Think about it. Why embed a processor to do that work when they could use the one already installed on the other side of the port?
Because they already have a processor in the mouse anyhow, to drive the scanner and otherwise process mouse movement. (High-power processor cores are cheap, and when you already have one for some other reason they're free.)
Because they're concerned about privacy issues, and don't want a raw fingerprint on the wire.
Because they want to compress the data before it hits the wire.
Because they want to be compatable across many platforms without dumping a lot of code into the driver where it might need tweaking - or they don't want to expose their compression/signature algorithm in an open-source or hackable driver.
Mind you, I'm not saying they DO compress the fingerprint in the mouse. I'm just providing reasons why they might chose to do so.
Heck, though this isn't the same issue, look at this year's presidential election. I wanted it to come down to ANYONE other than Bush and Gore. Now I'm stuck with no choice but to vote for one or to not vote.
The HELL you are.
Even if you've never participated in your local party machine, contributed to or volunteered for a candidate more to your likeing, or voted in the primary, there are more than two presidential candidates on the ballot.
Try voting your concience for a change.
A minor party candidate CAN win a big office. (Look at Jessie Ventura, the governor of Minnesota!) All it takes is voters who don't fall for the self-fulfilling prophecy that only a Republican or a Democrat can win.
The mathematical psychologists have a term for people who ignore the candidate closest to their opinion and vote for only for their best choice among those they perceive as "electable". They call such people "dishonest voters". And such behavior plays HELL with the mathematical models.
As long as you vote for the lesser of two evils, you support evil. By voting for a minor party candidate - even when he DOESN'T get elected, you say to the politicians "Here is a vote that you didn't get, that you COULD have gotten, if your position had been more like THAT guy's."
The only vote that DOESN'T count is the one that isn't cast.
...in this crazy upside down society of ours, that it seems that ones income is inversally proportional to ones real worth in society. Ie, the people who provide all the needs (food, clothing, housing),[] have the lowest incomes in society. While the people on the highest incomes mostly do nothing of any intrinsic value.
You seem to misunderstand markets.
Value is what people are willing to pay.
When a talent is in shorter supply than demand, the price rises until some of those "demanding" decide to do without or make do with something else.
So the price paid for talent is always less than its worth (who would pay more than something is worth?), but higher for useful-but-scarce talent than for useful-and-common.
Sure, people would quickly die without food. But nearly anyone can learn to flip burgers. And it doesn't take a strong command of the local language to clean a building or mow a lawn.
So enterprising immigrants (legal or otherwise) who arrive with ambition but no education and no local language, can still find work tending fields, cleaning buildings, cooking food, and so on. But their children and grandchildren may do much better - and perhaps they will as well, once they have developed skills that are in greater demand than supply.
The problem occurs when the pointy-haired bosses start stereotyping, start believing, for instance, that programming can only be done by young european-descended northern-city-raised Americans, orientals, or east Indians, while Chicanos, "rednecks", blacks, American Indians, and older people of all sorts are good only for low-pay work. When this happens, people with talent but a non-stereotypical appearance or accent, don't find the employment and pay level they are capable of performing, while companies pay exhorbitant premiums for "features" unrelated to the job, reddening their bottom line, all the while lamenting the "talent shortage".
does anyone remember in 'Hitchhikers guide to the Universe', where all the useless people [] colonised a planet (the spaceships with all the useful people crashed) & this planet ended up being called Earth later on, by their descendents.
Well, no.
But I remember how, in "Hitchhiker's Guide to the GALAXY" how the "A" ship had all the "useful" people and they deliberately crashed the "B" ship with all the "useless" people like the telephone sanitisers.
The B passengers ended up colonizing earth while the A passengers' new utopia was wiped out by a plague picked up from an unsanitised telephone.
Part of the problem with electric stuff is the sheer MAGNITUDE of power required - which is why you need peaking.
A horsepower is really close to 3/4 killowatt. Depending on the weight of your car you might need 150 or more of 'em to get away from the stop sign before you get rear-ended. (You only need 'em for moments.)
Do you want that as 75 amps at 1500 volts, or 750 amps at 150 volts? (And which car do YOU want to work on when there's trouble?)
A big one is power-to-weight ratio. Otto cycle engines have just about everything beat on that at the moment, and diesel cycle engines are a close second.
Workable alternatives are: - Steam - Electric transmission, flywheel peaking, just about any efficient engine at about 49 horse.
The last time steam was tried was when Howard Hughes tried it. By his figures he needed to get the total manufacturing cost of the engine plus flash boiler down to $150 to make it a practical replacement for the otto cycle. He got the engine part down to $150 but not to $75.
Electric transmission/flywheel peaking is not simple. But the hard parts are the flywheels and the electronics. People are again working on the flywheels, and silicon just keeps on improving. We might see 'em some time. (Of course I've been waiting for the version with the lawnmower engine / generator in place of the fuel cells for about 40 years and it isn't here yet.)
A fuel-cell/flywheel-peaked electric car would blow the DOORS off an otto-cycle car, as would may other electric transmission configurations. But nearly everything would have to work all the time. (Exception: The fuel cell/engine could quit, and you could limp it several miles to a fixit shop.)
We would never never ever consider driving less because we don't have much of a choice. I don't know percentages, but probably by far most of the population of the US has no reasonable access to public transportation.
And that's because public transportaion requires a concentration of people in one spot and a concentration of destinations in another.
That might work for some of the postage-stamp-sized countries in Europe, but here in the US (where we have counties larger than most european countries, and where the nearest cop shop can be three hours away on a road good for 70 MPH) we call such concentrations "slums".
Even where public transportation is in place and working well, two in a car is cheaper per passenger-mile than public transport.
But: - If your time has any value (and you don't want to waste it making connections) - If your safety has any value (and you don't want to risk it riding unarmed on a bus/train load of teen gangstas) - If your quality of life has any value (and you don't want to trash it by moving to an apartment next to the tracks) you'll generally find that you're WAY ahead in a driver-only car.
I don't think Apple had anything to do with the X/NeWS merged system.
Right. As I said, it was the same people who had previously done, independently of Apple, a NeWS for A/UX, which they wanted to sell to A/UX users. When they got no marketing support from Apple, they contracted with Sun to build the X/NeWS thingie for Sun.
By failing to support such outside developers, Apple proved that A/UX was what it had been rumored to be - a mechanism to enable US government departments to check the "it has a UNIX" box to satisfy the upper eschelons (who were trying to standardize the government computers on Unix).
Later on A/UX proved to be handy for checking that applications were 32-bit clean, when Apple migrated their OS - since it required such cleanliness to run Apple apps. So Apple told the developers they wouldn't certify anything that didn't run on A/UX, as a handy way to get things ported.
They should open-source it. People have been asking for this for 12 years now. I think the original (ie non-X merged) version should be made available. Please, Scott?
... to quote one of my friends, "There are no fucking attractive alternatives!"
Well, there IS NeWS. ("KNEE-wiss", not "news") Or at least there was. Built on Display Postscript. Nothing in the standard window management defined in terms of pixels (so the screen resolution didn't foul you up).
Big complaint is that, while it had a lot of handy capabilities it was somewhat slower than X. That was a decade ago, when processors were a LOT slower, AND NeWS didn't cache fonts. But that was then.
With today's processors the differential in speed might not be a problem. Either would "snap". And NeWS should be an ideal vehicle for taking maximum advantage of graphics accellerators, which might make it pass X.
(Or at least I THINK it would be good. I haven't been into the guts of it.)
Grasshopper Group (Gillmore, Henson, Daniels, in no particular order) did a quite workable one for the Apple Macintosh running A/UX about a decade back. When Apple wouldn't let developers know who was using A/UX OR forward mailings, they cut a deal with Sun to do an X/NeWS merged system. Which Sun then dropped, but wouldn't release the rights to their code.
Maybe, after a decade, Sun might want to reconsider and open-source it. That would provide a nice starting place.
If not, what was done once can be done again.
Name stood for "NEw Window System". Maybe it could be resurrected and renamed OlWS. B-)
The only real opposition we have left are the newspapers, most of which are owned by one man.
Unfortunately, the British newspapers aren't free, either. Without a constitution to trump the laws, the government can (and does) suppress news items it doesn't like.
If they'd considered how weaponry might advance (they didn't even have breach-loading firearms then, did they?), they might have been a little less ambiguous with the 2nd amendment.
They DID consider how weaponry would advance. (Prototype repeating weapons were already well known. Breach-loaders did exist, though they weren't common.)
The founders PERSONALLY owned top-of-the-line armament, from rifles to field cannon to warships. They had just used them to OVERTHROW the "legitimate government", partly using tactics that depended on their weaponry's advantages over that of their opposition.
And it's clear from their writings that the general population's military superiority over the central government's forces is EXACTLY what they meant to protect with the second amendment.
As for "state militias", those are examples of "select militias". "Well regulated militia" was a term of political debate, and referred to EXACTLY that part of an armed population that WASN'T enrolled in either the "standing army" or a "select militia".
(Even when called up by the central government to defend against foreign threats, the well regulated militia was commanded by officers that were not chosen by the Fed. Usually the officers were chosen by the members. According to the Founders' writings the selection of militia officers, and its method, was to be explicitly reserved to the state level.)
As [their resources] aren't [infinite], they necessarily have to make decisions between what areas to focus on.
I'd be inclined to agree with you if all they did was blandly ignore the amendments they didn't defend. (I'd even overlook things like their poster on the bill of rights, which conspicuously omits the 2nd.)
Unfortunately, they sometimes spend their "limited resources" working actively against it.
(Though they once worked for it, when it got tied to one of their big hot-buttons - the fourth. It was nice to see the ACLU and the NRA working together to defend the law-abiding residents of the Chicago public housing projects against warrantless searches allegedly looking for guns. B-) )
What part of "well regulated militia" don't you understand?
It looks like you don't understand it.
When reading historical documents you have to keep in mind that the language drifts with time. Different meanings of the same word become predominant, phrases fall into disuse, and so on. There's an entire specialization of history (called "historiography") dedicated to understanding documents in the version of the language in which they were written.
"Well regulated" is a textbook example of the effect. While "regulated", standing alone, occasionally meant "controlled by law or authority", it more commonly meant "adjusted/tuned". The phrase "well regulated" always meant the latter.
A "well regulated clock" kept good time. It didn't have a special section of the legal code dedicated to it. A person with a "well regulated mind" thought clearly. He wasn't a graduate of a mind-control program. A "well regulated shotgun" had two barrels that shot in the same direction, rather than diverging. It wasn't subject to 30,000 laws on everything from barrel length to whether it could be possessed within a mile of an elementary school.
And a "well regulated militia" was one that fought well, not one that was under the control of the government.
But that's just the start. The phrase "well regulated militia" was a special term of political debate. It referred to that portion of "the militia" (i.e. every adult male who owned or could borrow a gun and was in a condition to fight) that wasn't in a special relation to the government.
The armed land forces of the country were divided into three parts: The "standing army" (full-time employees who did nothing but soldier), the "select militia" (part-time employees who soldiered in times of need, under command and control of the government), and the "well regulated militia" (everybody else who could fight).
And according to the writings of the Founders, the well regulated militia was explicitly supposed to be not under the control of the government. And it was explicitly supposed to be large and talented enough to easily defeat all the other branches of the military combined if it ever came to a conflict.
Because the primary purpose of the well regulated militia was as the last ditch insurance that the government remained the servant of the people, rather than usurping the people's authority and becoming their master.
Because PPV molecules contain benzene rings, which allow electrons to move through the molecule, the polymer can act as a semiconductor--and form the basis of a light-emitting diode.
Or a transistor. (Even with only one type of semiconductor you can make a FET.)
Now think about what you can do once you can print transistors with chemical inks.
Then remember you can also print wires, resistors, capacitors, small inductors, and antennas. (You can do a large inductor with a capacitor and an amplifier.)
Densities will likely be too small for a really smart computer. But a slow RISC machine should be trivial. Analog will be easy.
Hybrids on paper from an ink-spitter... Brings a whole new meaning to "printed circuit". B-)
c. How "WELL" do these things respond to electricity? Can you give them a "little" juice and have them light up a little, and MORE JUICE to light up more?
If not, you could always excite them with a variable-width pulse, or print them in sections and turn on variable numbers of sections.
Wouldn't it be nice if HavenCo/Sealand would set up a mirror for DeCSS, ASF2MPEG (did you know that MS has a patent on the ASF format?) and other "illegal"/banned (peh) pieces of free software like this (and perhaps some standard crypto stuff OpenSSH, GnuPG, etc.).
What I'm saying is that It would be an interesting gimmick (marketing) for them...
Why should they become a lightning rod for free? They'd be ahead to leave this "marketing gimmic" to their clients, rather than co-opting it for themselves.
Then they get paid for the servers that host it, rather than spending their own resources on them. And they still get the marketing benefits.
(It might be in their interest to post the tools that are handy for doing business with them anonymously. But I bet even that could be handled, more cheaply, by linking to others who already host them.)
Large animals tend to have slower reaction times because of the finite speed of nerve signal propagation, so a huge animal is going to be relatively slower than a human being
True when comparing mammals, and true again when comparing lizards. (Dragons appear to be related to the latter). But when comparing lizards to mammals the strike of a lizard is way faster than you'd predict by considering a mammal of the same size.
Lizards are cold-blooded. So they can be mostly fast-twitch and do a significant amount of high-speed work before they cook themselves.
Also: If the strike doesn't require a mid-course correction it can be pipelined, so the neural delay doesn't matter.
But it also means that, if you can see it coming, you, as a small mammal, may be able to dodge. Watch "The Crock Hunter" versus a snake or a croc some time.
The problem is when the snake or crock (or dragon) pretends to be a stick or log (or redwood tree) until the strike. Then you DON'T see it coming until it's too late to dodge.
Of course, dragons can take advantage of their airspeed, too... B-)
But it's FUN to reverse-engineer a plausable explanation for things in SciFi (as opposed to SF) movies which are REALLY there solely for dramatic effect.
For example:
Q: Why does a "photon torpedo" going off nearby throw people around on the Enterprise's bridge?
My candidate A: EMP from the detonation interfering with the artificial gravity's mechanism for compensating for impulse engine acdelleration.)
My favorite from someone else:
Q: Why does the Enterprise go "whoosh" as it flies by (in a vacuum) in the opening credits?
A: Because someone left the vacuum cleaner running.
(Real A: Because they tried it silently and it just didn't work ffor the audience.)
At least JJ's people had energy weapons when they took on the Empire... Ewoks fought the 'crack' troopers who were supposed to be guarding the Emperor's life with sticks and rocks...and won!
Not totally preposterous. The battle scenes looked like the Empire's army had been dealing only with energy and particle-beam weapons for so long that their "armor" designers had sacrificed strength for weight and/or other factors, leaving them wide open to a kinetic energy attack.
A silly mistake, of course. But battlefields are littered with the remains of armies whose leaders and weapon designers made silly mistakes.
Of course the armor wasn't very effective against energy and/or particle beam weapons, either. And lots of the civilians they were called on to oppress were unarmed, and could be expected to improvise with clubs and the like. So why WERE they wearing that armor, anyhow?
Perhaps it was to be intimidating, ala the Nazi's crisp uniforms or the Klan's hoods. Perhaps it was as a weapons-system platform or remote-sensing countermeasures.
(Next question: Why didn't they have any thermal imaging, thus letting overgrown teddybears ambush them?)
Well, the illegal part was the fraud perperated when someone tried to bribe the janitors for the trash to sift through.
The courts have promulgated a rule about trash, fo the purposes of criminal investigations. The rule seems appropriate in this situation as well:
- If you discrad something, it's fair game for searches. (A "reasonable and prudent person" would have no "expectation" that the information on it would be safe from hostile viewers.)
- If you shred it first, it's not. (I.e. the cops don't get to sort the strips, stick them back together, and use them as evidence.)
If the courts recognize that you can expect the information on documents thrown into the trash, without shredding, to come back to haunt you in criminal cases, why is there anything "illegal" about a private citizen, or a service agency hired by one of the victims, doing the trash picking?
It's only a problem if they hire the janitors to give them trash they were supposed to shread.
As for fraud, WHAT fraud? Who was defrauded? Who defrauded whom? Again, the only way a fraud would be perpetrated is if the janitor handed over trash that he was hired to shread, or if he diverted it from a recycling operation he was specifically directed to use.
I believe it's more of a development, hobbiest, tinkerer, workstation kind of thing. No one in their right mind would buy an ARM as a desktop system. (At least, not in this form.)
Things may have changed since I was dealing with this (a couple years ago)...
If you are designing a system-on-a-chip ASIC and need a low-power, low-silicon-consumption, high-performance processor to embed, your choices were pretty much limited to the ARM and the MIPS families. And they were also limited by the fab you chose - most had one or the other available, few had both.
There are several big advantages to doing your software development on a platform that runs the same instruction set as the target or a superset of it. Two big ones:
- You can use the native development environment. (This was even more important a couple years back, because gcc's cross-platform support was badly broken.)
- You can run most of the target code on the workstation.
MIPS machines have been available with unix and linux for a very long time. Think SGI. (We bought a Cobalt Qube just to get a development environment for MIPS, after wasting more than its cost trying to get gcc/g++ to compile for a MIPS on a Sun. Found out later that we'd have needed a few hundred lines of patch from Cygnus to get cross-gcc to work.)
This board, running the Linux or BSD environments, provides an equivalent for the ARM family.
ARM cores tend to be smaller and lower power than MIPS for equivalent functionality. Being able to throw together an ARM development environment by stuffing this board into a PC case and loading Linux onto it is a great boon to garage-shop "fabless semiconductor companies".
Why are we so intent on replacing newspapers when they are the most effective medium for news?
Because newspapers aren't a medium for news. They're a medium for a lot of other things, and in the small amount of their square-footage they give to current events, they're normally a medium for distortion and propaganda.
And they're filtered down until so much information is removed that the "common man" can understand what's left - whether it's true or not, whether or not selective ommission amounts to a subtle lie. This makes them totally useless to the "uncommon man" - a tag which, on one subject or another, can be applied to nearly anyone.
Newspapers are being replaced by internet-based reporting because the internet lowers the barriers to entry. This means that current events reportage can be made with a variety of slants, not solely from those that appeal to the people with the money to own and operate the monopoly that is a chain of big-city newspapers, or a piece of the oligopoly that is the set of broadcast networks.
Though each reporter may use different colored filters as he views current events, combining enough colored images can give a clear picture. And you can't enforce selective ommission when anybody can play - because SOMEBODY will find "the other side" interesting enough to report.
News reporting has been in decline for about a half century, as a combination of economic forces, government intervention, and social activism has limited both the number of viewpoints and the amount of coverage. The internet has now changed the game.
Newspapers can drastically remake themselves - along the line of their claimed ideals - to stay in the game. Or they can survive by filling some other need than delivering news.
We know they're squirreling away in word files lots of identifying information about the people who create and those who edit the file. The whold WORLD found out after the the FBI used it to track down the author of a Word macro virus.
So obviously, if you're:
- a government functionary charged with keeping things secret,
- a businessman or office worker handling the trade secrets that give your company a competitive edge,
- a professional responsible for keeping your clients' business data, medical histories, or similar data confidential,
- a whistle-blower,
- a revolutionary writing a manefesto, or
- darn near anyone who has information to keep sectet
you should NOT be using Microsoft's tools.
I wonder how many more people will be harmed before the general public has this figured out?
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it. Why embed a processor to do that work when they could use the one already installed on the other side of the port?
Because they already have a processor in the mouse anyhow, to drive the scanner and otherwise process mouse movement. (High-power processor cores are cheap, and when you already have one for some other reason they're free.)
Because they're concerned about privacy issues, and don't want a raw fingerprint on the wire.
Because they want to compress the data before it hits the wire.
Because they want to be compatable across many platforms without dumping a lot of code into the driver where it might need tweaking - or they don't want to expose their compression/signature algorithm in an open-source or hackable driver.
Mind you, I'm not saying they DO compress the fingerprint in the mouse. I'm just providing reasons why they might chose to do so.
Heck, though this isn't the same issue, look at this year's presidential election. I wanted it to come down to ANYONE other than Bush and Gore. Now I'm stuck with no choice but to vote for one or to not vote.
The HELL you are.
Even if you've never participated in your local party machine, contributed to or volunteered for a candidate more to your likeing, or voted in the primary, there are more than two presidential candidates on the ballot.
Try voting your concience for a change.
A minor party candidate CAN win a big office. (Look at Jessie Ventura, the governor of Minnesota!) All it takes is voters who don't fall for the self-fulfilling prophecy that only a Republican or a Democrat can win.
The mathematical psychologists have a term for people who ignore the candidate closest to their opinion and vote for only for their best choice among those they perceive as "electable". They call such people "dishonest voters". And such behavior plays HELL with the mathematical models.
As long as you vote for the lesser of two evils, you support evil. By voting for a minor party candidate - even when he DOESN'T get elected, you say to the politicians "Here is a vote that you didn't get, that you COULD have gotten, if your position had been more like THAT guy's."
The only vote that DOESN'T count is the one that isn't cast.
...in this crazy upside down society of ours, that it seems that ones income is inversally proportional to ones real worth in society. Ie, the people who provide all the needs (food, clothing, housing),[] have the lowest incomes in society. While the people on the highest incomes mostly do nothing of any intrinsic value.
You seem to misunderstand markets.
Value is what people are willing to pay.
When a talent is in shorter supply than demand, the price rises until some of those "demanding" decide to do without or make do with something else.
So the price paid for talent is always less than its worth (who would pay more than something is worth?), but higher for useful-but-scarce talent than for useful-and-common.
Sure, people would quickly die without food. But nearly anyone can learn to flip burgers. And it doesn't take a strong command of the local language to clean a building or mow a lawn.
So enterprising immigrants (legal or otherwise) who arrive with ambition but no education and no local language, can still find work tending fields, cleaning buildings, cooking food, and so on. But their children and grandchildren may do much better - and perhaps they will as well, once they have developed skills that are in greater demand than supply.
The problem occurs when the pointy-haired bosses start stereotyping, start believing, for instance, that programming can only be done by young european-descended northern-city-raised Americans, orientals, or east Indians, while Chicanos, "rednecks", blacks, American Indians, and older people of all sorts are good only for low-pay work. When this happens, people with talent but a non-stereotypical appearance or accent, don't find the employment and pay level they are capable of performing, while companies pay exhorbitant premiums for "features" unrelated to the job, reddening their bottom line, all the while lamenting the "talent shortage".
does anyone remember in 'Hitchhikers guide to the Universe', where all the useless people [] colonised a planet (the spaceships with all the useful people crashed) & this planet ended up being called Earth later on, by their descendents.
Well, no.
But I remember how, in "Hitchhiker's Guide to the GALAXY" how the "A" ship had all the "useful" people and they deliberately crashed the "B" ship with all the "useless" people like the telephone sanitisers.
The B passengers ended up colonizing earth while the A passengers' new utopia was wiped out by a plague picked up from an unsanitised telephone.
Oh, yes...
Part of the problem with electric stuff is the sheer MAGNITUDE of power required - which is why you need peaking.
A horsepower is really close to 3/4 killowatt. Depending on the weight of your car you might need 150 or more of 'em to get away from the stop sign before you get rear-ended. (You only need 'em for moments.)
Do you want that as 75 amps at 1500 volts, or 750 amps at 150 volts? (And which car do YOU want to work on when there's trouble?)
A big one is power-to-weight ratio. Otto cycle engines have just about everything beat on that at the moment, and diesel cycle engines are a close second.
Workable alternatives are:
- Steam
- Electric transmission, flywheel peaking, just about any efficient engine at about 49 horse.
The last time steam was tried was when Howard Hughes tried it. By his figures he needed to get the total manufacturing cost of the engine plus flash boiler down to $150 to make it a practical replacement for the otto cycle. He got the engine part down to $150 but not to $75.
Electric transmission/flywheel peaking is not simple. But the hard parts are the flywheels and the electronics. People are again working on the flywheels, and silicon just keeps on improving. We might see 'em some time. (Of course I've been waiting for the version with the lawnmower engine / generator in place of the fuel cells for about 40 years and it isn't here yet.)
A fuel-cell/flywheel-peaked electric car would blow the DOORS off an otto-cycle car, as would may other electric transmission configurations. But nearly everything would have to work all the time. (Exception: The fuel cell/engine could quit, and you could limp it several miles to a fixit shop.)
We would never never ever consider driving less because we don't have much of a choice. I don't know percentages, but probably by far most of the population of the US has no reasonable access to public transportation.
And that's because public transportaion requires a concentration of people in one spot and a concentration of destinations in another.
That might work for some of the postage-stamp-sized countries in Europe, but here in the US (where we have counties larger than most european countries, and where the nearest cop shop can be three hours away on a road good for 70 MPH) we call such concentrations "slums".
Even where public transportation is in place and working well, two in a car is cheaper per passenger-mile than public transport.
But:
- If your time has any value (and you don't want to waste it making connections)
- If your safety has any value (and you don't want to risk it riding unarmed on a bus/train load of teen gangstas)
- If your quality of life has any value (and you don't want to trash it by moving to an apartment next to the tracks)
you'll generally find that you're WAY ahead in a driver-only car.
Thanks for the corrections.
I don't think Apple had anything to do with the X/NeWS merged system.
Right. As I said, it was the same people who had previously done, independently of Apple, a NeWS for A/UX, which they wanted to sell to A/UX users. When they got no marketing support from Apple, they contracted with Sun to build the X/NeWS thingie for Sun.
By failing to support such outside developers, Apple proved that A/UX was what it had been rumored to be - a mechanism to enable US government departments to check the "it has a UNIX" box to satisfy the upper eschelons (who were trying to standardize the government computers on Unix).
Later on A/UX proved to be handy for checking that applications were 32-bit clean, when Apple migrated their OS - since it required such cleanliness to run Apple apps. So Apple told the developers they wouldn't certify anything that didn't run on A/UX, as a handy way to get things ported.
They should open-source it. People have been asking for this for 12 years now. I think the original (ie non-X merged) version should be made available. Please, Scott?
Yes: Pretty please with syntactic sugar on it!
... to quote one of my friends, "There are no fucking attractive alternatives!"
Well, there IS NeWS. ("KNEE-wiss", not "news") Or at least there was. Built on Display Postscript. Nothing in the standard window management defined in terms of pixels (so the screen resolution didn't foul you up).
Big complaint is that, while it had a lot of handy capabilities it was somewhat slower than X. That was a decade ago, when processors were a LOT slower, AND NeWS didn't cache fonts. But that was then.
With today's processors the differential in speed might not be a problem. Either would "snap". And NeWS should be an ideal vehicle for taking maximum advantage of graphics accellerators, which might make it pass X.
(Or at least I THINK it would be good. I haven't been into the guts of it.)
Grasshopper Group (Gillmore, Henson, Daniels, in no particular order) did a quite workable one for the Apple Macintosh running A/UX about a decade back. When Apple wouldn't let developers know who was using A/UX OR forward mailings, they cut a deal with Sun to do an X/NeWS merged system. Which Sun then dropped, but wouldn't release the rights to their code.
Maybe, after a decade, Sun might want to reconsider and open-source it. That would provide a nice starting place.
If not, what was done once can be done again.
Name stood for "NEw Window System". Maybe it could be resurrected and renamed OlWS. B-)
Even the phrase "Old Fart" is a punk rock coinage.
Old Fart predates punk rock.
It even predates me (who is one). B-)
The only real opposition we have left are the newspapers, most of which are owned by one man.
Unfortunately, the British newspapers aren't free, either. Without a constitution to trump the laws, the government can (and does) suppress news items it doesn't like.
If they'd considered how weaponry might advance (they didn't even have breach-loading firearms then, did they?), they might have been a little less ambiguous with the 2nd amendment.
They DID consider how weaponry would advance. (Prototype repeating weapons were already well known. Breach-loaders did exist, though they weren't common.)
The founders PERSONALLY owned top-of-the-line armament, from rifles to field cannon to warships. They had just used them to OVERTHROW the "legitimate government", partly using tactics that depended on their weaponry's advantages over that of their opposition.
And it's clear from their writings that the general population's military superiority over the central government's forces is EXACTLY what they meant to protect with the second amendment.
As for "state militias", those are examples of "select militias". "Well regulated militia" was a term of political debate, and referred to EXACTLY that part of an armed population that WASN'T enrolled in either the "standing army" or a "select militia".
(Even when called up by the central government to defend against foreign threats, the well regulated militia was commanded by officers that were not chosen by the Fed. Usually the officers were chosen by the members. According to the Founders' writings the selection of militia officers, and its method, was to be explicitly reserved to the state level.)
As [their resources] aren't [infinite], they necessarily have to make decisions between what areas to focus on.
I'd be inclined to agree with you if all they did was blandly ignore the amendments they didn't defend. (I'd even overlook things like their poster on the bill of rights, which conspicuously omits the 2nd.)
Unfortunately, they sometimes spend their "limited resources" working actively against it.
(Though they once worked for it, when it got tied to one of their big hot-buttons - the fourth. It was nice to see the ACLU and the NRA working together to defend the law-abiding residents of the Chicago public housing projects against warrantless searches allegedly looking for guns. B-) )
What part of "well regulated militia" don't you understand?
It looks like you don't understand it.
When reading historical documents you have to keep in mind that the language drifts with time. Different meanings of the same word become predominant, phrases fall into disuse, and so on. There's an entire specialization of history (called "historiography") dedicated to understanding documents in the version of the language in which they were written.
"Well regulated" is a textbook example of the effect. While "regulated", standing alone, occasionally meant "controlled by law or authority", it more commonly meant "adjusted/tuned". The phrase "well regulated" always meant the latter.
A "well regulated clock" kept good time. It didn't have a special section of the legal code dedicated to it. A person with a "well regulated mind" thought clearly. He wasn't a graduate of a mind-control program. A "well regulated shotgun" had two barrels that shot in the same direction, rather than diverging. It wasn't subject to 30,000 laws on everything from barrel length to whether it could be possessed within a mile of an elementary school.
And a "well regulated militia" was one that fought well, not one that was under the control of the government.
But that's just the start. The phrase "well regulated militia" was a special term of political debate. It referred to that portion of "the militia" (i.e. every adult male who owned or could borrow a gun and was in a condition to fight) that wasn't in a special relation to the government.
The armed land forces of the country were divided into three parts: The "standing army" (full-time employees who did nothing but soldier), the "select militia" (part-time employees who soldiered in times of need, under command and control of the government), and the "well regulated militia" (everybody else who could fight).
And according to the writings of the Founders, the well regulated militia was explicitly supposed to be not under the control of the government. And it was explicitly supposed to be large and talented enough to easily defeat all the other branches of the military combined if it ever came to a conflict.
Because the primary purpose of the well regulated militia was as the last ditch insurance that the government remained the servant of the people, rather than usurping the people's authority and becoming their master.
Because PPV molecules contain benzene rings, which allow electrons to move through the molecule, the polymer can act as a semiconductor--and form the basis of a light-emitting diode.
Or a transistor. (Even with only one type of semiconductor you can make a FET.)
Now think about what you can do once you can print transistors with chemical inks.
Then remember you can also print wires, resistors, capacitors, small inductors, and antennas. (You can do a large inductor with a capacitor and an amplifier.)
Densities will likely be too small for a really smart computer. But a slow RISC machine should be trivial. Analog will be easy.
Hybrids on paper from an ink-spitter... Brings a whole new meaning to "printed circuit". B-)
c. How "WELL" do these things respond to electricity? Can you give them a "little" juice and have them light up a little, and MORE JUICE to light up more?
If not, you could always excite them with a variable-width pulse, or print them in sections and turn on variable numbers of sections.
Wouldn't it be nice if HavenCo/Sealand would set up a mirror for DeCSS, ASF2MPEG (did you know that MS has a patent on the ASF format?) and other "illegal"/banned (peh) pieces of free software like this (and perhaps some standard crypto stuff OpenSSH, GnuPG, etc.).
What I'm saying is that It would be an interesting gimmick (marketing) for them...
Why should they become a lightning rod for free? They'd be ahead to leave this "marketing gimmic" to their clients, rather than co-opting it for themselves.
Then they get paid for the servers that host it, rather than spending their own resources on them. And they still get the marketing benefits.
(It might be in their interest to post the tools that are handy for doing business with them anonymously. But I bet even that could be handled, more cheaply, by linking to others who already host them.)
Large animals tend to have slower reaction times because of the finite speed of nerve signal propagation, so a huge animal is going to be relatively slower than a human being
True when comparing mammals, and true again when comparing lizards. (Dragons appear to be related to the latter). But when comparing lizards to mammals the strike of a lizard is way faster than you'd predict by considering a mammal of the same size.
Lizards are cold-blooded. So they can be mostly fast-twitch and do a significant amount of high-speed work before they cook themselves.
Also: If the strike doesn't require a mid-course correction it can be pipelined, so the neural delay doesn't matter.
But it also means that, if you can see it coming, you, as a small mammal, may be able to dodge. Watch "The Crock Hunter" versus a snake or a croc some time.
The problem is when the snake or crock (or dragon) pretends to be a stick or log (or redwood tree) until the strike. Then you DON'T see it coming until it's too late to dodge.
Of course, dragons can take advantage of their airspeed, too... B-)
But it's FUN to reverse-engineer a plausable explanation for things in SciFi (as opposed to SF) movies which are REALLY there solely for dramatic effect.
For example:
Q: Why does a "photon torpedo" going off nearby throw people around on the Enterprise's bridge?
My candidate A: EMP from the detonation interfering with the artificial gravity's mechanism for compensating for impulse engine acdelleration.)
My favorite from someone else:
Q: Why does the Enterprise go "whoosh" as it flies by (in a vacuum) in the opening credits?
A: Because someone left the vacuum cleaner running.
(Real A: Because they tried it silently and it just didn't work ffor the audience.)
For the millenium I finally retired my Suns-at-home and went to a PC architecture. (Also retired SunOS/Solaris for Linux.)
For the hardware I chose the top-end Athlon.
Reasons:
- No serial number inside.
- Great price/performance.
- Intel's non-support history with the Pentium math bug.
At least JJ's people had energy weapons when they took on the Empire... Ewoks fought the 'crack' troopers who were supposed to be guarding the Emperor's life with sticks and rocks...and won!
Not totally preposterous. The battle scenes looked like the Empire's army had been dealing only with energy and particle-beam weapons for so long that their "armor" designers had sacrificed strength for weight and/or other factors, leaving them wide open to a kinetic energy attack.
A silly mistake, of course. But battlefields are littered with the remains of armies whose leaders and weapon designers made silly mistakes.
Of course the armor wasn't very effective against energy and/or particle beam weapons, either. And lots of the civilians they were called on to oppress were unarmed, and could be expected to improvise with clubs and the like. So why WERE they wearing that armor, anyhow?
Perhaps it was to be intimidating, ala the Nazi's crisp uniforms or the Klan's hoods. Perhaps it was as a weapons-system platform or remote-sensing countermeasures.
(Next question: Why didn't they have any thermal imaging, thus letting overgrown teddybears ambush them?)
Well, the illegal part was the fraud perperated when someone tried to bribe the janitors for the trash to sift through.
The courts have promulgated a rule about trash, fo the purposes of criminal investigations. The rule seems appropriate in this situation as well:
- If you discrad something, it's fair game for searches. (A "reasonable and prudent person" would have no "expectation" that the information on it would be safe from hostile viewers.)
- If you shred it first, it's not. (I.e. the cops don't get to sort the strips, stick them back together, and use them as evidence.)
If the courts recognize that you can expect the information on documents thrown into the trash, without shredding, to come back to haunt you in criminal cases, why is there anything "illegal" about a private citizen, or a service agency hired by one of the victims, doing the trash picking?
It's only a problem if they hire the janitors to give them trash they were supposed to shread.
As for fraud, WHAT fraud? Who was defrauded? Who defrauded whom? Again, the only way a fraud would be perpetrated is if the janitor handed over trash that he was hired to shread, or if he diverted it from a recycling operation he was specifically directed to use.
I believe it's more of a development, hobbiest, tinkerer, workstation kind of thing. No one in their right mind would buy an ARM as a desktop system. (At least, not in this form.)
Things may have changed since I was dealing with this (a couple years ago)...
If you are designing a system-on-a-chip ASIC and need a low-power, low-silicon-consumption, high-performance processor to embed, your choices were pretty much limited to the ARM and the MIPS families. And they were also limited by the fab you chose - most had one or the other available, few had both.
There are several big advantages to doing your software development on a platform that runs the same instruction set as the target or a superset of it. Two big ones:
- You can use the native development environment. (This was even more important a couple years back, because gcc's cross-platform support was badly broken.)
- You can run most of the target code on the workstation.
MIPS machines have been available with unix and linux for a very long time. Think SGI. (We bought a Cobalt Qube just to get a development environment for MIPS, after wasting more than its cost trying to get gcc/g++ to compile for a MIPS on a Sun. Found out later that we'd have needed a few hundred lines of patch from Cygnus to get cross-gcc to work.)
This board, running the Linux or BSD environments, provides an equivalent for the ARM family.
ARM cores tend to be smaller and lower power than MIPS for equivalent functionality. Being able to throw together an ARM development environment by stuffing this board into a PC case and loading Linux onto it is a great boon to garage-shop "fabless semiconductor companies".
Why are we so intent on replacing newspapers when they are the most effective medium for news?
Because newspapers aren't a medium for news. They're a medium for a lot of other things, and in the small amount of their square-footage they give to current events, they're normally a medium for distortion and propaganda.
And they're filtered down until so much information is removed that the "common man" can understand what's left - whether it's true or not, whether or not selective ommission amounts to a subtle lie. This makes them totally useless to the "uncommon man" - a tag which, on one subject or another, can be applied to nearly anyone.
Newspapers are being replaced by internet-based reporting because the internet lowers the barriers to entry. This means that current events reportage can be made with a variety of slants, not solely from those that appeal to the people with the money to own and operate the monopoly that is a chain of big-city newspapers, or a piece of the oligopoly that is the set of broadcast networks.
Though each reporter may use different colored filters as he views current events, combining enough colored images can give a clear picture.
And you can't enforce selective ommission when anybody can play - because SOMEBODY will find "the other side" interesting enough to report.
News reporting has been in decline for about a half century, as a combination of economic forces, government intervention, and social activism has limited both the number of viewpoints and the amount of coverage. The internet has now changed the game.
Newspapers can drastically remake themselves - along the line of their claimed ideals - to stay in the game. Or they can survive by filling some other need than delivering news.
The Word feature to turn off is Fast Saves
So why was it on by default?
What other security leaks do they have in there?
We know they're squirreling away in word files lots of identifying information about the people who create and those who edit the file. The whold WORLD found out after the the FBI used it to track down the author of a Word macro virus.
So obviously, if you're:
- a government functionary charged with keeping things secret,
- a businessman or office worker handling the trade secrets that give your company a competitive edge,
- a professional responsible for keeping your clients' business data, medical histories, or similar data confidential,
- a whistle-blower,
- a revolutionary writing a manefesto, or
- darn near anyone who has information to keep sectet
you should NOT be using Microsoft's tools.
I wonder how many more people will be harmed before the general public has this figured out?