Since we have now redefined nanotech to include anything that deals in nanometer scale structures, rather than artificially constructed mechanisms with molecules as components[...]
Umm... I'm pretty sure that's *always* been the real-world definition of nanotech. The "molecules as components" definition would be science fiction only.
Just what causes this rotational lock? I mean I realize the Moon is locked to its rotation around the Earth, yet the Earth is not locked the Sun, which it clearly orbits and has done so for quite a while.
Tidal forces do that. Basically, the earth would be stretched into an oblong shape, with the long axis pointing at the dwarf. If the earth then tried to spin faster than the orbital period, the crust would have to bend as the oblong part "moved" WRT the rest of the earth.
If the earth was trying to sping enough faster (or slower; it's all relative) than the orbital period, then things on the ground would move over this "hump" very quickly, and might be thrown into the air, much like a car going too fast over a hill. If this happened on the hump pointing towards the dwarf (there'd also be one pointing away from it), then any people who got "launched" in this manner would stand a decent chance of being captured by the gravity of the dwarf, and landing on it. They would then become the richest people in the solar system, unless someone else had claimed the dwarf first.
I like the idea of having people caught quickly but at the same time I feel that law enforcement agencies would quickly find a way to constantly monitor the cameras, cutting into our privacy even more. Since these cameras are in public it doesn't bother me as much.
I wholeheartedly object to this and all other gamers should as well. Take a look at Xbox Live-- They are doing similar things as Steam in "downloadable content" How long will it take for them to realize that they can loop the noose around your nuts and charge you for updates? You want the new map pack for Half Life2/3? That'll be a 12.95/mo service charge for Steam please.
And how were they unable to do this before? Just because they *can* use online distribution for that, doesn't mean they will. Especially if they know they'll drive away their customers by doing so.
I thought companies had been trying to move software to a subscription model for a while now. They don't seem to have managed to yet, and it's certainly not a technical issue...
NVidia provides binary drivers precompiled for the most common distors - RedHat, Fedora, Suse, Mandrake. They can't possibly provide binaries for all of them.
Debian provides compiled nvidia kernel modules (in the non-free section, not in the main distribution) to match the compiled kernels they provide.
Eh, I seriously doubt that a laser would have to be anywhere close to as bright as sunlight to be dangerous. The trouble is that the light's all going in exactly the same direction, and focusses to a really small spot on your eye when you look at it.
The best quality optics in the world won't get you past the diffraction limit, so the physical size of the CCD matters too. The diffraction limit imposes the condition that cramming ever more pixels into the same area eventually becomes fruitless: there's no more information to be had in that area. You want more information? Increase that area.
It's actually the size of the aperture, not the image plane, that imposes diffraction limits. On the image plane, the limit is imposed by the size of the beam waist you can get given the focal length of the lens and its aperture (which give the angle at which the beam converges, which gives the beam waist size for any given wavelength).
In the best possible case, you get a pixel size comparable to a wavelength of light (say one micron, for visible light). This requires a lens (or mirror!) with a diameter comparable to its focal length.
And since this gives a minimum useful pixel size, the only way to get more (useful) pixels is to have a bigger physical CCD. Just like was said.
I agree it's very scary to have to show your papers, and have guys with big machine guns standing in train stations (visit Penn station at some point), and I would support any and all alternatives that could accomplish the same effect. I just can't think of any off hand except give in to the many and varied demands of anyone who waves a bomb in our collective faces, and I think that will just cause more trouble, not less.
Why not just shoot 'em? More effective, and possibly even legal (self-defense, whatever "defense of others" is called).
You could try to prevent them from waving the bomb in your face, you could let them and then do whatever they want, or you can make it pointless (and suicidal) for them to try.
Remember that the nVidia driver is source for the kernel module, the binary is just for the XFree server.
No.
The bulk of the kernel module is from a file "nv-kernel.o" (~5MB), which is provided already compiled. The source files provided total <300kB. The finished kernel module is ~55kB (1%) larger than the provided (precompiled, binary only) core.
Sacrilege! We all know that all true emacs functions require at least three modifier keys! We'll have none of this stupid single keypress to perform a simple function crap!
Huh? Those 29 other keys? They *are* modifier keys. Now you're not limited to just 3 anymore.
So if you leave the front door of your house open (by mistake or on purpose), it is okay for anyone to come in, check out what you have in the fridge, use your bathroom, etc.?
If your house is in the middle of downtown and looks no different from a public business...
Not really relevant anyway, considering that any incoming connections have to be accepted first; if you tell your computer to refuse connections, or even to ignore those that ask to connect, they won't be able to.
So it's more like, if someone asks to come in and someone inside opens the door for them, is it ok for them to enter?
Huh. So if ax overflows during addition, it increments the top half of eax even though it was told to do a 16-bit operation, rather than a 32-bit one?
And I'd think i386 would have some mechanism to know if an overflow had occurred (never used i386 asm enough to find it, but it seems necessary for some things), something using this (assuming it really does exist) would definitely see a difference in some of those instructions.
It has to be said, I think that if Sun are seriously thinking of producing such chips then it must be a moderately good idea (they're not monkeys after all), so I wouldn't write it off on the basis of heat concerns.
Unless, of course, they're doing it to try to live up to their name... but then just think how cool a stack of white-hot chips would look...
In that twisted logic, I suppose you would blame gunshot victims for not wearing a bullet-proof vest or upgrading to the newest models when better armor piercing bullets came out.
Maybe if they knowingly chose to enter an active war zone...
Instead of fighting for one signe UI, Gnome should have two modes: beginner and expert.
[...]
Actually, in any of the modes, one should be able to easily configure a feature according to the needs. For instance, maybe a beginner would still like to type a full path, so somewhere (not in gconf only) there should be an option to enable it.
How about config options for everything, with 2 sets of defaults? Or a load-setting-from-file mechanism; something akin to the theme engine?
yeah until its on 90% of desktops...then we'll see how secure it is
And to further blow your smug theory away, any Unix like operating system will always be more secure than the current Windows systems by design. Its not an opinion, its a design choice that makes the software somewhat more difficult to use but gaining security. You CAN make a Unix like OS as insecure as a standard Windows install (hello Lindows) but you have to really try.
...But because it makes software harder to use, it's not going to *be* on 90% of desktops until they drop the security. Or until someone makes the security not interfere with use, in which case Windows would suddenly get much better security.
Also, since the police can arrest you for withholding your name, if you are trying to avoid being arrested for an outstanding warrant, they can hold you indefinitely - simply by asking you your name every 24 hours until you tell them (so they look up your outstanding warrants). Yep - forced self-incrimination.
B.S.
The reasoning against forced self-incrimination is that the answer may not be true, just temporarily convinent. Thus, people could be forced to incriminate themselves for what they didn't do. This question cannot be used for that.
It's an open-ended question, not a directed question they could try to force a particular answer to; its "What's your name?", not "Are you So-and-So?" "No" *thwack* "Are you So-and-So?" etc . And even if they were allowed to phrase it that way, there's still the matter of physical description.
My guess is that there will be a future case that gets to the supreme court, where an innocent person in a legal demonstration refuses to give their name, gets arrested, and refuses for weeks to give their name - and gets held by the police without any realistic opportunity to be set free. Then maybe the court will realize what they've done.
Verry funny. They could, at any time, simply tell them their name and end the whole thing. Or they could go to court over it like this guy did and try to argue that the police didn't have sufficient reason to ask. That *is* kinda the point of legal demonstrations, you know.
So, lemme get this straight. You're NOT suspected of a crime and refuse to identify yourself, you get arrested. You ARE suspected of a crime and refuse to identify yourself and you DON'T get arrested? That's pretty fucked up.
Uh, if you're suspected of a crime, then wouldn't you get arrested for that *regardless* of whether you agree to identify yourself?
Using Profiling as an optimization tool is *always* unfair unless both tools are provided with the advantage of the same profiling information. This is a valid question for the author then: if the JIT/javac/JVM uses profiling information, gcc should too, for fair comparison.
Why? In neither case did the programmer do extra work to provide profile data. If one tool can figure that out for itself somehow, that's a valid advantage. Which tool works better with a given amount of programmer time?
When I try to load the Get The Facts site in IE, it loads just fine.
When I try to load it under Mozilla Firebird 0.7, I get redirected to http://www.microsoft.com/info/customerror.htm, with the error "We're sorry, we were unable to service your request. As an option, you may visit any of the pages below for information about Microsoft services and products."
Doesn't only showing the page to the people using your product kind of beat the purpose?
Actually, that's not really right in either respect.
With both patents and copyrights, the number of areas one is excluded from are really fairly large. For example, you are not allowed to publicly perform works, though that is not a copy in the eyes of the law, nor are you allowed to import them in various manners, which also isn't even vaguely related to copying. Likewise, patents deal with many issues related to inventions.
Copyright only covers using someone else's work. You can't do that by accident.
Patents cover a specific way of doing things, whether copied or independently invented. It is possible to violate a patent without knowing about it.
However, since all patents are on file, there's no reason for people to accidently infringe on a patent. They can and should know that it exists; they're just not checking.
They very well could be checking, but just not quite thouroughly enough.
...and since when does everyone who might possibly come up with something they think is "new" have the resources needed for a thourough patent search?
The modification that I'd like to see made would involve *patent owners* having to pay ex parte or inter partes fees if it is determined that their patent was improperly approved. This means that groups like the EFF (and, with some work to make the process particularly easy, perhaps anyone) can initate re-examination requests while supplying prior art examples.
Problem: The patent owner should not be liable for screwups by the patent office. The initial filing fee should cover all needed research.
Idea: Have the patent office refund the challenge-patent fee if the challenge is successful. Challenger makes patent office do pointless extra work, challenger pays $$$. Challenger finds mistake made by patent office, it's not the challenger's fault a bad patent was granted.
Slashdot Mirror
Tim
If the earth was trying to sping enough faster (or slower; it's all relative) than the orbital period, then things on the ground would move over this "hump" very quickly, and might be thrown into the air, much like a car going too fast over a hill. If this happened on the hump pointing towards the dwarf (there'd also be one pointing away from it), then any people who got "launched" in this manner would stand a decent chance of being captured by the gravity of the dwarf, and landing on it. They would then become the richest people in the solar system, unless someone else had claimed the dwarf first.
Tim
Tim
Think "witch trials", people being forced to confess to things they hadn't done... don't see how this is such an issue with DNA samples and whatnot...
Tim
I thought companies had been trying to move software to a subscription model for a while now. They don't seem to have managed to yet, and it's certainly not a technical issue...
Tim
Tim
Tim
Tim
You could try to prevent them from waving the bomb in your face, you could let them and then do whatever they want, or you can make it pointless (and suicidal) for them to try.
Tim
Tim
The bulk of the kernel module is from a file "nv-kernel.o" (~5MB), which is provided already compiled. The source files provided total <300kB. The finished kernel module is ~55kB (1%) larger than the provided (precompiled, binary only) core.
Tim
Tim
Not really relevant anyway, considering that any incoming connections have to be accepted first; if you tell your computer to refuse connections, or even to ignore those that ask to connect, they won't be able to.
So it's more like, if someone asks to come in and someone inside opens the door for them, is it ok for them to enter?
Tim
And I'd think i386 would have some mechanism to know if an overflow had occurred (never used i386 asm enough to find it, but it seems necessary for some things), something using this (assuming it really does exist) would definitely see a difference in some of those instructions.
Tim
Tim
Tim
Tim
How about config options for everything, with 2 sets of defaults? Or a load-setting-from-file mechanism; something akin to the theme engine?
Tim
Tim
The reasoning against forced self-incrimination is that the answer may not be true, just temporarily convinent. Thus, people could be forced to incriminate themselves for what they didn't do. This question cannot be used for that.
It's an open-ended question, not a directed question they could try to force a particular answer to; its "What's your name?", not "Are you So-and-So?" "No" *thwack* "Are you So-and-So?" etc . And even if they were allowed to phrase it that way, there's still the matter of physical description.
Verry funny. They could, at any time, simply tell them their name and end the whole thing. Or they could go to court over it like this guy did and try to argue that the police didn't have sufficient reason to ask. That *is* kinda the point of legal demonstrations, you know.Tim
Tim
Tim
Tim
Patents cover a specific way of doing things, whether copied or independently invented. It is possible to violate a patent without knowing about it.
They very well could be checking, but just not quite thouroughly enough.Tim
Idea: Have the patent office refund the challenge-patent fee if the challenge is successful. Challenger makes patent office do pointless extra work, challenger pays $$$. Challenger finds mistake made by patent office, it's not the challenger's fault a bad patent was granted.
Tim