True. But it is usually an effort to cheat the game programmers/studios/publishers out of their work.
Well then just like with an odometer alteration, where you have to show that fraud took place in order for it to be a crime, and the crime is fraud not odometer-diddling, here they should have to demonstrate that he actually made unauthorized copies of games, and then that would be the crime. Not modifying game consoles.
But because we have a shit law in the DMCA, even if nobody was copying games illegally, it would still be a crime.
Having a policy like loser pays legal bills of both sides would go a long way to making the court system fair. Right now its often richest guy wins because he can outlast the poor guy.
The richest would still win because they could still outlast the poor guy because they would still be paying out the arse for the best lawyers around while the poor guy couldn't afford to. The whole point of "loser pays" is that you only get paid if you win, and thus only makes the situation you're talking about worse. Because ask any lawyer -- no matter how much of a slam-dunk you think your case is, there's always the chance that you will lose in court.
Right now poor people cave in to the rich because they cannot afford the cost of a lawyer, even a cheap one. The odds of them winning and the reward for winning are not great enough to justify that expense. If they thought they'd certainly win and get enough out of winning, they'd stay the course even in the current system.
Now imagine that the poor person had to pay the rich guy's legal bills! Exactly how sure of your case would you have to be to risk having to pay millions of dollars in legal fees if you lose, when hiring your own el-cheapo lawyer for a few g's is already an onerous expense? Nobody would dare fight the rich in court! Even with obvious modifications, like limiting the expense to at most what you yourself spent, that means doubling the cost, again an onerous situation and completely defeating the purpose when the whole premise is that people can't afford to fight legal battles!
Whereas this does nothing to discourage the rich from using their dollars to sway justice in their favor. What, like the rich would care that they have to spend a little extra paying the poor guy's rinky dink lawyer after spending ridiculous sums on their own lawyers?
"Loser pays" solves nothing. It was an idea created by those who benefit from the current system and wanted to make it even more lopsided, sold as a reform to help make the courts "fair." It's anything but.
I get it! Cops are all dumb, lazy, and technically illiterate!
Seriously, everyone. I know we all resent cops, but to imply that a whole department can't find a single officer who knows what a domain is is ridiculous and insulting. Let's try to keep our government/authority-hate at least sort of grounded in reality.
I find it very interesting that your defense of the intelligence of the police is to insist that there surely must have been an officer somewhere in the department who knew what a 'domain' is.
Rather than pointing out that knowing what a 'domain' is and being smart are not even close to the same thing, because the meaning of "domain" we're looking for is, well, domain-specific.
I would expect that a great many highly intelligent and well-educated people have no idea what a 'domain' is in the context of computing.
Basically, your response makes it sound like if you couldn't find an officer who knew, that would justify disparaging them. Whereas I simply think it's what you would expect -- the police know a lot of terminology involved with doing their job, and probably don't know so much about doing our job. I think it's quite probable that there are many police departments that couldn't pass your test, but I don't think that makes them dumb.
Given that the founding fathers had recently fought a war where they were defending themselves FROM their own government, I think they may have had a broader view than you attribute to them. Maybe Jefferson's wording was ditched, not to save space, but ebcause a majority of the other founders didn't like it?
Maybe. But more likely given all of Jefferson's writings on the subject, is that the GP's reading of the 2nd Amendment as not supporting the idea of armed rebellion is simply wrong. Egregiously so, considering his admonition to read the Founder's writings. Hello? Jefferson was constantly on about the need for the people to remove governments that don't represent them, and do so through organized rebellion. And that explicitly included the government he helped create, should it become necessary.
People may disagree with me, but I also think that it is reasonable to make sure that jitter-sensitive data (like VoIP) is treated differently than Bittorrent traffic, which is not at all sensitive to jitter. The IP suite of protocols are extremely limited when it comes to flow control-- they can only do congestion prevention or egress rate limiting. If you're at the point where congestion is a problem, everyone is going to suffer. If that means that someone's Bittorrent traffic needs to be capped, I'm OK with that.
To some extent, that's fine. Different uses need different quality of service -- VoIP is low bandwidth but latency sensitive, while Bittorrent is bandwidth intensive and latency insensitive. There's no reason to cap bandwidth, just use a different router scheduling policy for the two different packets. VoIP gets priority but by its very nature this shouldn't hold up the Bittorent for long. If it does and the "VoIP" app starts eating bandwidth like it's a file transfer, then de-prioritize it.
Honestly, just implementing a multi-level feedback queue like they've had in OS schedulers for decades (though admittedly it's easier to implement wrt processes vs connections) would do what you're asking for, and fairly so without having to "cap" or otherwise actually degrade Bittorrent or any other specific app. As congestion increases, everyone's bandwidth-intensive applications would degrade proportionately as expected during prime-time hours, while the latency-sensitive applications would still be serviced reasonably well.
The most important part of net neutrality is not about preventing any kind of QoS based on packet type. It's about discriminating based on source. It's about degrading a movie file that came from Hulu vs some site Time Warner approves of.
Net neutrality doesn't prevent them from doing what you're asking. It just means they can't do it in a discriminatory way that is ultimately designed not to make life on the network better, but to protect their other businesses. The Internet always has had, and probably always will have growing pains. Right now VoIP, video-on-demand, and Bittorrent are competing for scarce resources. Until then, operators need to manage traffic. I will leave how as a discussion point for every else.
Easy. It's a two step process: 1) Implement source- and type-neutral management policies that are based on actual usage, not assumptions that certain kinds of traffic, or certain sources of traffic -- who coincidentally are always competitors of the ISPs' media business -- are "evil" and must be slowed down or blocked. 2) Invest the ludicrous profits these fuckers are making into increasing capacity, so prime-time degradation isn't a very big deal.
Net neutrality doesn't prevent this. In fact it probably makes it more likely.
For instance, you assume that the marginal cost of maintaining a neutral network is identical to a non-neutral one, which might not be true. If the non-neutral one has significantly lower upkeep, it might win out as an inferior but cheaper product. That is, even if consumers prefer neutral ISPs to non-neutral ones, that preference only goes so far towards convincing them to pay a higher rate.
Okay, well then at the very least a free market would result in us getting much better and much cheaper service than we currently are, since the cable companies are making money hand-over-fucking-fist right now and not investing it in improving service. I don't recall the exact number but last I checked TW was spending millions on upkeep on their network, and made billions in revenue off their cable internet service. Again no exact number (though it's public) but it was a profit margin of easily 1000%. No way does the difference between neutral or non- erase that margin.
So, worst case: Competition means that cable companies have to either drop prices or improve service, either way resulting in a profit margin that is somewhat sane, and a much better value/dollar for the users.
This would kind of solve the whole thing. The cable companies can partition the bandwidth any way they like. They can reserve bandwidth for their own movie services. The customer still gets what is advertised.
Again, I just want to make this clear... It doesn't solve the problem. The customer gets what is advertised... unless it's a site TW doesn't like. Because you haven't required them to be packet agnostic (i.e. "net neutral"), they can still do traffic shaping to suit their agenda.
Therefore, if they have a 20-Gbps link to your house, but they offer 7-Mbps of open bandwidth, with 13-Mpbs reserved for their own downloadable movies, they can only advertise 7-Mpbs service.
That's actually more restrictive than net neutrality because it would mean they have to guarantee a certain minimum bandwidth in order to advertise that bandwidth. Which is fairly unrealistic. Even if they actually upgraded their equipment instead of whining about how expensive it is and pocketing all their profits like douchebags, it'd still be the case that cable service would likely be degraded during the prime-time hours when everyone in your neighborhood hops on the same shared connection.
Net neutrality isn't about guaranteeing a minimum amount of internet bandwidth. Net neutrality is about not discriminating based on type and more importantly source of internet packets. For example, Time Warner doesn't want to degrade the internet in general, rather they'd like to degrade performance for packets from Hulu or Netflix specifically. Degrading the internet in general would make Time Warner look bad compared to DSL, while selectively blocking/degrading Hulu packets would make Hulu look like a bad choice compared to TW cable TV.
Another commonly proposed non-neutral situation is where TW or other ISP degrades Google's packets unless Google pays them specifically (as opposed to the ISP Google already pays and who has peering agreements with the would-be blackmailing ISP, meaning they're already getting paid once).
But for Time Warner, it's all about hurting online video services, without hurting their own cable internet business.
How do they rank players? Couldn't an expert player just pose as a novice, and win easily?
Yeah I was chuckling thinking about that, and hearing their CEO comparing it to wrestling weight classes.
On the one hand, that makes no sense, because weight classes have nothing to do with separating people based on skill, but rather simple physical attributes and the unfair advantage that stems from them. Even the most skilled 110 pounder on earth is going to get smushed into the mat by a competent 275 pounder.
On the other hand, it makes perfect sense, because wrestlers are all about gaming the weight class system as much as possible. That's why they starve themselves, and run five miles wearing a dozen sweatshirts and/or plastic bags the day before weigh-in to lose water weight, all so that when they walk onto the mat in the "150lb" weight class they're sporting the body of a 170 pounder. In practice this just means everyone is really a couple weight classes heavier than what they wrestle at. But that's because you can't easily change your weight, and your weight class is defined by what you weigh at weigh-in. You can't wrestle at 130 a couple weeks then gain some weight but stay at 130. If you could? Yeah you'd see people cutting so much weight they couldn't stand up right just so that later at a more important match they'd have an advantage.
Anyway, I'm assuming/hoping it's a sort of ladder system and that the size of wagers is capped at each level. It's one thing to have someone sandbagging and pool shark you out of $10, yet another when Mr. Franklin gets involved.
IBM is most certainly still a hardware company. Nobody who wasn't a hardware company would continue to invest in the development of top-end fabrication plants, as even companies who are unarguably hardware companies can't justify that expense. The majority of their money comes from support contracts for that hardware, and the software installations on that hardware. Support contracts are just a smarter way to make money off of hardware than relying solely on initial sticker price, and its what IBM has doing since the beginning. So that doesn't make the name "IBM" any less appropriate today than it was then.
Your proposed subject line is inferior. Doesn't matter if you won't read anything that might challenge your monopoly on whining. Your irrational hatred of passive voice is still foolish and wrong. That is not what your 4th grade writing teacher was trying to tell you.
Also, and go ahead and call me a pedant, but pedantry does not mean criticizing the style of something that is grammatically, syntactically, and semantically correct.
Even geothermal is powered by the heat of the earth's core, which is itself powered by radioactivity.
Well, and by the original formation of the earth (essentially gravitational potential energy of the dust and rocks that accreted and formed earth, plus later impacts, turned into heat).
Not that adding "Formation of the solar system" as another source of energy really adds much to the mix! It is pretty amazing when you think about it.
Open source only means that the source is available to the users of the product.
No it doesn't. Even the weakest definition of Open Source includes the ability to modify said software and distribute the result. Being able to just look at source is what that "Shared Source" bullshit MS tried to pull however many years ago was, and nobody was fooled.
And yeah, the GPL or OSI may not define "open", but if you definition of "open" allows for patents with restrictive and non-royalty-free licensing terms, then your definition sucks balls.
i hypothesize this simply because the woman is still alive (assuming she wasn't infected 2 years ago) and mild disease is a sign of an "old" disease
Not necessarily by any means. 'Mild' can mean a sign of any number of things, such as being very new and poorly adapted to attacking humans.
And HIV itself is only recently known in humans. The 'standard' version we are familiar with is anything but an 'old' disease with respect to humans. And yet it seems almost perfectly adapted to spreading and surviving while remaining deadly -- with an 'incubation' period of a decade or even more before it becomes AIDS, HIV has plenty of time to spread, but then it destroys the immune system and the victim dies from a cold. That doesn't sound like 'equilibrium' or 'mildness' to me.
I see no indication that this version is more mild or older than the existing strains.
Look, Earthlings don't have a monopoly on flubbing rover landings or making unit conversion screw-ups. Fortunately we still have a monopoly on working Mars rovers! They though that since Mar's atmosphere is so weak they could completely ignore air friction and make the thing out of really light and cheap materials, and that melted hunk of slab is all that's left of their rover.
On the other hand, the Euporans are way ahead of us on exploring Neptune.
IBM makes bugger all money from "International Business Machines" these days but they wouldn't want to lose a brand everyone knows.
Yeah unless you consider a z/90 or other massive server computer to be a "business machine" -- hmm, a computer is a machine, and these are used by international businesses for essentially the same things as their classic tabulators, collators, and accounting machines and then some, I think it fits -- in which case it's more accurate to say "IBM makes all their money from 'International Business Machines'".
Nevertheless your point about the importance of branding stands.:)
It's funny... there's this attitude that riding a motorcycle is easy but it's coming from people who've never actually ridden one.
Well, this may just be my opinion, but as someone who has never ridden a motorcycle, I think that attitude comes from people who've never ridden a bike of any kind and are idiots.
I actually think that's all irrelevant; markets depend on rational actors and that's not what we've got.
It's never what we've got.:P It's one of the reasons economics is so screwy when you try to make it into an applied science.
Their competitors (that sell you weightless flight) call their ship a plane, and don't dubiously claim you were in space. Other than that, it looks like the same product to me. Do those differences make it worth 40X as much money? Some people think so, but I suspect they are the same ones who buy flights before the ship exists.
They call their planes planes because they're planes not ships of either the rocket- or space- variety. How high can they go? The world altitude record for an air-breathing craft is 37km. Personally, I see a huge difference between that and 100km, between this and this.
I predict they'll drop the price unless they just go bankrupt too fast to get the chance.
Well, if they aren't bankrupt, they've already made it clear they plan to drop the price, so I'm predicting your prediction comes true even if for different reasons.
$200,000 is some savings?! Must be nice to have that kind of cash.
Heh, I was talking about it being feasible at some point in my life, not at today's prices. The ones paying $200k are the ones that will help drop that price. I've heard they have plans to get the cost down to $20k in a relatively short time frame. That's starting to get somewhat feasible -- instead of a nice new Acura, get a used beater and a rocket ride to space? No idea if it'll happen, but if it does, even if I'm ancient I'll sign whatever health waivers are necessary.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Ha!
And not only have you proven Fermilab is out to sabotage the LHC, you've also proven that Fermilab plays Horde.
True. But it is usually an effort to cheat the game programmers/studios/publishers out of their work.
Well then just like with an odometer alteration, where you have to show that fraud took place in order for it to be a crime, and the crime is fraud not odometer-diddling, here they should have to demonstrate that he actually made unauthorized copies of games, and then that would be the crime. Not modifying game consoles.
But because we have a shit law in the DMCA, even if nobody was copying games illegally, it would still be a crime.
Having a policy like loser pays legal bills of both sides would go a long way to making the court system fair. Right now its often richest guy wins because he can outlast the poor guy.
The richest would still win because they could still outlast the poor guy because they would still be paying out the arse for the best lawyers around while the poor guy couldn't afford to. The whole point of "loser pays" is that you only get paid if you win, and thus only makes the situation you're talking about worse. Because ask any lawyer -- no matter how much of a slam-dunk you think your case is, there's always the chance that you will lose in court.
Right now poor people cave in to the rich because they cannot afford the cost of a lawyer, even a cheap one. The odds of them winning and the reward for winning are not great enough to justify that expense. If they thought they'd certainly win and get enough out of winning, they'd stay the course even in the current system.
Now imagine that the poor person had to pay the rich guy's legal bills! Exactly how sure of your case would you have to be to risk having to pay millions of dollars in legal fees if you lose, when hiring your own el-cheapo lawyer for a few g's is already an onerous expense? Nobody would dare fight the rich in court! Even with obvious modifications, like limiting the expense to at most what you yourself spent, that means doubling the cost, again an onerous situation and completely defeating the purpose when the whole premise is that people can't afford to fight legal battles!
Whereas this does nothing to discourage the rich from using their dollars to sway justice in their favor. What, like the rich would care that they have to spend a little extra paying the poor guy's rinky dink lawyer after spending ridiculous sums on their own lawyers?
"Loser pays" solves nothing. It was an idea created by those who benefit from the current system and wanted to make it even more lopsided, sold as a reform to help make the courts "fair." It's anything but.
I get it! Cops are all dumb, lazy, and technically illiterate!
Seriously, everyone. I know we all resent cops, but to imply that a whole department can't find a single officer who knows what a domain is is ridiculous and insulting. Let's try to keep our government/authority-hate at least sort of grounded in reality.
I find it very interesting that your defense of the intelligence of the police is to insist that there surely must have been an officer somewhere in the department who knew what a 'domain' is.
Rather than pointing out that knowing what a 'domain' is and being smart are not even close to the same thing, because the meaning of "domain" we're looking for is, well, domain-specific.
I would expect that a great many highly intelligent and well-educated people have no idea what a 'domain' is in the context of computing.
Basically, your response makes it sound like if you couldn't find an officer who knew, that would justify disparaging them. Whereas I simply think it's what you would expect -- the police know a lot of terminology involved with doing their job, and probably don't know so much about doing our job. I think it's quite probable that there are many police departments that couldn't pass your test, but I don't think that makes them dumb.
Given that the founding fathers had recently fought a war where they were defending themselves FROM their own government, I think they may have had a broader view than you attribute to them. Maybe Jefferson's wording was ditched, not to save space, but ebcause a majority of the other founders didn't like it?
Maybe. But more likely given all of Jefferson's writings on the subject, is that the GP's reading of the 2nd Amendment as not supporting the idea of armed rebellion is simply wrong. Egregiously so, considering his admonition to read the Founder's writings. Hello? Jefferson was constantly on about the need for the people to remove governments that don't represent them, and do so through organized rebellion. And that explicitly included the government he helped create, should it become necessary.
People may disagree with me, but I also think that it is reasonable to make sure that jitter-sensitive data (like VoIP) is treated differently than Bittorrent traffic, which is not at all sensitive to jitter. The IP suite of protocols are extremely limited when it comes to flow control-- they can only do congestion prevention or egress rate limiting. If you're at the point where congestion is a problem, everyone is going to suffer. If that means that someone's Bittorrent traffic needs to be capped, I'm OK with that.
To some extent, that's fine. Different uses need different quality of service -- VoIP is low bandwidth but latency sensitive, while Bittorrent is bandwidth intensive and latency insensitive. There's no reason to cap bandwidth, just use a different router scheduling policy for the two different packets. VoIP gets priority but by its very nature this shouldn't hold up the Bittorent for long. If it does and the "VoIP" app starts eating bandwidth like it's a file transfer, then de-prioritize it.
Honestly, just implementing a multi-level feedback queue like they've had in OS schedulers for decades (though admittedly it's easier to implement wrt processes vs connections) would do what you're asking for, and fairly so without having to "cap" or otherwise actually degrade Bittorrent or any other specific app. As congestion increases, everyone's bandwidth-intensive applications would degrade proportionately as expected during prime-time hours, while the latency-sensitive applications would still be serviced reasonably well.
The most important part of net neutrality is not about preventing any kind of QoS based on packet type. It's about discriminating based on source. It's about degrading a movie file that came from Hulu vs some site Time Warner approves of.
Net neutrality doesn't prevent them from doing what you're asking. It just means they can't do it in a discriminatory way that is ultimately designed not to make life on the network better, but to protect their other businesses.
The Internet always has had, and probably always will have growing pains. Right now VoIP, video-on-demand, and Bittorrent are competing for scarce resources. Until then, operators need to manage traffic. I will leave how as a discussion point for every else.
Easy. It's a two step process:
1) Implement source- and type-neutral management policies that are based on actual usage, not assumptions that certain kinds of traffic, or certain sources of traffic -- who coincidentally are always competitors of the ISPs' media business -- are "evil" and must be slowed down or blocked.
2) Invest the ludicrous profits these fuckers are making into increasing capacity, so prime-time degradation isn't a very big deal.
Net neutrality doesn't prevent this. In fact it probably makes it more likely.
For instance, you assume that the marginal cost of maintaining a neutral network is identical to a non-neutral one, which might not be true. If the non-neutral one has significantly lower upkeep, it might win out as an inferior but cheaper product. That is, even if consumers prefer neutral ISPs to non-neutral ones, that preference only goes so far towards convincing them to pay a higher rate.
Okay, well then at the very least a free market would result in us getting much better and much cheaper service than we currently are, since the cable companies are making money hand-over-fucking-fist right now and not investing it in improving service. I don't recall the exact number but last I checked TW was spending millions on upkeep on their network, and made billions in revenue off their cable internet service. Again no exact number (though it's public) but it was a profit margin of easily 1000%. No way does the difference between neutral or non- erase that margin.
So, worst case: Competition means that cable companies have to either drop prices or improve service, either way resulting in a profit margin that is somewhat sane, and a much better value/dollar for the users.
This would kind of solve the whole thing. The cable companies can partition the bandwidth any way they like. They can reserve bandwidth for their own movie services. The customer still gets what is advertised.
Again, I just want to make this clear... It doesn't solve the problem. The customer gets what is advertised... unless it's a site TW doesn't like. Because you haven't required them to be packet agnostic (i.e. "net neutral"), they can still do traffic shaping to suit their agenda.
Therefore, if they have a 20-Gbps link to your house, but they offer 7-Mbps of open bandwidth, with 13-Mpbs reserved for their own downloadable movies, they can only advertise 7-Mpbs service.
That's actually more restrictive than net neutrality because it would mean they have to guarantee a certain minimum bandwidth in order to advertise that bandwidth. Which is fairly unrealistic. Even if they actually upgraded their equipment instead of whining about how expensive it is and pocketing all their profits like douchebags, it'd still be the case that cable service would likely be degraded during the prime-time hours when everyone in your neighborhood hops on the same shared connection.
Net neutrality isn't about guaranteeing a minimum amount of internet bandwidth. Net neutrality is about not discriminating based on type and more importantly source of internet packets. For example, Time Warner doesn't want to degrade the internet in general, rather they'd like to degrade performance for packets from Hulu or Netflix specifically. Degrading the internet in general would make Time Warner look bad compared to DSL, while selectively blocking/degrading Hulu packets would make Hulu look like a bad choice compared to TW cable TV.
Another commonly proposed non-neutral situation is where TW or other ISP degrades Google's packets unless Google pays them specifically (as opposed to the ISP Google already pays and who has peering agreements with the would-be blackmailing ISP, meaning they're already getting paid once).
But for Time Warner, it's all about hurting online video services, without hurting their own cable internet business.
yourself. Otherwise it would be plain gambling.
I'm pretty sure it's still gambling. That, or Pete Rose needs to be reinstated to the Hall of Fame!
Maybe he was just ahead of his time...
How do they rank players? Couldn't an expert player just pose as a novice, and win easily?
Yeah I was chuckling thinking about that, and hearing their CEO comparing it to wrestling weight classes.
On the one hand, that makes no sense, because weight classes have nothing to do with separating people based on skill, but rather simple physical attributes and the unfair advantage that stems from them. Even the most skilled 110 pounder on earth is going to get smushed into the mat by a competent 275 pounder.
On the other hand, it makes perfect sense, because wrestlers are all about gaming the weight class system as much as possible. That's why they starve themselves, and run five miles wearing a dozen sweatshirts and/or plastic bags the day before weigh-in to lose water weight, all so that when they walk onto the mat in the "150lb" weight class they're sporting the body of a 170 pounder. In practice this just means everyone is really a couple weight classes heavier than what they wrestle at. But that's because you can't easily change your weight, and your weight class is defined by what you weigh at weigh-in. You can't wrestle at 130 a couple weeks then gain some weight but stay at 130. If you could? Yeah you'd see people cutting so much weight they couldn't stand up right just so that later at a more important match they'd have an advantage.
Anyway, I'm assuming/hoping it's a sort of ladder system and that the size of wagers is capped at each level. It's one thing to have someone sandbagging and pool shark you out of $10, yet another when Mr. Franklin gets involved.
IBM is most certainly still a hardware company. Nobody who wasn't a hardware company would continue to invest in the development of top-end fabrication plants, as even companies who are unarguably hardware companies can't justify that expense. The majority of their money comes from support contracts for that hardware, and the software installations on that hardware. Support contracts are just a smarter way to make money off of hardware than relying solely on initial sticker price, and its what IBM has doing since the beginning. So that doesn't make the name "IBM" any less appropriate today than it was then.
Your proposed subject line is inferior. Doesn't matter if you won't read anything that might challenge your monopoly on whining. Your irrational hatred of passive voice is still foolish and wrong. That is not what your 4th grade writing teacher was trying to tell you.
Also, and go ahead and call me a pedant, but pedantry does not mean criticizing the style of something that is grammatically, syntactically, and semantically correct.
"No blood for poop!"
This joke is 100% recycled via humor-digesting bacteria.
Even geothermal is powered by the heat of the earth's core, which is itself powered by radioactivity.
Well, and by the original formation of the earth (essentially gravitational potential energy of the dust and rocks that accreted and formed earth, plus later impacts, turned into heat).
Not that adding "Formation of the solar system" as another source of energy really adds much to the mix! It is pretty amazing when you think about it.
For the love of Jeebus, please Martian journalists, please learn to stop contradicting K'Breel to his face!
Open source only means that the source is available to the users of the product.
No it doesn't. Even the weakest definition of Open Source includes the ability to modify said software and distribute the result. Being able to just look at source is what that "Shared Source" bullshit MS tried to pull however many years ago was, and nobody was fooled.
And yeah, the GPL or OSI may not define "open", but if you definition of "open" allows for patents with restrictive and non-royalty-free licensing terms, then your definition sucks balls.
NASA should make RC toys to build funds, if anything I bought lasted as long as these rovers, I'd be a happy camper.
Yeah but who the hell is going to buy an RC toy that has a top speed of 0.1 mph and doesn't respond to your commands for twenty minutes?
Well you gotta admit that the "x86 crap" brand wasn't exactly a brilliant stroke of marketing.
i hypothesize this simply because the woman is still alive (assuming she wasn't infected 2 years ago) and mild disease is a sign of an "old" disease
Not necessarily by any means. 'Mild' can mean a sign of any number of things, such as being very new and poorly adapted to attacking humans.
And HIV itself is only recently known in humans. The 'standard' version we are familiar with is anything but an 'old' disease with respect to humans. And yet it seems almost perfectly adapted to spreading and surviving while remaining deadly -- with an 'incubation' period of a decade or even more before it becomes AIDS, HIV has plenty of time to spread, but then it destroys the immune system and the victim dies from a cold. That doesn't sound like 'equilibrium' or 'mildness' to me.
I see no indication that this version is more mild or older than the existing strains.
Look, Earthlings don't have a monopoly on flubbing rover landings or making unit conversion screw-ups. Fortunately we still have a monopoly on working Mars rovers! They though that since Mar's atmosphere is so weak they could completely ignore air friction and make the thing out of really light and cheap materials, and that melted hunk of slab is all that's left of their rover.
On the other hand, the Euporans are way ahead of us on exploring Neptune.
IBM makes bugger all money from "International Business Machines" these days but they wouldn't want to lose a brand everyone knows.
Yeah unless you consider a z/90 or other massive server computer to be a "business machine" -- hmm, a computer is a machine, and these are used by international businesses for essentially the same things as their classic tabulators, collators, and accounting machines and then some, I think it fits -- in which case it's more accurate to say "IBM makes all their money from 'International Business Machines'".
Nevertheless your point about the importance of branding stands. :)
It's funny... there's this attitude that riding a motorcycle is easy but it's coming from people who've never actually ridden one.
Well, this may just be my opinion, but as someone who has never ridden a motorcycle, I think that attitude comes from people who've never ridden a bike of any kind and are idiots.
I actually think that's all irrelevant; markets depend on rational actors and that's not what we've got.
It's never what we've got. :P It's one of the reasons economics is so screwy when you try to make it into an applied science.
Their competitors (that sell you weightless flight) call their ship a plane, and don't dubiously claim you were in space. Other than that, it looks like the same product to me. Do those differences make it worth 40X as much money? Some people think so, but I suspect they are the same ones who buy flights before the ship exists.
They call their planes planes because they're planes not ships of either the rocket- or space- variety. How high can they go? The world altitude record for an air-breathing craft is 37km. Personally, I see a huge difference between that and 100km, between this and this.
I predict they'll drop the price unless they just go bankrupt too fast to get the chance.
Well, if they aren't bankrupt, they've already made it clear they plan to drop the price, so I'm predicting your prediction comes true even if for different reasons.
$200,000 is some savings?! Must be nice to have that kind of cash.
Heh, I was talking about it being feasible at some point in my life, not at today's prices. The ones paying $200k are the ones that will help drop that price. I've heard they have plans to get the cost down to $20k in a relatively short time frame. That's starting to get somewhat feasible -- instead of a nice new Acura, get a used beater and a rocket ride to space? No idea if it'll happen, but if it does, even if I'm ancient I'll sign whatever health waivers are necessary. :)