Painting this to be a personal thing by Yang is nuts. Yahoo and M$ were getting along famously until M$ decided to launch a hostile takeover.
Microsoft never launched a hostile takeover. A hostile takeover means bringing the offer to the shareholders directly, which they never did. All Microsoft did was bring their offer to Yahoo's board, which is what any other company would do if they were interested in buying them. Apparently this latest news indicates that Yang decided to not even negotiate. Though there were rumors that Microsoft might go hostile after the board negotiations broke down, it never happened.
Uh, no, that's completely wrong. Unless you're suggesting that Eric Traut doesn't work for or speak for Microsoft. In the talk he gave, clearly MinWin was supposed to be part of Windows 7.
Wrong again... the ZDNet article mischaracterized his statements. He only says they built MinWin out of the current Windows 7 codebase. If you actually listen to the talk, he says: "This is internal only; you won't see us productizing this, but you can imagine this being used as the basis for products in the future." (said at 4:00 of the video clip on this page)
Lawmakers always seem to be able to sneak in pork for their own agendas into bills; and often these bills are passed without people remembering where such clauses came from. If there were a source-control-like system, you could see who "checked in" which changes and how the bill evolved before being passed.
In essence, your idea is no different than a trade secret and your contracts become NDAs. However, if your code ever leaks to someone without a contract, they will be able to do whatever they want with it and you will have no legal recourse, which is the point the article is trying to make.
But technically, Plasma is often considered the fourth state of matter, and is hotter than the substance's equivellent gaseous form.
So? The gas only remains as a plasma as long as the electrical current is going through it. If it breaks, then it immediately cools down to room temperature since there's so little of the gas in the first place. Each of the individual ions are at a high temperature, but since there are so few of them, not much heat energy is transferred to the surrounding environment. All those neon lights you see everywhere are also just glowing tubes of plasma. You don't see them wreaking havoc when they break.
Jeez... just because you're studying physics doesn't mean you can still spout off and expect everyone to understand it. Essentially, what have you accomplished by just posting all the rigour without the context? Absolutely nothing; the original poster didn't learn anything and all you did was show off that you knew some math.
For the sake of miro_f and most of the other people in the/. community that don't have a degree in physics, all that was said is that a pure electric field in one frame of reference may look like an electromagnetic field in another frame of reference (for instance if an observer passing by at a significant speed [at least 0.2c] looks at an electric field in your frame of reference, it will look as if that electric field also has a magnetic component). All this means is that electric and magnetic fields are one and the same and depends on the frame of reference of the observer.
The EM field tensor and Minkowski space mentioned are mathematical constructions used to simplify calculations to arrive at this fact.
If you were truly taking a principled stand, you would stop listening to the music altogether. It seems like you are trying to justify knowingly breaking the law with the reason "I like it." Interesting principled stand: "But I like it...."
Isn't the statement of a principled stand even stronger if you actually do like the product? If you didn't like the product, you wouldn't have bought it anyway, so how is that a statement? If you do like the product but refuse to buy it because of the ethics of the seller, then you are actually making a statement because you are actually depriving yourself of something you would have bought otherwise.
Borealis, Boreas - The great north wind; greek god of. aka Aquilo
Australis, Auster - The great south wind; roman god of. aka Notus
Even though the aurora was observed in the southern hemisphere of Mars, it doesn't mean it should automatically be called aurora australis. They're called borealis and australis on Earth because they're caused by the magnetic field lines going to the northern and southern poles, respectively.
However, because Mars' magnetic field is too weak to create the phenomenon by similar means, the aurora is caused by a separate mechanism, namely the magnetic anomalies described in the article, which can occur anywhere on the planet. For this reason, it should not be called aurora borealis or aurora australis, but rather aurora [insert god of magnetic rocks here].
They returned over 25 billion to their shareholders via tax free dividends.
Where'd you get the impression that it was tax free? People who received the dividends still had to pay taxes on it (though it was treated separately from normal income).
What is the tax treatment of the special dividend?
The special dividend, along with the November 2004 quarterly dividend, was treated as "qualified dividend income" for U.S. federal income tax purposes. These dividends may also be considered "extraordinary" under the U.S. federal income tax rules depending on the facts and circumstances of the stockholder. Treatment as extraordinary may affect a corporate shareholder's basis in its Microsoft stock or, with respect to individual shareholders, may affect the tax characterization of a sale of their Microsoft shares. Thus, we strongly urge each stockholder to consult with their tax advisor regarding their specific tax treatment of these dividends including all applicable state, local, foreign and U.S. federal tax considerations.
If M$ didn't initially intend to include Monad in the release, why exactly was it in the alpha?
Monad was never included in the alpha. It was a separate package that developers could download if they wanted to play with it. The only connection it had with Longhorn was that developers needed to have Longhorn installed to make it work.
OK, human memory is pretty good at eliding details and interpolating from previous experience (analagous to heavy JPEG compression maybe?), but even 10minutes of pottering about the house must equate to a huge 'dataset'.
Yes, but how much of those 10 minutes do you actually store? Most likely you'll just remember the general episode but not the specific details. If you were talking to someone, you probably stored the meaning of the conversation but I bet you that you won't be able to recite the whole conversation word for word, probably not even a single sentence. There are plenty of details that your brain will just ignore, so there's definitely a lot of lossy compression going on.
It's not too surprising that the brain's short-term visual cache would be closer to the visual cortex. What I would like to know is how closely the visual cache is related to intelligence. Does it need actual visual input, instead of just imagined...?
Well, in the case of blind people, the visual system of their brain is taken over by their auditory system. They end up processing sound they way sight is usually processed, allowing them to "see" with whatever limited audio cues are given to them. It's amazing how adaptive the brain is.
From what I've read on the web and seen on a PBS Nova program about the subject: during a flip the Earth's internal dynamo goes from ordered to chaotic.
Yep... I've seen this Nova too. It was pretty interesting. For the rest of you out there, here's a link to the show's web site, where you can also see an animation of a computer simulation of a polar reversal. During the reversal, the earth could have poles coming out of the equator even, and if you were able to witness it, you would even see auroras around those poles.
Games like SimCity/warcraft show gamers how an extremely organized, well planned, and well led society can become greater than all others. Seeing how such societies flourish would naturally lead them to desire a similar intelligent overseer running the real world, with extreme authoritarian control to be able to 'do the right thing'.
I'd be wary of an intelligent overseer who had the itch to press the tornado button every now and then.
This is unless the instituational holders have some vested interest in seeing debacle continue. I would think that it there are several two and three letter companies that might be willing to pay a significant premium to make SCO go away.
But isn't this what a bunch of us slashdotters believed what SCO originally wanted?...to be bought out by IBM? And then their plan backfired when IBM decided to stand its ground so now their mentality is winning the lawsuits or bust?
I did not have parents who were PhDs or had a rigorous science background, but I was still named a STS finalist the year that I did it.
However, what did make the difference was a program in my high school specifically designed to encourage students to enter these types of competitions. Over three years, the program cultivated my interests and helped me get the courage to go to a local university and seek a professor to help me on my project. I don't know if I would have known to do that otherwise.
The application process is fairly rigorous too... they try to make sure you didn't get help in your project from your parents and that the work was done mostly independently with one or two adult mentors. I talk more about it in my other comment here.
I was a STS finalist back in 98 (back when it was still Westinghouse and not Intel) and can say with confidence that anyone who gets to that stage did not get help from their parents. The application and judging process is extremely rigorous.
Once you're a finalist, in order to determine whether you should be in the top 10, they take you through a somewhat intimidating interview process, where you sit speak in front of 3 other scientists at a time (I don't remember anymore, but I think I had 3 or 4 of these types of interviews)... and they don't even ask you about your project. They basically grill you on basic science concepts to see if you know what you are talking about.
BTW, to explain the high New York finalist ratio, this is due to the fact that a lot of New York high schools have 2-3 year programs especially designed to get students to do this competition. They never directly help your with your particular research project, but they do encourage you to go out to local universities and talk to professors in fields that you are interested in. They also help you enter other smaller science competitions in order for you to get more experience. If it hadn't been for one of these programs in my high school, I don't think I would have had the motivation/courage to do this on my own.
Many of the finalists do come from magnet schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, but plenty of NY public schools have this program too. It's basically a way for them to get prestige. I don't know why other states don't do the same, though I guess money is always an issue.
They made several references to webicorders in the article... I never heard that word before and Googled for it to find the definition:
The Webicorder is a Web display of seismic data. The display looks like paper records made by machines called "helicorders". A plot of the data is called a seismogram.
Slashdot Mirror
Lawmakers always seem to be able to sneak in pork for their own agendas into bills; and often these bills are passed without people remembering where such clauses came from. If there were a source-control-like system, you could see who "checked in" which changes and how the bill evolved before being passed.
In essence, your idea is no different than a trade secret and your contracts become NDAs. However, if your code ever leaks to someone without a contract, they will be able to do whatever they want with it and you will have no legal recourse, which is the point the article is trying to make.
Ni hao: You well -> Hello
Ni hao ma: Are you well? -> How are you?
Jeez... just because you're studying physics doesn't mean you can still spout off and expect everyone to understand it. Essentially, what have you accomplished by just posting all the rigour without the context? Absolutely nothing; the original poster didn't learn anything and all you did was show off that you knew some math. For the sake of miro_f and most of the other people in the /. community that don't have a degree in physics, all that was said is that a pure electric field in one frame of reference may look like an electromagnetic field in another frame of reference (for instance if an observer passing by at a significant speed [at least 0.2c] looks at an electric field in your frame of reference, it will look as if that electric field also has a magnetic component). All this means is that electric and magnetic fields are one and the same and depends on the frame of reference of the observer.
The EM field tensor and Minkowski space mentioned are mathematical constructions used to simplify calculations to arrive at this fact.
Of course it's more than oneupmanship. You should be able to fit at least 10 men in there. :)
However, because Mars' magnetic field is too weak to create the phenomenon by similar means, the aurora is caused by a separate mechanism, namely the magnetic anomalies described in the article, which can occur anywhere on the planet. For this reason, it should not be called aurora borealis or aurora australis, but rather aurora [insert god of magnetic rocks here].
From http://www.microsoft.com/msft/FAQ/faqdividend.mspx :
The POSIX layer is still freely available as a download even though it's not included in-box:d efault.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/sfu/
http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techrevie
For instance: http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:jo3aRe29uHsJ: slashdot.org/+slashdot&hl=en will be blocked by the firewall, but http://216.239.57.104/search?%71=cache:jo3aRe29uHs J:slashdot.org/+slashdot&hl=en will not. Congratulations, you've just successfully did a canonicalization exploit on their firewall! :)
Hopefully they won't figure this out and fix their firewall...
You can't reload real life...
However, what did make the difference was a program in my high school specifically designed to encourage students to enter these types of competitions. Over three years, the program cultivated my interests and helped me get the courage to go to a local university and seek a professor to help me on my project. I don't know if I would have known to do that otherwise.
The application process is fairly rigorous too... they try to make sure you didn't get help in your project from your parents and that the work was done mostly independently with one or two adult mentors. I talk more about it in my other comment here.
Once you're a finalist, in order to determine whether you should be in the top 10, they take you through a somewhat intimidating interview process, where you sit speak in front of 3 other scientists at a time (I don't remember anymore, but I think I had 3 or 4 of these types of interviews)... and they don't even ask you about your project. They basically grill you on basic science concepts to see if you know what you are talking about.
BTW, to explain the high New York finalist ratio, this is due to the fact that a lot of New York high schools have 2-3 year programs especially designed to get students to do this competition. They never directly help your with your particular research project, but they do encourage you to go out to local universities and talk to professors in fields that you are interested in. They also help you enter other smaller science competitions in order for you to get more experience. If it hadn't been for one of these programs in my high school, I don't think I would have had the motivation/courage to do this on my own.
Many of the finalists do come from magnet schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, but plenty of NY public schools have this program too. It's basically a way for them to get prestige. I don't know why other states don't do the same, though I guess money is always an issue.