Whether it would work or not, the Federal Government can't constitutionally mandate it. They can mandate it for passports, or for boarding airplanes, enter federal buildings or military bases etc. But other than those limited areas, they have no authority to do so. Even the RealID system was just some additional requirements that state drivers licenses would have to meet in order to count as identification for the purposes described above. If a state chose not to abide by it, there was no penalty other than inconvenience to its citizens, and people would still have been free to choose not to get an ID or drivers license at all.
Where is everyone getting this information about "cancelling"?
From TFA:
Here's how it works:
An insider client transfers all or a portion of their company stock into a JP Morgan Securities Inc. brokerage account.
The insider then develops, in conjunction with the 10b5-1 team, a 'phased, pre-planned sales program to be executed at either market or specified prices'.
Depending on the information available to the insider (but not the public), the insider can decide whether to execute the sale or not.
So, they enter the plan and then later, based on inside information, decide whether or not to actually execute the sale. In other words, they (in advance) make tentative plans to sell, then can cancel that before it occurs if their inside information does not support a sell-off.
Only works for stocks that drop, but that is significant when considering corporate scandals, companies in financial straits, etc.
I don't claim to know whether the article's description is correct, but it's where we're getting the idea of canceling.
So, are we going to get on GCC's case for enforcing standards compliance and thus breaking backwards compatibility while insisting that Microsoft should take the opposite approach with IE8?
The relevant legislation prohibits transactions when inside information is possessed. A regulation on the part of the SEC that forbid the cancellation of a transaction would, in effect, be requiring a transaction to take place based upon inside information, so would explicitly contradict the law. Congress could perhaps close the loophole through new legislation, but I doubt the SEC could do so on its own.
CS3 gave me no problems at all installing on Vista 32 - didn't need to register.dlls manually or even tell anything to run in compatibility mode. Don't know about potential 64-bit issues though...
If your Vista experience is so trouble-free then why are you even thinking about file transfer speeds (a well-known trouble point for Vista)? I certainly never think about that, haven't needed to in years...
I didn't say I had trouble with file transfers. I saw a review that mentioned improved performance, and I was curious as to whether I'd see any difference in the speed of synchronizing offline files, etc. Curiosity about claimed performance improvements does not imply trouble.
For the record, I have Vista installed on two of my four systems: my laptop, and my media center box. Its media center application was reason enough to upgrade to it on the latter; it came with the former. Of my other two active boxes, one doesn't have the video card for Vista and is doing just fine with XP Pro, and the other is a server. Offline file synchronization between my laptop and server is the file transfer event I most often encounter, so while I have no problems and really had no complaints about the out-of-the-box performance, I thought it was worth checking out.
I got the "early adopter" version, too, but I wouldn't say I was desperate for it, just curious.:) Really, my problems with Vista, other than uninformed Mac users incessantly asking me what problems I have with Vista, have been pretty much nonexistent. I grabbed SP1 just to see if I'd notice a difference on the improved file transfer speeds.
The laws of nature haven't changed in the last few decades. It's quite irrelevant how long ago we figured out how to harness particular aspects of them in this way, if there's the chance that others still haven't.
I agree with your Godwin's Law analysis of the comparison to child porn, but that doesn't mean it's a great idea to be posting nuclear weapon schematics, even old and very basic ones, in public where there's even a slight chance that they could give additional helpful information to our enemies.
To look at a less extreme example, if the Islamic terrorists didn't know how to make explosives, would the fact that the Chinese invented black powder centuries ago be relevant? It would still be beneficial not to give them the recipe that allows them to become suicide-murderers on a more massive, more efficient scale. They have this information already, so we need not keep it secret.
There is some evidence, though, that Iran's radical government is supportive of the efforts of terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere. And there's evidence that they're pursuing a program to try to develop nuclear weapons, which they do not have yet. It's highly probable that what they lack is not information given them by such a sketch, but rather the refined weapons-grade materials necessary to create a bomb, but how does the amount of time that has passed since we figured it out have any bearing on whether it's a good idea to give them information on the topic, whether they might already have it or not?
The $1.9 million restitution agreement is in addition to the almost $35 million the FTC is collecting from the person the FTC considers the ringleader of this scam, Willoughby Farr of Nationwide Connections. They're confiscating the full amount, plus fining them an additional $1.9M. So, the guilty parties will have lost at least $2M on the deal once legal costs, etc. are accounted for. How is that not a deterrent?
Like he said, feel free to give them your spare food. The US government's foreign aid is only a fraction of what the US people give voluntarily. The government is not the whole of society, especially in a free country.
It'd still be quite possible to detect cheating on tests, etc.: the information has to be transmitted via radio waves. If they can be received, they can be detected. Undetectable communication is impossible.
Re:Non-Tolkien material in these completions
on
The Children of Hurin
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· Score: 2, Informative
In this work, Christopher Tolkien is very clear about what his role was: choosing which version of his father's words to use. All of the words are J.R.R. Tolkien's. The Silmarillion does not deviate far from that standard, either. It's the Histories of Middle Earth where you'll find much of Christopher's own writing... and then, it's typically a recounting of the history of the writing of the epics by his father, more often than it is actual "Middle Earth mythology" in a direct fashion.
Since the whole problem is that the outsourced manufacturing company has the layout (blueprint), then they certainly would be able to activate the chip by removing the "lock" circuitry from the layout and manufacturing chips which require no activation! It may be a non-trivial task to reverse-engineer which parts of the chip are responsible, but if the money is there it is certainly possible and would be worth it. Making evasion a non-trivial task is all any protection or encryption scheme can hope to do. How nontrivial it is made is the key factor.
Patents are rarely detailed enough to fully implement in practice; usually they cover only a subset of the design, and are written broadly enough that several different paths could be taken to implement them. Looking up a patent would show you the concept, but not an exact design such as a blueprint provides.
It doesn't sound like this is a consumer-level activation, but a one-time, manufacturer-side process:
To activate a chip, the manufacturer would plug it in and let it contact the patent owner over an ordinary phone line or internet connection. It's intended to protect against overseas subcontractors who have access to the blueprints making extras and then going and selling them on the black market, behind the patent-holder's back. So, the overseas company would make it, ship it back to the company who owns the rights to it, where it would be activated before being distributed. The outsourced manufacturing company wouldn't have the ability to activate them, so couldn't sell extras to the black market.
For rote computer users (people who don't really learn how to do what they're doing, just a number of steps that will produce a desired result), leaving things in the same place but changing the transparency/color is something they can adjust to easily. Moving something to another part of the screen (i.e. top taskbar vs bottom) can, unfortunately, confuse them. It's a minor difference to you or I, but for those who don't understand the function, but only know to click on the button in the lower left corner of the screen, the differences seem larger.
I've met a few of these people... set up a network with an Active Directory domain at a church about 4 years ago, and the secretary still can't grasp the concept of a user account being the same anywhere on the network, and occasionally sends an e-mail asking for the password for another computer. In this case, she couldn't handle the difference between the Win95/NT/2k style taskbar and the Playskool-looking one in XP, so even apart from issues of taste (avoiding the tacky blue and green), running anything other than the "Classic" look and feel would be too much of an adjustment for her. More typically, the color schemes are something that people seem to be able to handle changes in, so long as the layout is the same. There are millions of these people out there - they're the masses of regular users for whom Microsoft does massive market research towards designing a UI that will work for them as well as the rest of us.
It's not that they couldn't have learned the Gnome or Nautilus (or MacOS) UIs, but that they've now learned how to do what they need in the Windows Explorer UI by rote and are too intimidated to try anything else. From their perspectives, it's a completely different system to memorize, and there's little (if any) incentive to do so.
Cancer? What is it about magnetic fields you think can cause cancer? All cancer occurs on Earth, which has a large magnetic field, therefore magnetic fields cause cancer.
Or, we could blame everything on gravity. The same reasoning can conveniently be extended to any number of imagined causes.;)
Vista's Aero interface isn't all that familiar to XP-users compared to the latest Linux systems, anyway. Other than being "prettied up" and a few added search features, the interface is largely identical in XP and Vista. Taskbar with a button on the left and a tray on the right and a button for each open window, window min/max/close controls in the same places, etc. The mouse buttons do the same thing, the keyboard shortcuts are the same. Apart from adding search functionality, everything is conceptually the same and located in the same relative place. The control panel does the same thing; the Documents/Pictures/Music folders operate in the same way, though they've dropped the silly "My " prefix. The UI is just colored a little differently and has some transparency now. Most of the changes in Vista are "under the hood" other than the searching and UAC's popups.
That's not nearly as radical a change to the UI even as what Microsoft did within Office between the 2003 and 2007 versions, let alone the different methods of accomplishing something in different operating systems. I'm not saying familiarity is necessarily a magic bullet for MS, but the claim that Vista's UI is substantially unfamiliar to an XP user is unfounded.
Bullshit. If the mars mission is actually doing useful work, then having people physically there will make the work much more efficient.
Useful work? What useful work is there to be done on an uninhabitable planet from which we cannot return? It's not as if we could mine it for resources... we don't even have the capacity to get the person back. Taking pictures or analyzing soil samples can easily be accomplished by drones, and a delay isn't really that big a deal, considering that our only purpose for being there (besides a gesture to proclaim how much more capable we are than other nations) is abstract scientific research. I'm not saying that such research is not a worthy goal: it's how I make my living. But useful work doesn't fit into the scope of a mission to Mars. There's nothing useful to be done there.
I don't know the details, but it only works on the AIM and ICQ networks, not with MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, etc. Since it's a feature that only functions over the OSCAR protocol, there's clearly some protocol dependence.
I wonder how they define "multi-headed applications"
In any case, third-party developers such as Cerulean Studios (Trillian) already apparently know the OSCAR protocol well enough to have incorporated additional functionality such as SecureIM (encrypted messages) that aren't included in standard AIM clients. This seems more geared towards encabling people to develop small-time add-ons or perhaps bloated adware clients than to actually increasing the quality of mainstream clients.
Re:How do the acid-test creators test the acid tes
on
Acid3 Test Released
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· Score: 1
If the test returns javascript errors and confirmations as we're told it does, they should be able to compare those results against the standards for what should have happened. It's a bit more tedious than having a reference browser, perhaps, but it would work.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether it would work or not, the Federal Government can't constitutionally mandate it. They can mandate it for passports, or for boarding airplanes, enter federal buildings or military bases etc. But other than those limited areas, they have no authority to do so. Even the RealID system was just some additional requirements that state drivers licenses would have to meet in order to count as identification for the purposes described above. If a state chose not to abide by it, there was no penalty other than inconvenience to its citizens, and people would still have been free to choose not to get an ID or drivers license at all.
From TFA:
Here's how it works:
So, they enter the plan and then later, based on inside information, decide whether or not to actually execute the sale. In other words, they (in advance) make tentative plans to sell, then can cancel that before it occurs if their inside information does not support a sell-off.
Only works for stocks that drop, but that is significant when considering corporate scandals, companies in financial straits, etc.
I don't claim to know whether the article's description is correct, but it's where we're getting the idea of canceling.
So, are we going to get on GCC's case for enforcing standards compliance and thus breaking backwards compatibility while insisting that Microsoft should take the opposite approach with IE8?
The relevant legislation prohibits transactions when inside information is possessed. A regulation on the part of the SEC that forbid the cancellation of a transaction would, in effect, be requiring a transaction to take place based upon inside information, so would explicitly contradict the law. Congress could perhaps close the loophole through new legislation, but I doubt the SEC could do so on its own.
CS3 gave me no problems at all installing on Vista 32 - didn't need to register .dlls manually or even tell anything to run in compatibility mode. Don't know about potential 64-bit issues though...
I didn't say I had trouble with file transfers. I saw a review that mentioned improved performance, and I was curious as to whether I'd see any difference in the speed of synchronizing offline files, etc. Curiosity about claimed performance improvements does not imply trouble.
For the record, I have Vista installed on two of my four systems: my laptop, and my media center box. Its media center application was reason enough to upgrade to it on the latter; it came with the former. Of my other two active boxes, one doesn't have the video card for Vista and is doing just fine with XP Pro, and the other is a server. Offline file synchronization between my laptop and server is the file transfer event I most often encounter, so while I have no problems and really had no complaints about the out-of-the-box performance, I thought it was worth checking out.
I got the "early adopter" version, too, but I wouldn't say I was desperate for it, just curious. :) Really, my problems with Vista, other than uninformed Mac users incessantly asking me what problems I have with Vista, have been pretty much nonexistent. I grabbed SP1 just to see if I'd notice a difference on the improved file transfer speeds.
The laws of nature haven't changed in the last few decades. It's quite irrelevant how long ago we figured out how to harness particular aspects of them in this way, if there's the chance that others still haven't.
I agree with your Godwin's Law analysis of the comparison to child porn, but that doesn't mean it's a great idea to be posting nuclear weapon schematics, even old and very basic ones, in public where there's even a slight chance that they could give additional helpful information to our enemies.
To look at a less extreme example, if the Islamic terrorists didn't know how to make explosives, would the fact that the Chinese invented black powder centuries ago be relevant? It would still be beneficial not to give them the recipe that allows them to become suicide-murderers on a more massive, more efficient scale. They have this information already, so we need not keep it secret.
There is some evidence, though, that Iran's radical government is supportive of the efforts of terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere. And there's evidence that they're pursuing a program to try to develop nuclear weapons, which they do not have yet. It's highly probable that what they lack is not information given them by such a sketch, but rather the refined weapons-grade materials necessary to create a bomb, but how does the amount of time that has passed since we figured it out have any bearing on whether it's a good idea to give them information on the topic, whether they might already have it or not?
So, what about VHF? I realize the majority of DTV broadcasts are UHF, but a few are in the VHF range. How is this antenna's performance down there?
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click "Reply" there, rather than at the bottom of a user's post.
Like he said, feel free to give them your spare food. The US government's foreign aid is only a fraction of what the US people give voluntarily. The government is not the whole of society, especially in a free country.
It'd still be quite possible to detect cheating on tests, etc.: the information has to be transmitted via radio waves. If they can be received, they can be detected. Undetectable communication is impossible.
In this work, Christopher Tolkien is very clear about what his role was: choosing which version of his father's words to use. All of the words are J.R.R. Tolkien's. The Silmarillion does not deviate far from that standard, either. It's the Histories of Middle Earth where you'll find much of Christopher's own writing ... and then, it's typically a recounting of the history of the writing of the epics by his father, more often than it is actual "Middle Earth mythology" in a direct fashion.
Patents are rarely detailed enough to fully implement in practice; usually they cover only a subset of the design, and are written broadly enough that several different paths could be taken to implement them. Looking up a patent would show you the concept, but not an exact design such as a blueprint provides.
I've met a few of these people... set up a network with an Active Directory domain at a church about 4 years ago, and the secretary still can't grasp the concept of a user account being the same anywhere on the network, and occasionally sends an e-mail asking for the password for another computer. In this case, she couldn't handle the difference between the Win95/NT/2k style taskbar and the Playskool-looking one in XP, so even apart from issues of taste (avoiding the tacky blue and green), running anything other than the "Classic" look and feel would be too much of an adjustment for her. More typically, the color schemes are something that people seem to be able to handle changes in, so long as the layout is the same. There are millions of these people out there - they're the masses of regular users for whom Microsoft does massive market research towards designing a UI that will work for them as well as the rest of us.
It's not that they couldn't have learned the Gnome or Nautilus (or MacOS) UIs, but that they've now learned how to do what they need in the Windows Explorer UI by rote and are too intimidated to try anything else. From their perspectives, it's a completely different system to memorize, and there's little (if any) incentive to do so.
Or, we could blame everything on gravity. The same reasoning can conveniently be extended to any number of imagined causes. ;)
That's not nearly as radical a change to the UI even as what Microsoft did within Office between the 2003 and 2007 versions, let alone the different methods of accomplishing something in different operating systems. I'm not saying familiarity is necessarily a magic bullet for MS, but the claim that Vista's UI is substantially unfamiliar to an XP user is unfounded.
Bullshit. If the mars mission is actually doing useful work, then having people physically there will make the work much more efficient.
Useful work? What useful work is there to be done on an uninhabitable planet from which we cannot return? It's not as if we could mine it for resources ... we don't even have the capacity to get the person back. Taking pictures or analyzing soil samples can easily be accomplished by drones, and a delay isn't really that big a deal, considering that our only purpose for being there (besides a gesture to proclaim how much more capable we are than other nations) is abstract scientific research. I'm not saying that such research is not a worthy goal: it's how I make my living. But useful work doesn't fit into the scope of a mission to Mars. There's nothing useful to be done there.
I don't know the details, but it only works on the AIM and ICQ networks, not with MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, etc. Since it's a feature that only functions over the OSCAR protocol, there's clearly some protocol dependence.
In any case, third-party developers such as Cerulean Studios (Trillian) already apparently know the OSCAR protocol well enough to have incorporated additional functionality such as SecureIM (encrypted messages) that aren't included in standard AIM clients. This seems more geared towards encabling people to develop small-time add-ons or perhaps bloated adware clients than to actually increasing the quality of mainstream clients.
If the test returns javascript errors and confirmations as we're told it does, they should be able to compare those results against the standards for what should have happened. It's a bit more tedious than having a reference browser, perhaps, but it would work.