There is a big problem with online TV, from the perspective of companies like Fox: it is very easy for the studios to go directly to their customers. Fox is essentially a publisher. They buy or commission TV shows and then broadcast them with adverts to recoup their original costs and make a profit. If they don't want a show, the studio has few alternatives for distribution, because the airwaves only provide a limited amount of space. On the Internet, this is not the case, as long as someone is willing to pay for it then the studios can keep producing their shows and can keep distributing them. Why would they need the likes of Fox? And, if every show that Fox cancels ends up being directly funded by fans and continuing, who would care about Fox?
Yes there is. Slot machines (at least around here) have to publish their payout ratio. If they pay out less than the amount stated on the machine, then the operator is liable for large fines.
The time for nation building in Afghanistan was at the end of the Cold War, back when America was seen as a liberator. Abandoning the country as soon as it stopped being a valuable short-term ally made the USA an easy target for negative propaganda. It looks like the rush to 'bring our boys home' is going to cause the same mistake to be repeated in Iraq...
It is illegal to spend US public money on propaganda aimed at domestic consumption. It would be legal if the cost for the military is covered entirely by the studio, with no hidden subsidies, or if the film is intended entirely for the export market.
If you're expecting science fiction, you wouldn't be missing much. Space opera, maybe, romance-thrillers, definitely. I quite enjoyed the selection of her books that my local library had, but describing her as a 'Sci-Fi Writer' seems quite misleading to me.
My reaction too. It's subsidising nuclear and wind, makes it easier for small experimental generators to be connected to the grid (yay for getting back some of the R&D investment on your new test plant), requires carbon capture for coal plants, and provides an emissions ceiling for any power plant which is going to be lowered every year. And the Slashdot spin is that it sucks because it doesn't mandate immediately switching to unicorn fart power.
They can't sell what they don't have the rights to sell
If you read the Facebook T&Cs, you will see that users warrant that they do have the right to grant the license that Facebook requests. If you do not, in fact, have this right, then you are liable for any damages that Facebook incurs. That means that if you upload a cover of a song and Facebook produces it as a single, then Facebook can take you to court to claim back the statutory license that the original author is entitled to.
Why? What part of EU law states that a company is not allowed to do what you authorised them to do with your work? If this were the case, I suspect a lot of publishers would find it very difficult to do business in the EU.
Not necessarily. Facebook owns a nonexclusive, sublicenseable, commercial license to anything that their users have uploaded. There are probably a lot of bands that have uploaded their albums, for example. Facebook would be quite within their rights to put these on iTunes or Amazon. It wouldn't take many people buying them to push them over the $18 mark. The same with photographs - they've already sold some of these to Starbucks for advertising, they're probably in a good position to compete with the likes of iStockPhoto.
While true, it's also misleading. The inverse square law isn't magic, it's follows naturally on from basic geometry. If you take a 2D beam with any angle of spread, then at distance 2n from the source, it will be twice as wide as at distance n. If the beam is in three dimensions, then the spread will be twice as wide in each dimension, so it will be covering four times the area. This applies just as much to flashlights as to lasers, but it's not nearly as important in the latter case as the former because going from a radius of, say, 1mm at one km to 2mm at 2km doesn't really make much difference to the brightness, while going from 10cm at 1m to 20cm at 2m does.
With things like phased array antenna, it's possible to get the beam spread quite low, with lasers you can get it very low. The problem is not the inverse square law, it's that at the kind of power and directionality you want for this kind of thing you end up with something that has no problem propagating the power efficiently to the destination and will happily burn a hole through anything that tries to prevent it from doing so.
If you notice someone driving dangerously, you can report them to the police. I did this when someone decided to start reversing out of a parking space and drove into my leg. Very low speed collision, so I wasn't injured, but he refused to admit that he'd done anything wrong by reversing into a stationary pedestrian without looking. The police went and had a chat with him about paying due care and attention. Maybe next time, he made sure he checked his blind spot before reversing...
That's actually part of the QA process that NASA requires. After any fault is identified, you must add a procedure for ensuring that faults of this nature are not problems in the future. In your example, this would require either adding kevlar tyres, or ensuring that the tyres were checked after backing out of the driveway and before starting the journey.
The second doesn't necessarily follow from the first. Space elevator designs typically involve using something like ground-based lasers to transmit power to the crawler, possibly using conventional conductors to power it for the bottom few km before resistance makes that too expensive. For a person, we're talking something on the order of 1MWh. If it is spread over 10 hours (which is far faster than any proposed space elevator design) then the power supply is only 100kW, which well below the upper limit of power distribution systems. Any office building is likely to have a larger amount of power coming into it. Just because you have to supply a large amount of energy, doesn't mean that you have to have the capability of supplying it all at once.
Yes there is, as long as it happens before the patent is granted. Preliminary patents are published and prior art is solicited. This typically takes up to 3 years. You can use the preliminary patent in court but, in a first to file system, the fact that the infringement happened before the preliminary patent was granted will get the case summarily dismissed. If the prior art is provided to the patent office before the final patent is granted, then the final patent will not be granted and, if there is enough time, then the preliminary patent will be withdrawn before it even goes to court. This means that you can only enforce a preliminary patent if you are really sure that it is valid: if there is prior art then it is much cheaper for the person you threaten to just provide it to the patent office, rather than wait for the case to go to court. Once the final patent is granted, then it becomes harder.
It was one of the reasons I switched to DuckDuckGo. The zero-click box at the top usually contains the wikipedia article and a few other relevant links (e.g. code search results, IMDB), and the rest of the results are about as relevant as Google's are now, although not as good as Google's were a few years ago.
Actually, there'd probably be quite a lot of collateral damage in that scenario, specifically from contaminated oil fields. The sudden increase in the price of oil would have a significant impact on the US economy (less so on Europe, where taxation levels largely isolate consumers from the commodity cost of oil).
SDI works by getting a load of DoD contractors to approach the government saying 'we can build this magic system. If the Russians build one first, they'll be able to launch a first strike without fearing retaliation. OMG Communists!!111eleventyone' The people on the appropriations committee don't want to be seen as Soft on Communists, so they authorise the spending. The Russians believe that, since the US government and their contractors believe that the system will work that they need to be able to defeat it before it goes live, so they ramp up military spending far beyond sustainable levels. This pushes the already-unstable USSR into total collapse. The politicians then say 'yes, that's what we meant to happen, see how clever we are? We killed communism! Vote for us!' Then people start wondering what is going to happen to all of those nuclear warheads that are being guarded by people who haven't been paid for over a year...
If two people file a patent almost the same time, with first-to-invent, you have a long drawn-out court battle over who invented it. With first-to-file, the second filing will typically include evidence that it was invented before the first disclosure and therefore invalidate the first, so no one gets the patent.
This is as it should be for things that are sufficiently obvious that two people invent them almost simultaneously: remember that the point of patents is not to reward you for being clever, it's to provide an incentive for disclosing your invention. If someone else would disclose it a week later anyway, or all interested people know it already, then there is no reason to provide the incentive.
And before Google, there were Yahoo, AltaVista, and many others. The reason I switched from AltaVista to Google was that the AltaVista home page had become so bloated that it took about 30 seconds to load on my modem. The reason I switched away from Google was that they'd made the UI worse four times in a row in under six months. I've not noticed any deterioration in search results: whenever DDG can't find anything, I try Google, and I've yet to find a query where going to Google has resulted in something useful, although the last time I tried I noticed that the Google UI was even worse than when I stopped using it regularly.
Work well in Safari too, but I find it somehow very amusing that the Ghostery web site has big 'follow us on Twitter' and 'friend us on Facebook' buttons on the front.
The issue is the 'given the same hardware' part. I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro, and I actually consider it to be quite good value, but I've tried looking for Macs for people with different requirements to me and it's often difficult because there are big gaps in Apple's lineup. They can get a machine that requires a load of after-market additions to do what they need (and therefore becomes expensive) or they can buy something that is overpowered for their needs (and therefore expensive), or they can buy something from another manufacturer that actually meets their requirements and costs significantly less than buying form Apple.
Apple is no longer shipping their own X11.app, but their own X11.app was always just a random snapshot of XQuartz that typically lagged behind the upstream version, was shipped on the install DVDs but not part of the default install, and not regularly updated. Now they are saying that the official way of running X11 apps on OS X is to use the upstream version. The end result for users is that it is marginally more difficult to install, but they get an up to date version that actually works with modern X11 stuff, rather than the old and buggy version that Apple was shipping. For example, if you use WINE on 10.7, you need to install XQuartz because bugs in Apple's X11 prevent it from working correctly. With 10.8, this confusion won't exist because there will only be XQuartz. I find it difficult to see how this is evil...
Slashdot Mirror
There is a big problem with online TV, from the perspective of companies like Fox: it is very easy for the studios to go directly to their customers. Fox is essentially a publisher. They buy or commission TV shows and then broadcast them with adverts to recoup their original costs and make a profit. If they don't want a show, the studio has few alternatives for distribution, because the airwaves only provide a limited amount of space. On the Internet, this is not the case, as long as someone is willing to pay for it then the studios can keep producing their shows and can keep distributing them. Why would they need the likes of Fox? And, if every show that Fox cancels ends up being directly funded by fans and continuing, who would care about Fox?
Yes there is. Slot machines (at least around here) have to publish their payout ratio. If they pay out less than the amount stated on the machine, then the operator is liable for large fines.
You really should read the entire thread that you reply to, starting at the top...
The time for nation building in Afghanistan was at the end of the Cold War, back when America was seen as a liberator. Abandoning the country as soon as it stopped being a valuable short-term ally made the USA an easy target for negative propaganda. It looks like the rush to 'bring our boys home' is going to cause the same mistake to be repeated in Iraq...
It is illegal to spend US public money on propaganda aimed at domestic consumption. It would be legal if the cost for the military is covered entirely by the studio, with no hidden subsidies, or if the film is intended entirely for the export market.
If you're expecting science fiction, you wouldn't be missing much. Space opera, maybe, romance-thrillers, definitely. I quite enjoyed the selection of her books that my local library had, but describing her as a 'Sci-Fi Writer' seems quite misleading to me.
My reaction too. It's subsidising nuclear and wind, makes it easier for small experimental generators to be connected to the grid (yay for getting back some of the R&D investment on your new test plant), requires carbon capture for coal plants, and provides an emissions ceiling for any power plant which is going to be lowered every year. And the Slashdot spin is that it sucks because it doesn't mandate immediately switching to unicorn fart power.
They can't sell what they don't have the rights to sell
If you read the Facebook T&Cs, you will see that users warrant that they do have the right to grant the license that Facebook requests. If you do not, in fact, have this right, then you are liable for any damages that Facebook incurs. That means that if you upload a cover of a song and Facebook produces it as a single, then Facebook can take you to court to claim back the statutory license that the original author is entitled to.
Why? What part of EU law states that a company is not allowed to do what you authorised them to do with your work? If this were the case, I suspect a lot of publishers would find it very difficult to do business in the EU.
Not necessarily. Facebook owns a nonexclusive, sublicenseable, commercial license to anything that their users have uploaded. There are probably a lot of bands that have uploaded their albums, for example. Facebook would be quite within their rights to put these on iTunes or Amazon. It wouldn't take many people buying them to push them over the $18 mark. The same with photographs - they've already sold some of these to Starbucks for advertising, they're probably in a good position to compete with the likes of iStockPhoto.
While true, it's also misleading. The inverse square law isn't magic, it's follows naturally on from basic geometry. If you take a 2D beam with any angle of spread, then at distance 2n from the source, it will be twice as wide as at distance n. If the beam is in three dimensions, then the spread will be twice as wide in each dimension, so it will be covering four times the area. This applies just as much to flashlights as to lasers, but it's not nearly as important in the latter case as the former because going from a radius of, say, 1mm at one km to 2mm at 2km doesn't really make much difference to the brightness, while going from 10cm at 1m to 20cm at 2m does.
With things like phased array antenna, it's possible to get the beam spread quite low, with lasers you can get it very low. The problem is not the inverse square law, it's that at the kind of power and directionality you want for this kind of thing you end up with something that has no problem propagating the power efficiently to the destination and will happily burn a hole through anything that tries to prevent it from doing so.
ARM assembly is pretty clean. One rich addressing mode, orthogonal architecture, lots of GPRs. If I were teaching assembly, I'd start with ARM today.
If you notice someone driving dangerously, you can report them to the police. I did this when someone decided to start reversing out of a parking space and drove into my leg. Very low speed collision, so I wasn't injured, but he refused to admit that he'd done anything wrong by reversing into a stationary pedestrian without looking. The police went and had a chat with him about paying due care and attention. Maybe next time, he made sure he checked his blind spot before reversing...
That's actually part of the QA process that NASA requires. After any fault is identified, you must add a procedure for ensuring that faults of this nature are not problems in the future. In your example, this would require either adding kevlar tyres, or ensuring that the tyres were checked after backing out of the driveway and before starting the journey.
The second doesn't necessarily follow from the first. Space elevator designs typically involve using something like ground-based lasers to transmit power to the crawler, possibly using conventional conductors to power it for the bottom few km before resistance makes that too expensive. For a person, we're talking something on the order of 1MWh. If it is spread over 10 hours (which is far faster than any proposed space elevator design) then the power supply is only 100kW, which well below the upper limit of power distribution systems. Any office building is likely to have a larger amount of power coming into it. Just because you have to supply a large amount of energy, doesn't mean that you have to have the capability of supplying it all at once.
Yes there is, as long as it happens before the patent is granted. Preliminary patents are published and prior art is solicited. This typically takes up to 3 years. You can use the preliminary patent in court but, in a first to file system, the fact that the infringement happened before the preliminary patent was granted will get the case summarily dismissed. If the prior art is provided to the patent office before the final patent is granted, then the final patent will not be granted and, if there is enough time, then the preliminary patent will be withdrawn before it even goes to court. This means that you can only enforce a preliminary patent if you are really sure that it is valid: if there is prior art then it is much cheaper for the person you threaten to just provide it to the patent office, rather than wait for the case to go to court. Once the final patent is granted, then it becomes harder.
It was one of the reasons I switched to DuckDuckGo. The zero-click box at the top usually contains the wikipedia article and a few other relevant links (e.g. code search results, IMDB), and the rest of the results are about as relevant as Google's are now, although not as good as Google's were a few years ago.
Actually, there'd probably be quite a lot of collateral damage in that scenario, specifically from contaminated oil fields. The sudden increase in the price of oil would have a significant impact on the US economy (less so on Europe, where taxation levels largely isolate consumers from the commodity cost of oil).
SDI works by getting a load of DoD contractors to approach the government saying 'we can build this magic system. If the Russians build one first, they'll be able to launch a first strike without fearing retaliation. OMG Communists!!111eleventyone' The people on the appropriations committee don't want to be seen as Soft on Communists, so they authorise the spending. The Russians believe that, since the US government and their contractors believe that the system will work that they need to be able to defeat it before it goes live, so they ramp up military spending far beyond sustainable levels. This pushes the already-unstable USSR into total collapse. The politicians then say 'yes, that's what we meant to happen, see how clever we are? We killed communism! Vote for us!' Then people start wondering what is going to happen to all of those nuclear warheads that are being guarded by people who haven't been paid for over a year...
If two people file a patent almost the same time, with first-to-invent, you have a long drawn-out court battle over who invented it. With first-to-file, the second filing will typically include evidence that it was invented before the first disclosure and therefore invalidate the first, so no one gets the patent.
This is as it should be for things that are sufficiently obvious that two people invent them almost simultaneously: remember that the point of patents is not to reward you for being clever, it's to provide an incentive for disclosing your invention. If someone else would disclose it a week later anyway, or all interested people know it already, then there is no reason to provide the incentive.
What does Exchange do that Scalable OpenGroupware does not? SOGo:
So what does MS Exchange do that it doesn't but that you need? This is a serious question - I'd be happy to forward any feature requests to Inverse...
And before Google, there were Yahoo, AltaVista, and many others. The reason I switched from AltaVista to Google was that the AltaVista home page had become so bloated that it took about 30 seconds to load on my modem. The reason I switched away from Google was that they'd made the UI worse four times in a row in under six months. I've not noticed any deterioration in search results: whenever DDG can't find anything, I try Google, and I've yet to find a query where going to Google has resulted in something useful, although the last time I tried I noticed that the Google UI was even worse than when I stopped using it regularly.
Work well in Safari too, but I find it somehow very amusing that the Ghostery web site has big 'follow us on Twitter' and 'friend us on Facebook' buttons on the front.
The issue is the 'given the same hardware' part. I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro, and I actually consider it to be quite good value, but I've tried looking for Macs for people with different requirements to me and it's often difficult because there are big gaps in Apple's lineup. They can get a machine that requires a load of after-market additions to do what they need (and therefore becomes expensive) or they can buy something that is overpowered for their needs (and therefore expensive), or they can buy something from another manufacturer that actually meets their requirements and costs significantly less than buying form Apple.
Apple is no longer shipping their own X11.app, but their own X11.app was always just a random snapshot of XQuartz that typically lagged behind the upstream version, was shipped on the install DVDs but not part of the default install, and not regularly updated. Now they are saying that the official way of running X11 apps on OS X is to use the upstream version. The end result for users is that it is marginally more difficult to install, but they get an up to date version that actually works with modern X11 stuff, rather than the old and buggy version that Apple was shipping. For example, if you use WINE on 10.7, you need to install XQuartz because bugs in Apple's X11 prevent it from working correctly. With 10.8, this confusion won't exist because there will only be XQuartz. I find it difficult to see how this is evil...