I'm certainly not the first person to notice this was announced yesterday but went into effect almost two weeks ago.
IANACL, but even if it's legal to say "we are changing our service agreement," how can it possibly be okay to say "we have changed our service agreement as of two weeks ago?" The first at least allows you to cancel your service in response.
Unless this is some amazing cock-up, it probably means that some sort of Internet dragnet went into operation on June 16 and got the goods on a bunch of Bell Sympatic customers.
Linus's presence on the list is indeed a backhanded complement. At present, the kernel matters to Linux users about as much as the chassis matters to a truck driver: It's the platform, and you damned sure can't do without it, but all the really interesting stuff is what's bolted onto it. As long as the platform is well-built and stable, all I want to do is drive around, maybe tinker with the engine a little.
Let's not get too carried away with the metaphor here.
And am I the only one who thinks Linus' picture makes him look like the Joker?
note the article says 10-cyclinder whereas the summary says 12-cylinder
Well, it's from a.au domain, so obviously they have to convert from cylinders Australian to cylinders U.S. The exchange rate has gone straight to hell in the last few years.
I don't think they will be able to find enough developers that will trust them. They're already trying to steal the work of countless others, the sentiment goes, why would we try to do business with them again?
This is why their former customers are not going to be future customers, unless they're badly locked in on some 3rd party software. And non-customers will never become customers. Who wants to do business with somebody who'll sue you for moving to a competitor's product? It's like getting divorced from a gold-digger.
Oopsie. Added a nine there: Please read: "between 99.999% ("five nines") and 99.9999% ("six nines")". Seven nines would be 3.2 seconds per year. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Carrier Grade means reliable enough that the phone company and other major data carriers would use it to run a switch. That means between 99.999% and 99.99999% uptime, or between 5 about minutes and 30 seconds of total downtime per year.
Sound excessive? Those switches aren't just carrying phone calls to grandma. They carry 911 calls. Realtime FCC flight control data. Multibillion dollar bank transfers. In other words if they fail, planes collide and economies collapse.
Well, that and the fact that Microsoft usually insists on eating its own dogfood. As for the other, who's gonna stop them? Plus when you go to them and say, "Oh yeah? You and what army?" They can just say, "Nope, just us."
10. Potato chips
Chef George Crum concocted the perfect sandwich complement in 1853 when - to spite a customer who complained that his fries were cut too thick - he sliced a potato paper-thin and fried it to a crisp. Needless to say, the diner couldn't eat just one.
It would appear that many great inventions have been projects to make somebody shut the hell up. This puts potato chips are on the same list as the Total Perspective Vortex.
More likely the first invention-induced accident was in underwear. Like the guy who invented mountain biking? He was probably trying to invent a better set of brakes, messed that up, went off the road and ended up going on a very fast ride through the woods. His Fruit-of-the-Looms have a special place of honor in the Extreme Sports Hall of Fame.
And in this case, his famous words of discovery were not "Eureka!" but "Oh Shit Oh Shit Oh Shit I'm Gonna Dieeeeeee!"
A lot of people are dismissive of Java as having failed on client GUI apps.
I'm one of them: The early Java GUI tools were a well-thought-out abomination that sent droves and droves of developers in search of better solutions. A lot of them saw VB just sitting there, and all their customers were on Windows anyway, and now Java's in an irredemable hole as far as GUI development goes. This is good, because innovative projects often start as a reaction to suckage elsewhere.
So Java itself will never make a serious dent in the realm of GUI clients. The reason is very simple: AJAX and SaaS are using the interface provided by the browser. Browsers have reached a capability threshold that is making them the client-side platform of choice.
We're reaching the point where, as far as desktop machines are concerned, the OS simply the framework for a windowing system, and the windowing system is simply the framework for the browser, and all HCI will happen in the browser. Sure, the server-side of the app may reside on the same system, and be written in just whatever language happens to be there, but all it will do is exchange XML and HTML with Firefox.
The OS is becoming an afterthought, and the Windowing system is an afterthought with skins. The browser is where it's at, and MS is gonna be hurtin' if people see Vista as merely the tool behind the tool behind the tool they use to get their jobs done.
It would help if we stopped calling it a "robot." It was a robotic arm. Even the word "arm" is too anthropomorphically suggestive: Spot welder arms of the era were so primitive that they couldn't realign themselves if the product was off center. If the car frames going down the assembly line were 5mm too high, all the welds would be 5mm too low. Expecting one to know if a human was in the way as it swung would be like expecting a car to know it was driving on the sidewalk. Maybe some day, but not in 1981.
Try shorting a car battery with a screwdriver and tell me there isn't a violent electrical arc
I was talking about the batteries for portable electronic devices, not car batteries.
And I've witnessed the explosion of a truck battery before. What explodes is the hydrogen produced during the charging process. Sulfuric acid gets sprayed everywhere. Way the hell fun.
Capacitors surely have the advantage of not doing that when they explode, but let's just look at the rate of discharge and the stored energy. Example: My camera uses four 2800mAh AA-size batteries. That's 40,320 coulombs, which at 6 volts comes to 6.7 kilofarads or 242 kilojoules. A capacitor storing that can discharge it instantly. An 80 Ah car battery stores about 3.5 megajoules. Discharging that much energy in 5 milliseconds (a number I pulled out of my ass (making it exactly the same as every other number here)) comes to 691 megawatts.
Hook two of those babies to a flux capacitor and Dr. Emmett Brown can send you back in time. Do yourself a favor: instead of taking your hot teen mom to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, sit down and write a Kurosawa-in-space knockoff called Star Wars. When it's time for the second sequel, see if you can do it with no fucking Ewoks. You'll be glad you did.
Isn't the space-elevator being made from these bad-boys?
That's one proposal, but chances are that instead of using individual, free-standing nanotubes a few micrometers in length secured only at one end, they'll weave millions of somewhat longer ones together into cables that will be under tension.
I have a couple of concerns about the safety and durability of nanotube capacitors, particularly if they are to be used in portable equipment.
First, safety. One of the amazingly cool things about capacitors is that they can deliver all their charge over the course of a few milliseconds. This makes them very useful for things like strobelights and subwoofers. But it can be very, very dangerous: What happens if you drop your in the toilet? Or you drop your iPod and it gets run over by a car? If they have batteries, a short circuit will cause the battery to get warm for a while, or it will release some slightly caustic goo and you have to wash your hands. But if they have capacitors, you get an explosion and a violent electrical arc.
Second, durability. You can beat the hell out of a chemical battery, expose it to shock and vibration to no end and it will continue to operate. These nanotubes, OTOH look awfully easy to break. Breakage could cause two things to happen: loss of capacitance, or worse, an internal short circuit, and see above.
It will be interesting to see how these two problems are addressed, or if these cool toys will be relegated to industrial and other controlled-environment applications.
The fundamentals of the patent system is to protect the author's idea and inventions.
Close, but there's a critical flaw in that oversimplification. Patents, like copyrights, were designed to strike a balance between the rights of creators and the rights of everybody else. But like any other legal fiction, the concept of "intellectual property" has been distorted far beyond its original intent, in the ways most profitable to those who already profit from it.
Patent systems were meant to help you protect your invention and make it exclusively yours for a limited time. After that, it belongs to everybody. You invent something, and make what money as you can, then a few years later it's just another thing anybody can use.
But patents expire. After you've been protected from us, the rest of us are now protected from you. This is good. If you don't think it is, consider what the world would be like if one big company that still held a patent on "the use of electrical signals to convey a message."
It might not have been all that cold: A major contributor to the accident may have been fermentation, which would have lowered the liquid's viscosity considerably. It wouldn't have cooled until it was down on the street, spread out and wrapped around everything.
Including animals: Remember, this was a horse-drawn era. Horses mired in this mess would have torn themselves apart trying to break free.
If somebody depends on a piece of equipment to protect his life, he develops a bond to it. For example, motorcyclists (seasoned ones, anyway) ride with a heavy thought in their mind: "If I fuck this up, I die." Then they move in a certain way and the bike moves like it's a part of them and they're both out of trouble. Riders really, really bond with their bikes, 'cause their bikes keep them happy and alive.
So if you ever have a conversation with a paramedic, ask them about bike accidents they've responded to. Ask them what the motorcyclist keeps saying over and over again. The guy will have bone sticking out of his leg, and all he'll say is, "Dude! Is my bike okay?"
Seasoned EMTs have a canned response: "Couple of dings, paint's scratched, but she'll be fine." Once you get that thought of the rider's head you can get around to the "oriented times three" questions.
Learning to ride a motorcycle is (arguably) harder than learning to drive a car, but for certain jobs, the bike is better.
Not necessarily better, but certainly more rewarding. In rec.motorcycles a few years ago, it was pointed out that there are only three things motorcycles do better than cars:
Accelerate,
Fit into small spaces, and
Fall over.
So I guess I agree with you: I've been dealing with the luxury-SUV called Eclipse at work. It's comfy, amenity-ridden, and hauls an entire project in one cumbersome load. But it doesn't steer or brake, and its features keep getting in the way when I know what I'm doing. So I've been finding more and more excuses to use vim. Its zippiness has been a blast.
One of the contengencies they're trying to plan for is the total destruction of civilization. On the timescale they're discussing, it's very probably there will be another Dark Age, durhing which history is forgotten, old languages are known only a handful of preservationists, and one continent doesn't even know the other one exists.
To say nothing of the consequence of climate shift. 24,000 years is enough time for an ice age to come and go, dragging every familiar weather pattern with it. It's time enough for the site to become a desert with 100MPH winds sandblasting the text off of every exposed surface for months at a time.
In the face of such conditions, written language may be unable to bear any message at all.
It's a cryin' shame he can't take this out in traffic. 2,000 degree high-thrust exhaust at windshield level would solve the hell out of a tailgating problem.
You need a bumper sticker that says, "If you can read this your windshield is about to melt."
If the Unis expelled students for spying on pirates and didn't expell the pirates themselves, they would have a buttload of lawsuits on their hands.
I disagree. If the spying is unlawful or in violation of school policy, I could make a strong claim that any results of the spying are inherently corrupt. So the spies go, the spied-upon stay. IANAL and I know there are always exceptions, but in the real world and for the most part, if a cop searches your home without a warrant or consent, any evidence obtained during that search, and any evidence derived from that evidence, can't be used in court.
Slashdot Mirror
IANACL, but even if it's legal to say "we are changing our service agreement," how can it possibly be okay to say "we have changed our service agreement as of two weeks ago?" The first at least allows you to cancel your service in response.
Unless this is some amazing cock-up, it probably means that some sort of Internet dragnet went into operation on June 16 and got the goods on a bunch of Bell Sympatic customers.
Let's not get too carried away with the metaphor here.
And am I the only one who thinks Linus' picture makes him look like the Joker?
Flight data still has to move around, and that's done over SONET rings and RBOCs do indeed handle it.
note the article says 10-cyclinder whereas the summary says 12-cylinder Well, it's from a .au domain, so obviously they have to convert from cylinders Australian to cylinders U.S. The exchange rate has gone straight to hell in the last few years.
This is why their former customers are not going to be future customers, unless they're badly locked in on some 3rd party software. And non-customers will never become customers. Who wants to do business with somebody who'll sue you for moving to a competitor's product? It's like getting divorced from a gold-digger.
Oopsie. Added a nine there: Please read: "between 99.999% ("five nines") and 99.9999% ("six nines")". Seven nines would be 3.2 seconds per year. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Carrier Grade means reliable enough that the phone company and other major data carriers would use it to run a switch. That means between 99.999% and 99.99999% uptime, or between 5 about minutes and 30 seconds of total downtime per year.
Sound excessive? Those switches aren't just carrying phone calls to grandma. They carry 911 calls. Realtime FCC flight control data. Multibillion dollar bank transfers. In other words if they fail, planes collide and economies collapse.
Well, that and the fact that Microsoft usually insists on eating its own dogfood. As for the other, who's gonna stop them? Plus when you go to them and say, "Oh yeah? You and what army?" They can just say, "Nope, just us."
And in this case, his famous words of discovery were not "Eureka!" but "Oh Shit Oh Shit Oh Shit I'm Gonna Dieeeeeee!"
I'm one of them: The early Java GUI tools were a well-thought-out abomination that sent droves and droves of developers in search of better solutions. A lot of them saw VB just sitting there, and all their customers were on Windows anyway, and now Java's in an irredemable hole as far as GUI development goes. This is good, because innovative projects often start as a reaction to suckage elsewhere.
So Java itself will never make a serious dent in the realm of GUI clients. The reason is very simple: AJAX and SaaS are using the interface provided by the browser. Browsers have reached a capability threshold that is making them the client-side platform of choice.
We're reaching the point where, as far as desktop machines are concerned, the OS simply the framework for a windowing system, and the windowing system is simply the framework for the browser, and all HCI will happen in the browser. Sure, the server-side of the app may reside on the same system, and be written in just whatever language happens to be there, but all it will do is exchange XML and HTML with Firefox.
The OS is becoming an afterthought, and the Windowing system is an afterthought with skins. The browser is where it's at, and MS is gonna be hurtin' if people see Vista as merely the tool behind the tool behind the tool they use to get their jobs done.
It would help if we stopped calling it a "robot." It was a robotic arm. Even the word "arm" is too anthropomorphically suggestive: Spot welder arms of the era were so primitive that they couldn't realign themselves if the product was off center. If the car frames going down the assembly line were 5mm too high, all the welds would be 5mm too low. Expecting one to know if a human was in the way as it swung would be like expecting a car to know it was driving on the sidewalk. Maybe some day, but not in 1981.
I was talking about the batteries for portable electronic devices, not car batteries.
And I've witnessed the explosion of a truck battery before. What explodes is the hydrogen produced during the charging process. Sulfuric acid gets sprayed everywhere. Way the hell fun.
Capacitors surely have the advantage of not doing that when they explode, but let's just look at the rate of discharge and the stored energy. Example: My camera uses four 2800mAh AA-size batteries. That's 40,320 coulombs, which at 6 volts comes to 6.7 kilofarads or 242 kilojoules. A capacitor storing that can discharge it instantly. An 80 Ah car battery stores about 3.5 megajoules. Discharging that much energy in 5 milliseconds (a number I pulled out of my ass (making it exactly the same as every other number here)) comes to 691 megawatts.
Hook two of those babies to a flux capacitor and Dr. Emmett Brown can send you back in time. Do yourself a favor: instead of taking your hot teen mom to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, sit down and write a Kurosawa-in-space knockoff called Star Wars. When it's time for the second sequel, see if you can do it with no fucking Ewoks. You'll be glad you did.
That's one proposal, but chances are that instead of using individual, free-standing nanotubes a few micrometers in length secured only at one end, they'll weave millions of somewhat longer ones together into cables that will be under tension.
First, safety. One of the amazingly cool things about capacitors is that they can deliver all their charge over the course of a few milliseconds. This makes them very useful for things like strobelights and subwoofers. But it can be very, very dangerous: What happens if you drop your in the toilet? Or you drop your iPod and it gets run over by a car? If they have batteries, a short circuit will cause the battery to get warm for a while, or it will release some slightly caustic goo and you have to wash your hands. But if they have capacitors, you get an explosion and a violent electrical arc.
Second, durability. You can beat the hell out of a chemical battery, expose it to shock and vibration to no end and it will continue to operate. These nanotubes, OTOH look awfully easy to break. Breakage could cause two things to happen: loss of capacitance, or worse, an internal short circuit, and see above.
It will be interesting to see how these two problems are addressed, or if these cool toys will be relegated to industrial and other controlled-environment applications.
Of course, they also think that by "correcting" your spelling I've circumvented your copy protection scheme, thereby violating the DMCA.
Close, but there's a critical flaw in that oversimplification. Patents, like copyrights, were designed to strike a balance between the rights of creators and the rights of everybody else. But like any other legal fiction, the concept of "intellectual property" has been distorted far beyond its original intent, in the ways most profitable to those who already profit from it.
Patent systems were meant to help you protect your invention and make it exclusively yours for a limited time. After that, it belongs to everybody. You invent something, and make what money as you can, then a few years later it's just another thing anybody can use.
But patents expire. After you've been protected from us, the rest of us are now protected from you. This is good. If you don't think it is, consider what the world would be like if one big company that still held a patent on "the use of electrical signals to convey a message."
Including animals: Remember, this was a horse-drawn era. Horses mired in this mess would have torn themselves apart trying to break free.
So if you ever have a conversation with a paramedic, ask them about bike accidents they've responded to. Ask them what the motorcyclist keeps saying over and over again. The guy will have bone sticking out of his leg, and all he'll say is, "Dude! Is my bike okay?"
Seasoned EMTs have a canned response: "Couple of dings, paint's scratched, but she'll be fine." Once you get that thought of the rider's head you can get around to the "oriented times three" questions.
Curiously enough, the bathroom door that accidently locks you out was invented by Augustine Shityourpants.
Not necessarily better, but certainly more rewarding. In rec.motorcycles a few years ago, it was pointed out that there are only three things motorcycles do better than cars:
So I guess I agree with you: I've been dealing with the luxury-SUV called Eclipse at work. It's comfy, amenity-ridden, and hauls an entire project in one cumbersome load. But it doesn't steer or brake, and its features keep getting in the way when I know what I'm doing. So I've been finding more and more excuses to use vim. Its zippiness has been a blast.
To say nothing of the consequence of climate shift. 24,000 years is enough time for an ice age to come and go, dragging every familiar weather pattern with it. It's time enough for the site to become a desert with 100MPH winds sandblasting the text off of every exposed surface for months at a time.
In the face of such conditions, written language may be unable to bear any message at all.
You need a bumper sticker that says, "If you can read this your windshield is about to melt."
That's le max, thank you very much.
I disagree. If the spying is unlawful or in violation of school policy, I could make a strong claim that any results of the spying are inherently corrupt. So the spies go, the spied-upon stay. IANAL and I know there are always exceptions, but in the real world and for the most part, if a cop searches your home without a warrant or consent, any evidence obtained during that search, and any evidence derived from that evidence, can't be used in court.