finally said "screw it" and simply focussed on my education, work, and video games and/or solitary recreation activities (biking, etc).
I actually met my first girlfriend while visiting my cousin in another city (it was his girlfriend's cousin, weird). After that, I learned a bit about women, and paid more attention to my appearance and manners, etc, and thus did my ability to communicate with woman and social skills in general develop.
Even then, I did not jump in the sack right away during my early dating, despite a certain amount of pressure to do so ("what do you mean you don't want to, you're a guy?" etc etc). It wasn't due to lack of interest in that subject, but rather that I was quite aware (and afraid) of the possible consequences. That I was conceived before my parents were 20 might have had a bit to do with my rather strong awareness of the consequences of such things.
So, to make a long story short. Yes, being a big nerd does tend to put one outside of the social circles where one would meet woman and thus have more opportunities to get lucky. However, it may also be true to a certain amount of intelligent discretion does lend towards - if not less sex - at least more care in using proper protection and choosing safe partners.
I was just recently on holidays in the other side of the country. Since I spent a lot of my time wandering around downtown, I had a sling-bag - as well as at times a backpack - that I took with me everywhere and had my camera and various other items inside. It's really quite interesting to find how much I counted on having my car or house nearby for dropping stuff off. I suppose if my camera had a 4GB card it could have taken enough crap-quality video to record the movie, but it's primarily a digital camera not a video-camera.
I was a bit worried about being searched or bothered, but had no problems, but I suppose I could have ended up in a similar situation. I didn't have anything else that I would worry about in my bag during a search, but if they hassled me about the camera I suppose I would have left.
My observation has been that those who are more hard-working or studious tend to have less time for relationships, physical included, and the other things that come along with them (children, etc). Perhaps it's not so much that they're smart as that they're busy?
First of all, what gives you the idea that your computer is or was top-of-the-line? Just because it was expensive and/or your salesperson said it was doesn't make it so. I have several older machines, ranging from 1-4 years old. Most of them weren't exactly top-of-the-line when I got them. All are capable of playing C&C3. The primary machine I use is a laptop, which - while I'm not sure on the exact date it came out - I can find press releases going back to 2003. For the record, it's an HP zd7000 laptop, and it runs C&C3.
So for all those that moan that their "cutting edge" machine can't run the game, I'd say that perhaps your complaint should not be to the game manufacturer, but rather that you were cheated by whomever sold you the machine...
Lastly, given that Blizzard tends to try and reach a larger, less cutting-edge audience (making games playable on both high-end and lesser hardware), I fully expect that my machine will happily play Starcraft 2 in the future.
Indeed. If they're going to compare something, it would be good to show "moved to OSX from windows XP or earlier", "moved to Vista from Mac OSX and earlier", and "moved to Vista from windows XP and earlier"
It's also good to keep in mind that Vista is a "new thing" whilst OSX has been around. Those "upgrading" to OSX quite likely did so awhile ago.
Don't forget the Canadians, who - while our population mix tends to come from many of the above anyhow - are just busy making sure nobody claims we are Americans...
p.s. If you think American junk food is bad, try Scottish. Deep-fried Mars-bars anyone?
I'm not entirely sure about how well it would work over the internet, but it wouldn't be that impossible to setup a remote PXE-style boot wherein the client machine has little to no operating system. For a true PXE, it would have no OS, or you could have something like a simple boot-kernel (as we use around here sometimes, grub+kernel+initrd) that boots and loads the remainder of the operating environment through the internet.
Security would be an issue, of course, but perhaps you could have something like a VPN or SSH based encapsulation of the mountpoints. As extremely high-speed internet connections become available, internet providers could offer not only internet service, but a whole operating system booted straight from the network. It would be very useful for clients that just want email, browsing, and perhaps messaging. Our systems at work support everything from basic browsing to video editing, 3d graphics apps, and streamed media. It requires a gigabit uplink between major switches and to the server, but in the future perhaps it could be doable on an internet scale.
A simple bootkernel would also be very useful for providing diagnostic/technical support. Have the client connect without a router, boot PXE, and then the ISP can run tests between the computer and their servers to see if issues have arisen from the user's PC, the internet connection/server/network, or the user's OS.
I really doubt it will help Sony's PR any to do this. Those that actually know about the rootkits will know that Sony is at fault. Those that don't will remain clueless. A rootkit maker will either be sued out of existence or tied up in court. Finally, it will probably make many think twice about doing business with Sony in the future, since nobody wants to end up as their new scapegoat.
Sounds like a good plan to me, take careful aim at that foot, Sony!
Actually, the third one is a good point. There are a lot of abuses of personal information, and the more that is available the more abuses there will be:
Because you might do something wrong with my information.
All the companies that "lose" your credit card info and others seem to get slaps on the wrist. Having your credit ruined can ruin your life. Now how about if somebody gets access to your more personal info. Suddenly you're an even better target for stalking, extortion, and more. *NOT* good.
Even if the government wasn't going to abuse this information (and they will), security leaks and hacking would lead to it being available to those that would have no problem abusing it.
I think that in some cases it's due to the American wetware being too slow to process the more complex datastream. Somewhat like decoding divX video on an old Pentium I:-)
- Have an infected partner
- Have a broken condom
- Actually contract AIDS from the exposure
Now in most cases, if you knowingly have encounter the first obstacle and proceed with sex, protected or not, you are knowingly engaging in a heavy risk. Multiple partners of course increases the risk of being unknowingly exposed, so knowing your partner is a bit thing, but adding protection to a known partner does greatly reduce risks.
99% protection is still pretty damn good if you've got a reliable partner and are practicing good sexual practices/hygiene, although I would personally advocate against promiscuity I have nothing against sex itself. One would hope that having sex weekly for several years, you would have a partner who had been screened against HIV and safe. I'd like to know where you got the 99% number, care to cite your sources and factors?
I have talked to friends of both genders who have insisted that they *need* to get laid. If it weren't for the internet and dirty magazines, what might some people do to satisfy the *need* when that outlet is no longer available. I'm not necessarily talking about crime - although for some it's a distinct possibility - but picking up some chick/dude in a bar just to scratch the itch isn't always the safest or most productive behavior either.
I've got one on right now. It's an old Seiko, which used to be my grandfather's. If I wear it for the day, then usually it manages to have enough juice/wind to sit on my nightstand when I hit the sack and yet still be keeping correct time in the morning. If I sleep in it usually runs out of juice and stops.
I'm not sure if it runs on an electric (charging a capacitor) or mechanical (winding a spring) principal though, and as curious as I have been I wouldn't want to pull it apart to find out.
Their lawyers would probably also argue that if someone wants to make a backup of their legitimately purchased media, then technology exists to make that copy locally and not require that they download it elsewhere
How would the software differentiate between a locally created backup copy and one that was downloaded?
To add to that, this program is doing to the equivilient to
"Lots of BMW's and Hondas are being stolen lately, so we will search your garage to see if the car in there matches"
It sorta seems to miss the part where you might actually "own" the car in question, or in the case of music, own the original media the song came from.
My question would be how it knows you don't have an original copy of the materials in question? I wouldn't install this software myself, but if I did it would find mp3'ed copies of a few dozen albums that I ripped for use in my own portable devices or in my car's CD-mp3 player.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to add to this, if a woman is color-blind, then I believe it follows that her offspring will indefinitely be color-blind as well, as the husband has not the genetic material to supply for color-vision?
Interesting enough, I just came across this term while looking up Komodo Dragons (which apparently in some cases have been known to have parthenogenic conception while in captivity). There's a wikipedia article on it here. Apparently it has also been known to occur in some fish/sharks or birds (as noted, in incubated turkey eggs).
Actually the wikipedia article is pretty interesting. I wonder if by discovering ways to do this in a test-tube environment, scientists could pave the way to enabling asexual reproduction within mammals or humans... a scary thought actually.
But then, but my understanding of this, any breach of the contract would be an issue between ebay and the buyer/sell, but not between the buyer/seller themselves until the point where the bid becomes a cash transaction?
That being said, ebay could sue or punish a non-paying buyer for breach of contract, or due the same to a sell that doesn't provide the actual item, but I'm not sure the seller could do so to the buyer or vise-versa until the cash transaction is finalized and/or the goods shipped. At any rate, you'd probably need more info from ebay or paypal to go after the seller/buyer regardless.
However, it appears that at least in Australia they've defined that the closing bid seems to mark the "ink on paper" of the contract implied by the ebay system.
What I wonder about is when a bidder cancels the auction just before close. In one case, I had a really good price on an item, and just before ending the seller closed the auction with the reason "item was found to be lost/broken"
I watched the seller for awhile to see if he re-listed and tried to sell the same item, as I think he just didn't get the high bids he had hoped for, but after a while said to heck with it. What would the obligations of a seller be in this case?
Supercapacitors might reduce the size in these cases, however.
I looked up a few details and found this article, which - if correct - seems to provide a lot of information.
It appears that there are many factors in lithium battery life. Deep-cycling is not good, but neither would repeatedly charging the battery when it is not necessary (using up charge cycles). It also mentions an often-forgotten factor, heat, which as well could be related to overcharging, or constant charging.
As it says in the article "Removing the battery from the laptop when running on fixed power protects the battery from heat."
Perhaps a happy-medium would to charge when it's about halfway down?
It seems to me that the best method would be to have a quick-switch circuit which would combine fixed-power, a capacitor, and the battery. When plugged into wall-power, the battery is charged up and then disconnected from the circuit when around full. The circuit then runs off fixed-power which runs through a capacitor. In the event of a drop or disconnection of fixed-power, the circuit could stay "alive" long enough on the capacitor to switch back over to using the battery. I'm not sure if anyone does this though, but depending on the needs of the capacitor it might be a good fix... it shouldn't have to run on the cap for more than a second or two before swapping over to battery-power.
My question would also be, how quick can one write 50GB on an HD disk. At the very least, I'd expect the early burners (and some are out already, I just haven't tested one) to take a looooong time to burn a disk, not to mention the CPU power and space that would be required to master content if one were maing video.
Well, I'd have to comment that it's probably a combination. It seems to be that in my earlier years I was definitely a bit more focussed on developing my mental attributes as opposed to my physical/social ones. Maybe it's a chicken-and-egg scenario, wherein you're less popular because you're a geek, and eventually you close yourself to the rest of the world because you're unpopular and thus fail to develop proper social skills.
I'll be the first to admit that I lacked many important social graces up to late high school. On the other hand, it often was that after repeated attempts to meet new people and make new friends, and getting summarily rejected if not having my ass kicked, that I finally said "screw it" and simply focussed on my education, work, and video games and/or solitary recreation activities (biking, etc).
I actually met my first girlfriend while visiting my cousin in another city (it was his girlfriend's cousin, weird). After that, I learned a bit about women, and paid more attention to my appearance and manners, etc, and thus did my ability to communicate with woman and social skills in general develop.
Even then, I did not jump in the sack right away during my early dating, despite a certain amount of pressure to do so ("what do you mean you don't want to, you're a guy?" etc etc). It wasn't due to lack of interest in that subject, but rather that I was quite aware (and afraid) of the possible consequences. That I was conceived before my parents were 20 might have had a bit to do with my rather strong awareness of the consequences of such things.
So, to make a long story short. Yes, being a big nerd does tend to put one outside of the social circles where one would meet woman and thus have more opportunities to get lucky. However, it may also be true to a certain amount of intelligent discretion does lend towards - if not less sex - at least more care in using proper protection and choosing safe partners.
I was just recently on holidays in the other side of the country. Since I spent a lot of my time wandering around downtown, I had a sling-bag - as well as at times a backpack - that I took with me everywhere and had my camera and various other items inside. It's really quite interesting to find how much I counted on having my car or house nearby for dropping stuff off. I suppose if my camera had a 4GB card it could have taken enough crap-quality video to record the movie, but it's primarily a digital camera not a video-camera.
I was a bit worried about being searched or bothered, but had no problems, but I suppose I could have ended up in a similar situation. I didn't have anything else that I would worry about in my bag during a search, but if they hassled me about the camera I suppose I would have left.
My observation has been that those who are more hard-working or studious tend to have less time for relationships, physical included, and the other things that come along with them (children, etc). Perhaps it's not so much that they're smart as that they're busy?
First of all, what gives you the idea that your computer is or was top-of-the-line? Just because it was expensive and/or your salesperson said it was doesn't make it so. I have several older machines, ranging from 1-4 years old. Most of them weren't exactly top-of-the-line when I got them. All are capable of playing C&C3. The primary machine I use is a laptop, which - while I'm not sure on the exact date it came out - I can find press releases going back to 2003. For the record, it's an HP zd7000 laptop, and it runs C&C3.
So for all those that moan that their "cutting edge" machine can't run the game, I'd say that perhaps your complaint should not be to the game manufacturer, but rather that you were cheated by whomever sold you the machine...
Lastly, given that Blizzard tends to try and reach a larger, less cutting-edge audience (making games playable on both high-end and lesser hardware), I fully expect that my machine will happily play Starcraft 2 in the future.
Indeed. If they're going to compare something, it would be good to show "moved to OSX from windows XP or earlier", "moved to Vista from Mac OSX and earlier", and "moved to Vista from windows XP and earlier"
It's also good to keep in mind that Vista is a "new thing" whilst OSX has been around. Those "upgrading" to OSX quite likely did so awhile ago.
Don't forget the Canadians, who - while our population mix tends to come from many of the above anyhow - are just busy making sure nobody claims we are Americans...
p.s. If you think American junk food is bad, try Scottish. Deep-fried Mars-bars anyone?
I'm not entirely sure about how well it would work over the internet, but it wouldn't be that impossible to setup a remote PXE-style boot wherein the client machine has little to no operating system. For a true PXE, it would have no OS, or you could have something like a simple boot-kernel (as we use around here sometimes, grub+kernel+initrd) that boots and loads the remainder of the operating environment through the internet.
Security would be an issue, of course, but perhaps you could have something like a VPN or SSH based encapsulation of the mountpoints. As extremely high-speed internet connections become available, internet providers could offer not only internet service, but a whole operating system booted straight from the network. It would be very useful for clients that just want email, browsing, and perhaps messaging. Our systems at work support everything from basic browsing to video editing, 3d graphics apps, and streamed media. It requires a gigabit uplink between major switches and to the server, but in the future perhaps it could be doable on an internet scale.
A simple bootkernel would also be very useful for providing diagnostic/technical support. Have the client connect without a router, boot PXE, and then the ISP can run tests between the computer and their servers to see if issues have arisen from the user's PC, the internet connection/server/network, or the user's OS.
I really doubt it will help Sony's PR any to do this. Those that actually know about the rootkits will know that Sony is at fault. Those that don't will remain clueless. A rootkit maker will either be sued out of existence or tied up in court. Finally, it will probably make many think twice about doing business with Sony in the future, since nobody wants to end up as their new scapegoat.
Sounds like a good plan to me, take careful aim at that foot, Sony!
Actually, the third one is a good point. There are a lot of abuses of personal information, and the more that is available the more abuses there will be:
Because you might do something wrong with my information.
All the companies that "lose" your credit card info and others seem to get slaps on the wrist. Having your credit ruined can ruin your life. Now how about if somebody gets access to your more personal info. Suddenly you're an even better target for stalking, extortion, and more. *NOT* good.
Even if the government wasn't going to abuse this information (and they will), security leaks and hacking would lead to it being available to those that would have no problem abusing it.
I think that in some cases it's due to the American wetware being too slow to process the more complex datastream. Somewhat like decoding divX video on an old Pentium I :-)
You have to pass all these obstacles:
- Have an infected partner
- Have a broken condom
- Actually contract AIDS from the exposure
Now in most cases, if you knowingly have encounter the first obstacle and proceed with sex, protected or not, you are knowingly engaging in a heavy risk. Multiple partners of course increases the risk of being unknowingly exposed, so knowing your partner is a bit thing, but adding protection to a known partner does greatly reduce risks.
99% protection is still pretty damn good if you've got a reliable partner and are practicing good sexual practices/hygiene, although I would personally advocate against promiscuity I have nothing against sex itself. One would hope that having sex weekly for several years, you would have a partner who had been screened against HIV and safe. I'd like to know where you got the 99% number, care to cite your sources and factors?
MS has successfully made a lot of their software tamper resistent by the mere virtue of not publishing the source code
Compatibility resistant too...
I have talked to friends of both genders who have insisted that they *need* to get laid. If it weren't for the internet and dirty magazines, what might some people do to satisfy the *need* when that outlet is no longer available. I'm not necessarily talking about crime - although for some it's a distinct possibility - but picking up some chick/dude in a bar just to scratch the itch isn't always the safest or most productive behavior either.
Yes, but now the music+movie industry can blame the failure on the ISP, and drag them into further litigation.
I've got one on right now. It's an old Seiko, which used to be my grandfather's. If I wear it for the day, then usually it manages to have enough juice/wind to sit on my nightstand when I hit the sack and yet still be keeping correct time in the morning. If I sleep in it usually runs out of juice and stops.
I'm not sure if it runs on an electric (charging a capacitor) or mechanical (winding a spring) principal though, and as curious as I have been I wouldn't want to pull it apart to find out.
Their lawyers would probably also argue that if someone wants to make a backup of their legitimately purchased media, then technology exists to make that copy locally and not require that they download it elsewhere
How would the software differentiate between a locally created backup copy and one that was downloaded?
To add to that, this program is doing to the equivilient to "Lots of BMW's and Hondas are being stolen lately, so we will search your garage to see if the car in there matches"
It sorta seems to miss the part where you might actually "own" the car in question, or in the case of music, own the original media the song came from.
My question would be how it knows you don't have an original copy of the materials in question? I wouldn't install this software myself, but if I did it would find mp3'ed copies of a few dozen albums that I ripped for use in my own portable devices or in my car's CD-mp3 player.