If a credit reporting agency falsely claims that a person has gone into massive unpaid debt when actually they are the victim of criminal theft, the credit reporting agency should be liable for damages (denied loans, higher interest rates, pain and suffering) due to their libel. I think even the threat of a class action lawsuit based on these grounds would significantly clean up the big credit reporting agencies' act.
Even better, hash the company name and convert it to decimal, take 9 digits and call it your SSN for that company. If they can tell the difference, you know something is wrong with their data collection/checking policies.
It's worth pointing out that pretty much every remotely mainstream OS *except* Linux manages to work (and work well) with a stable kernel ABI. Including ones considered at least - if not more - stable than Linux, even by Linux zealots, like FreeBSD and Solaris.
This is why OpenBSD is having more success than Linux in getting specs from vendors, right? Because they just let BLOBs run in the kernel? Oh, wait...
The only secure way to run binary drivers is to run them in usermode with ACLs on each hardware port and memory region they use, with safe wrappers around DMA. In fact, it's probably not even safe to trust binary drivers in this case. What if the hardware doesn't respect your computer and decides to snoop the bus on its own? It can leak information back to the driver through side channels, or worse act as a backdoor. Suppose your wireless chipset maker gets a visit from a TLA who wants immediate access to any wireless system. The driver is the place to do that, since it runs in kernel mode. Makes you wonder about all those "closed source wireless drivers are the *only way* to satisfy the FCC!" arguments.
Let me correct that: There is no way in this universe software can recover anything from a disk overwritten once with zeros. It is fundamentally impossible.
That depends on how much attackers know about a given drive. If they can rewrite the drive firmware to give raw access to disk tracks and sub-track positioning, there's a lot that can be done in software without opening the drive.
But todays HDDs go so close to the limits of the amount of data that can be physically present on a disk (as dictated by S/N ratio and surface area), that even a single overwrite with random data may be completely unrecoverable with any technology. Nobody really knows.
Hard disks are very far from any theoretical maximum in magnetic storage for a few reasons. The first is that the read/write heads are moving very fast and are roughly linear in nature, e.g. they use tracks and can't analyze 2D regions on the disk as well as a stationary head could, or a head free to move in two dimensions over a point on the disk. Second, hard disk drives must have a very low error rate which means that any recording and subsequent reading must have a high redundancy both in terms of information theory and track width. Basically, the technology that allows a 100GB disk to move tens or hundreds of TB of data over its lifetime with little or no data loss provides plenty of redundancy to read at least some data that is partially overwritten with random data. Third, increasing data density available per disk platter directly implies that at least the older platters were not using anything close to the theoretical maximum of the media. Some data density comes from the magnetic property of the platters, but a lot more comes from the read/write heads and new encoding schemes. With each advance in head technology, it becomes much easier to read more information off existing platters, making data recovery easier.
There are a couple practical reasons simply overwriting a drive doesn't work very well. The first is that simply overwriting each sector on the disk with random data is not truly random. The error correction codes for the sector are still valid, which means that all the data on the track is predictable, making it easier to recover what was on the disk before. Since both the original overwritten data and the new "random" data are mathematically related, it is much easier to reconstruct the original data. Some drives have modes to access the raw tracks directly, and this mode could theoretically be used to write random data over the entire track, including ECC areas. It would also allow remapped sectors to be overwritten. Generally, after a sector has required error correction to be applied more than a set number of times the data is remapped to a set of spare tracks reserved for that purpose. Without raw access to the disk, there is no way to overwrite the original data from these remapped sectors which are still able to provide the correct data after error correction is applied.
Equality is the *OPPORTUNITY* to do everything a man does, not the necessity of doing it. Women are able to enter CS and the contest with no discrimination, therefore, there is equality. When I got a CS degree there were *VERY* few women, and I think all but one in my class dropped out (this is at a college with a 30% graduation rate though).
I disagree with your assertion that there is no discrimination. Already there are dozens of comments pretending that women are unable to program, or are genetically predisposed not to like it, and other stupidity. Do you think women don't read slashdot and see those comments? Do you think women don't hear those comments when slashbots parade them around at school? Having theoretical equal opportunity means nothing if people actually believe they can't do something. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy very quickly. If a women applies for a job and doesn't get it, it only reinforces in the minds of bigots that a woman can't hold that job. It's a subconscious pattern matching ability that humans unfortunately possess; we are inherently biased by our limited life experiences and peer reinforcement of ideas.
It's also interesting to note that if there were only a few (3 or 4) women in your CS degree and all but one dropped out, that almost exactly matches the 30% success rate. You might as well be concerned that out of 30 men, all but 9 dropped out.
don't think that women are genetically built for programming - and I don't mean to sound like a chauvinist, scumbag, etc, but I don't believe that they're cut out for it which is probably why there is a shortage of women in the industry.
I don't believe you are cut out for programing either; it requires logical reasoning. Did you even read the article you quoted? Women have simply underestimated their programming ability and have not pursued a career in CS despite their good grades. Blame idiots like yourself who can't figure out why women might be angry about being treated like they're not cut out for programming.
Dying from old age is only natural because evolution selected for it as a quicker means of adaptation or because it was simply the best evolution could do, and it only applies to some species. Bacteria don't age, they just divide and share DNA through conjugation. There's no natural imperative for death, that's just a fanciful invention of people who can't come to terms with the fact that nature is ultimately cruel and alien to human ideals.
Or perhaps I should say, if we hypothesize that humankind does not have the wisdom to maintain a stable existence on Earth, the same factors that lead to it destroying the Earth and/or human life thereon might well lead to the same outcome in our planetary colonies.
That hypothesis is unrefutable by humans, because so far we have sustained our existance and we wouldn't be around to notice if we couldn't. The best we can do is try to improve ourselves and our environment, which includes extending our environment to other planets and solar systems. Look at it this way, if people move off the Earth, I bet there will be a lot less opposition to letting the Earth return to a "natural" state (despite the fact that humans and their byproducts are a part of nature by definition...).
Do we really want to be known as (presumably) the first species from Earth capable of improving itself and leaving the solar system, but unable to do so because of cowardice, indecision, or other correctable faults?
I'm not anti-human or anything (in fact, I'm good friends with a number of them!). But why should an individual care about whether or not the drama of humanity continues? For instance, if we permit let every person who currently lives to live out a natural and good life, and somehow do so without creating any new people, would that be acceptable?
If everyone joined the voluntary human extinction project, that is what would happen. The fact that droves of people aren't rushing to sign up probably means it's an unacceptable solution. For one thing, who takes care of all of us when we get old? What happens after everyone retires and the infrastructure (all of it; roads, cars, water, electricity, farming, etc.) crumbles?
Okay, a more obvious example. Take the TI-85, the calculator I used in high school. Speed it up by a factor of a million. It doesn't get any more accurate, because it's still using the same number of bits to calculate. It doesn't magically gain the ability to solve problems that it couldn't before (unless the problem are time or memory-bound). The advantage to hardware improvements come from the ability to use the right algorithm, instead of hacks to bring in an answer in an acceptable amount of time.
So what happens when you run existing genetic algorithms or neural nets on a computer that's 1,000,000 times faster? I agree that running Word or Quake on a 1PHz computer would be silly, but protein folding or QCD is not. The algorithms already exist, it's just the problem size that is CPU/memory limited. Technically the algorithms may have scalability problems, but if you have a magical computer that's just a million times faster instead of having a million times more processors, the current algorithms will work just fine.
Interpreted & JIT languages are "within a constant factor" of native code's speed, and CS students are taught that such things don't matter.;-)
Even if it is a constant factor (which isn't always true, consider tree lookups (log n) for variable names, etc.), the constant factors multiply. One loop that takes 1.1 times as long as compiled code isn't bad. A three deep nested loop that calls five functions deep to convert each element it processes takes 1.1^8=2.14 times as long. A 10% overhead is generous for a lot of interpreted languages, and a maximum depth of 5 function calls within loops probably covers toy problems only. Remember that many functions that applications call are library functions implemented in the interpreted language, calling other interpreted functions around wrappers to native code at some depth
The real question is: who cares? Is that guy's time worth more, or is the programmer's time worth more?
If it would take a programmer 1 week to make the macro processor twice as fast, it only takes 200 users wasting 1% of their time 1 week to make it worth it for the programmer. That's assuming that programmers and users have equally valuable time. Even if programmers are worth 10 times as much as users (perhaps more realistic in salaray), it only takes 2000 users at the same percentage to make it worth the programmer's time. Of course, the *optimal* solution is to make the users learn how to program in native code, making everyone hundreds of times more efficient at minimal cost...
"If you speed up a dog's brain by a factor of a million, you'll have a machine that takes only three nanoseconds to decide to sniff your crotch."
You will also have a machine that can simulate a million years of dog evolution each year. Modern humans have been around for less than 200,000 years. What do you think a million years of selective breeding and effectively limitless modification of brain structure would do to a dog? If anything, evolution is just waiting for computer hardware to get fast enough to do some *real* improvement.
Every ISP oversells its bandwidth because not everyone maxes out their pipe all the time. Even if everyone wanted to watch streaming media all day, people work and sleep on different schedules. It's probably true that right now the ISPs are too oversold, but it's relatively simple (if not cheap) to buy some fatter pipes at the central offices.
Overselling has always existed: "All circuits are busy" is just an extreme form of QoS hardwired into the phone network. IP has QoS built in, it's just up to the routers to interpret it. There are lots of ways to implement QoS in a net neutral way, and most of them don't require special pricing models unless additional QoS needs to be purchased.
All ISPs have to do is allocate enough of their total Internet bandwidth to QoS packets, and divide this up to their customers. Customers choose which packets they want to prioritize, and the ISP's routers just mark excess QoS packets from individual customers as normal priority. In fact, this applies to any network node, not just ISPs. Net neutrality in this case means that except for ensuring that peers don't exceed their QoS limits, networks let the peer decide which packets are high priority.
Over the longer term, what have these idiotic managers done? They've disconnected themselves from the very communities they serve. Sure, it's cheaper to have a bunch of lower paid foreigners do this work. But do they really understand what they're doing and why? Will they know when they've run in to a problem? Will they be able to reason their way through regulations and laws they had nothing to do with?
Let's turn your argument around. Do you think the managers really understand what they're doing and why? Will they know when they have outsourced *themselves* out of a job by relying entirely on another company to do what they were responsible for? Outsourcing eventually works higher up the chain and at each step there is more difficulty and cost in re-insourcing. At some point it becomes a foreignly owned company that is more economically efficient than the original because the management cruft and high priced labor has been removed.
I wonder what one of these big capacitors would do in a crash? At least they're not filled with so many chemicals as normal batteries, but what would happen?
Hopefully the same thing 10 or 15 gallons of gas does in current cars: Nothing. The easiest thing to do would be to short the terminals with enough resistance to avoid excessive heat but drain the capacitor within a few minutes or seconds, depending on the quality of the capacitor. Surrounding the whole thing in an insulating blanket would prevent physical damage that would short it internally and also prevent it from shorting to ground or the frame of the car.
Does that read to anyone else as locking those agents with "significant marketshare" as the only gatekeepers of said blanket licensing (previously established as needed for distribution in this revised model)... which makes me wonder how individual independant artists (those who don't wish to be affiliated with a General Designated Agent) would go about licensing their work to iTunes or whatnot. If they're now effectively represented by a GDA (read RIAA and the like) whether they want to be or not... then I have to read this as a powergrab by the RIAA to ensure they maintain their position as the gatekeepers of distribution (now in the digital age), with all artists having to sign with them. Maybe I've just gotten too cynical..
They recognize that the GDA is a powerful entity that needs to be restricted in its actions:
Additionally, the Copyright Office has some concerns regarding designated agents' authority to collect and expend administrative fees. The SIRA appears to give designated agents too much discretion to use these fees - and even royalties collected under the license - to inappropriately fund tangential activities.
and
Finally, the SIRA appears to omit a provision governing one of the most significant and necessary aspects of any blanket licensing scheme: there is no provision that addresses how royalties are to be distributed by designated agents to copyright owners.
It appears that the copyright office is genuinely concerned about the current language of the bill, so hopefully the subcommitte will modify the proposal to address those issues. They seem to be the biggest problems in the scheme, aside from the fair-use versus licensing-every-copy-cached-anywhere problem that companies are apparently having. Optimally, the GDA should be an extension of the Copyright Office itself. Trusting any commercial company to handle *all* licensing for *all* digital media is just asking for trouble.
If SIRA is passed with good statutes for streaming, it would allow Google, for example, to license every single piece of digital media and offer it as a library would. Here's the Copyright Office's recommendation:
However, the Copyright Office strongly urges that the SIRA not characterize streaming as a distribution or as a form of "digital phonorecord delivery," or DPD. A stream, whether interactive or noninteractive, is predominantly a public performance, although the various reproductions such a transmission requires makes it appropriate to address in section 115. A stream does not, however, constitute a "distribution," the object of which is to deliver a usable copy of the work to the recipient; the buffer and other intermediate copies or portions of copies that may temporarily exist on a recipient's computer to facilitate the stream and are for all practical purposes useless (apart from their role in facilitating the single performance) and most likely unknown to the recipient simply do not qualify.
Such a situation would probably allow Google to stream individual copies to people the same way a library checks out its media. Only one (or as many licenses as they have) stream to a user at a time, but the ability for any user to access any media for free or a very low cost. That's the future as I see it, since there is really no point in "owning" copies of media that could just be checked out of a massive library whenever one wants. There's a reason some copyright holders have always hated libraries, and I think this is it. When distribution costs are essentially zero, libraries are a much more cost effective solution than trying to manage licensing and purchasing rights for individual consumers. The downside for copyright holders? Libraries, even global ones, probably don't need more than a hundred or even a few thousand copies of individual works. No more platinum records, no more media cartels.
Stupid, certainly. Unethical, most definitely. He or she should be sacked and then turned over to authorities for prosecution on theft, sale of stolen property, etc.
Once you dispose of something as garbage, you don't own it anymore and hence there was no theft. If best buy did not promise to destroy the data on the drive in a specific manner, there probably isn't a contract violation. Destruction or disposal of property does not automatically entail privacy of contents.
The only privacy law I'm aware of regarding information is HIPAA which covers personally identifiable medical information. So if you want to get best buy in trouble, scan your medical records and store them on your computer before you give it to them.
Bit by bit, it seems, that America is changing into something quite different than I was taught in school. Like the supreme court ruling that allows local governments to sieze your land for a better purpose as just one of many examples.
Was it just that I was young and naive and believed in a good country that stuck to its principles? That principles meant something to this country?
Technically, the government can't just seize your land; they have to pay you for it. Maybe with beads or smallpox blankets, but they do have to pay for it.
Send the information to your current registrar as well, because they may be able to take action against ICLS for the misuse of their WHOIS service. Network Solutions recently sent an email to their subscribers asking them to report false renewal notices and other scams. I received a similar scam snail mail, and I assume it was from ICLS but I disposed of it before I thought of reporting it.
Come to Alaska, enough of an existing libertarian mindset and only 600,000 some residents to overpower. I think most would enjoy the economical benefits of being a major technology hub anyway. Residents get free money, too.
It looks like the concept is to group common methods from many different classes into a form that can be acted on uniformly. The example they gave allows for the creation of several multi-layer classes, all related and built upon each other. A "join point" is constructed as a collection of all methods that actually create new objects. The article explained that this is particularly useful for security, since while there may be many different classes that can be created, a join point can be used to allow or disallow the creation of any or all of them in a single place. The advantage is that security code does not have to be maintained in each class independantly.
How glaringly obvious is it that the "leaked email" is merely a troll? Major economic collapse? Recession? It's filled with buzzwords to make people notice and talk about it. Typical troll.
I would much rather be out on the town partying with friends than sitting in a darkened room figuring out why libDV is miscompiling - don't you people understand? When you are gone, none of this will matter, and the best you can hope for is that you will have left some happy memories for those that survive you.
Really? Do we remember Newton for who he married or which friends he had? Who, besides notorious sociolizers, are remembered for their interpersonal relationships? We remember people because of their societal achievements, for better or for worse.
Slashdot Mirror
If a credit reporting agency falsely claims that a person has gone into massive unpaid debt when actually they are the victim of criminal theft, the credit reporting agency should be liable for damages (denied loans, higher interest rates, pain and suffering) due to their libel. I think even the threat of a class action lawsuit based on these grounds would significantly clean up the big credit reporting agencies' act.
Even better, hash the company name and convert it to decimal, take 9 digits and call it your SSN for that company. If they can tell the difference, you know something is wrong with their data collection/checking policies.
Might I suggest a Really Big Stick(TM)? The bigger it is, the more humane. Just watch out for flying poison sacks...
It's worth pointing out that pretty much every remotely mainstream OS *except* Linux manages to work (and work well) with a stable kernel ABI. Including ones considered at least - if not more - stable than Linux, even by Linux zealots, like FreeBSD and Solaris.
This is why OpenBSD is having more success than Linux in getting specs from vendors, right? Because they just let BLOBs run in the kernel? Oh, wait...
The only secure way to run binary drivers is to run them in usermode with ACLs on each hardware port and memory region they use, with safe wrappers around DMA. In fact, it's probably not even safe to trust binary drivers in this case. What if the hardware doesn't respect your computer and decides to snoop the bus on its own? It can leak information back to the driver through side channels, or worse act as a backdoor. Suppose your wireless chipset maker gets a visit from a TLA who wants immediate access to any wireless system. The driver is the place to do that, since it runs in kernel mode. Makes you wonder about all those "closed source wireless drivers are the *only way* to satisfy the FCC!" arguments.
Let me correct that: There is no way in this universe software can recover anything from a disk overwritten once with zeros. It is fundamentally impossible.
That depends on how much attackers know about a given drive. If they can rewrite the drive firmware to give raw access to disk tracks and sub-track positioning, there's a lot that can be done in software without opening the drive.
But todays HDDs go so close to the limits of the amount of data that can be physically present on a disk (as dictated by S/N ratio and surface area), that even a single overwrite with random data may be completely unrecoverable with any technology. Nobody really knows.
Hard disks are very far from any theoretical maximum in magnetic storage for a few reasons. The first is that the read/write heads are moving very fast and are roughly linear in nature, e.g. they use tracks and can't analyze 2D regions on the disk as well as a stationary head could, or a head free to move in two dimensions over a point on the disk. Second, hard disk drives must have a very low error rate which means that any recording and subsequent reading must have a high redundancy both in terms of information theory and track width. Basically, the technology that allows a 100GB disk to move tens or hundreds of TB of data over its lifetime with little or no data loss provides plenty of redundancy to read at least some data that is partially overwritten with random data. Third, increasing data density available per disk platter directly implies that at least the older platters were not using anything close to the theoretical maximum of the media. Some data density comes from the magnetic property of the platters, but a lot more comes from the read/write heads and new encoding schemes. With each advance in head technology, it becomes much easier to read more information off existing platters, making data recovery easier.
There are a couple practical reasons simply overwriting a drive doesn't work very well. The first is that simply overwriting each sector on the disk with random data is not truly random. The error correction codes for the sector are still valid, which means that all the data on the track is predictable, making it easier to recover what was on the disk before. Since both the original overwritten data and the new "random" data are mathematically related, it is much easier to reconstruct the original data. Some drives have modes to access the raw tracks directly, and this mode could theoretically be used to write random data over the entire track, including ECC areas. It would also allow remapped sectors to be overwritten. Generally, after a sector has required error correction to be applied more than a set number of times the data is remapped to a set of spare tracks reserved for that purpose. Without raw access to the disk, there is no way to overwrite the original data from these remapped sectors which are still able to provide the correct data after error correction is applied.
Equality is the *OPPORTUNITY* to do everything a man does, not the necessity of doing it. Women are able to enter CS and the contest with no discrimination, therefore, there is equality. When I got a CS degree there were *VERY* few women, and I think all but one in my class dropped out (this is at a college with a 30% graduation rate though).
I disagree with your assertion that there is no discrimination. Already there are dozens of comments pretending that women are unable to program, or are genetically predisposed not to like it, and other stupidity. Do you think women don't read slashdot and see those comments? Do you think women don't hear those comments when slashbots parade them around at school? Having theoretical equal opportunity means nothing if people actually believe they can't do something. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy very quickly. If a women applies for a job and doesn't get it, it only reinforces in the minds of bigots that a woman can't hold that job. It's a subconscious pattern matching ability that humans unfortunately possess; we are inherently biased by our limited life experiences and peer reinforcement of ideas.
It's also interesting to note that if there were only a few (3 or 4) women in your CS degree and all but one dropped out, that almost exactly matches the 30% success rate. You might as well be concerned that out of 30 men, all but 9 dropped out.
don't think that women are genetically built for programming - and I don't mean to sound like a chauvinist, scumbag, etc, but I don't believe that they're cut out for it which is probably why there is a shortage of women in the industry.
I don't believe you are cut out for programing either; it requires logical reasoning. Did you even read the article you quoted? Women have simply underestimated their programming ability and have not pursued a career in CS despite their good grades. Blame idiots like yourself who can't figure out why women might be angry about being treated like they're not cut out for programming.
...just as we need to accept personal death.
Dying from old age is only natural because evolution selected for it as a quicker means of adaptation or because it was simply the best evolution could do, and it only applies to some species. Bacteria don't age, they just divide and share DNA through conjugation. There's no natural imperative for death, that's just a fanciful invention of people who can't come to terms with the fact that nature is ultimately cruel and alien to human ideals.
Or perhaps I should say, if we hypothesize that humankind does not have the wisdom to maintain a stable existence on Earth, the same factors that lead to it destroying the Earth and/or human life thereon might well lead to the same outcome in our planetary colonies.
That hypothesis is unrefutable by humans, because so far we have sustained our existance and we wouldn't be around to notice if we couldn't. The best we can do is try to improve ourselves and our environment, which includes extending our environment to other planets and solar systems. Look at it this way, if people move off the Earth, I bet there will be a lot less opposition to letting the Earth return to a "natural" state (despite the fact that humans and their byproducts are a part of nature by definition...).
Do we really want to be known as (presumably) the first species from Earth capable of improving itself and leaving the solar system, but unable to do so because of cowardice, indecision, or other correctable faults?
I'm not anti-human or anything (in fact, I'm good friends with a number of them!). But why should an individual care about whether or not the drama of humanity continues? For instance, if we permit let every person who currently lives to live out a natural and good life, and somehow do so without creating any new people, would that be acceptable?
If everyone joined the voluntary human extinction project, that is what would happen. The fact that droves of people aren't rushing to sign up probably means it's an unacceptable solution. For one thing, who takes care of all of us when we get old? What happens after everyone retires and the infrastructure (all of it; roads, cars, water, electricity, farming, etc.) crumbles?
Okay, a more obvious example. Take the TI-85, the calculator I used in high school. Speed it up by a factor of a million. It doesn't get any more accurate, because it's still using the same number of bits to calculate. It doesn't magically gain the ability to solve problems that it couldn't before (unless the problem are time or memory-bound). The advantage to hardware improvements come from the ability to use the right algorithm, instead of hacks to bring in an answer in an acceptable amount of time.
So what happens when you run existing genetic algorithms or neural nets on a computer that's 1,000,000 times faster? I agree that running Word or Quake on a 1PHz computer would be silly, but protein folding or QCD is not. The algorithms already exist, it's just the problem size that is CPU/memory limited. Technically the algorithms may have scalability problems, but if you have a magical computer that's just a million times faster instead of having a million times more processors, the current algorithms will work just fine.
Interpreted & JIT languages are "within a constant factor" of native code's speed, and CS students are taught that such things don't matter. ;-)
Even if it is a constant factor (which isn't always true, consider tree lookups (log n) for variable names, etc.), the constant factors multiply. One loop that takes 1.1 times as long as compiled code isn't bad. A three deep nested loop that calls five functions deep to convert each element it processes takes 1.1^8=2.14 times as long. A 10% overhead is generous for a lot of interpreted languages, and a maximum depth of 5 function calls within loops probably covers toy problems only. Remember that many functions that applications call are library functions implemented in the interpreted language, calling other interpreted functions around wrappers to native code at some depth
The real question is: who cares? Is that guy's time worth more, or is the programmer's time worth more?
If it would take a programmer 1 week to make the macro processor twice as fast, it only takes 200 users wasting 1% of their time 1 week to make it worth it for the programmer. That's assuming that programmers and users have equally valuable time. Even if programmers are worth 10 times as much as users (perhaps more realistic in salaray), it only takes 2000 users at the same percentage to make it worth the programmer's time. Of course, the *optimal* solution is to make the users learn how to program in native code, making everyone hundreds of times more efficient at minimal cost...
"If you speed up a dog's brain by a factor of a million, you'll have a machine that takes only three nanoseconds to decide to sniff your crotch."
You will also have a machine that can simulate a million years of dog evolution each year. Modern humans have been around for less than 200,000 years. What do you think a million years of selective breeding and effectively limitless modification of brain structure would do to a dog? If anything, evolution is just waiting for computer hardware to get fast enough to do some *real* improvement.
RMS does not drink beer.
Hmm, uncut hair, no beer... All he needs is a camel's hair tunic and he can be the reincarnation of John the Baptist; "Repent and turn to GNU/Linux!"
Every ISP oversells its bandwidth because not everyone maxes out their pipe all the time. Even if everyone wanted to watch streaming media all day, people work and sleep on different schedules. It's probably true that right now the ISPs are too oversold, but it's relatively simple (if not cheap) to buy some fatter pipes at the central offices.
Overselling has always existed: "All circuits are busy" is just an extreme form of QoS hardwired into the phone network. IP has QoS built in, it's just up to the routers to interpret it. There are lots of ways to implement QoS in a net neutral way, and most of them don't require special pricing models unless additional QoS needs to be purchased.
All ISPs have to do is allocate enough of their total Internet bandwidth to QoS packets, and divide this up to their customers. Customers choose which packets they want to prioritize, and the ISP's routers just mark excess QoS packets from individual customers as normal priority. In fact, this applies to any network node, not just ISPs. Net neutrality in this case means that except for ensuring that peers don't exceed their QoS limits, networks let the peer decide which packets are high priority.
Over the longer term, what have these idiotic managers done? They've disconnected themselves from the very communities they serve. Sure, it's cheaper to have a bunch of lower paid foreigners do this work. But do they really understand what they're doing and why? Will they know when they've run in to a problem? Will they be able to reason their way through regulations and laws they had nothing to do with?
Let's turn your argument around. Do you think the managers really understand what they're doing and why? Will they know when they have outsourced *themselves* out of a job by relying entirely on another company to do what they were responsible for? Outsourcing eventually works higher up the chain and at each step there is more difficulty and cost in re-insourcing. At some point it becomes a foreignly owned company that is more economically efficient than the original because the management cruft and high priced labor has been removed.
I wonder what one of these big capacitors would do in a crash? At least they're not filled with so many chemicals as normal batteries, but what would happen?
Hopefully the same thing 10 or 15 gallons of gas does in current cars: Nothing. The easiest thing to do would be to short the terminals with enough resistance to avoid excessive heat but drain the capacitor within a few minutes or seconds, depending on the quality of the capacitor. Surrounding the whole thing in an insulating blanket would prevent physical damage that would short it internally and also prevent it from shorting to ground or the frame of the car.
They recognize that the GDA is a powerful entity that needs to be restricted in its actions:
and
It appears that the copyright office is genuinely concerned about the current language of the bill, so hopefully the subcommitte will modify the proposal to address those issues. They seem to be the biggest problems in the scheme, aside from the fair-use versus licensing-every-copy-cached-anywhere problem that companies are apparently having. Optimally, the GDA should be an extension of the Copyright Office itself. Trusting any commercial company to handle *all* licensing for *all* digital media is just asking for trouble.
If SIRA is passed with good statutes for streaming, it would allow Google, for example, to license every single piece of digital media and offer it as a library would. Here's the Copyright Office's recommendation:
Such a situation would probably allow Google to stream individual copies to people the same way a library checks out its media. Only one (or as many licenses as they have) stream to a user at a time, but the ability for any user to access any media for free or a very low cost. That's the future as I see it, since there is really no point in "owning" copies of media that could just be checked out of a massive library whenever one wants. There's a reason some copyright holders have always hated libraries, and I think this is it. When distribution costs are essentially zero, libraries are a much more cost effective solution than trying to manage licensing and purchasing rights for individual consumers. The downside for copyright holders? Libraries, even global ones, probably don't need more than a hundred or even a few thousand copies of individual works. No more platinum records, no more media cartels.
Stupid, certainly. Unethical, most definitely. He or she should be sacked and then turned over to authorities for prosecution on theft, sale of stolen property, etc.
Once you dispose of something as garbage, you don't own it anymore and hence there was no theft. If best buy did not promise to destroy the data on the drive in a specific manner, there probably isn't a contract violation. Destruction or disposal of property does not automatically entail privacy of contents.
The only privacy law I'm aware of regarding information is HIPAA which covers personally identifiable medical information. So if you want to get best buy in trouble, scan your medical records and store them on your computer before you give it to them.
Bit by bit, it seems, that America is changing into something quite different than I was taught in school. Like the supreme court ruling that allows local governments to sieze your land for a better purpose as just one of many examples.
Was it just that I was young and naive and believed in a good country that stuck to its principles? That principles meant something to this country?
Technically, the government can't just seize your land; they have to pay you for it. Maybe with beads or smallpox blankets, but they do have to pay for it.
Send the information to your current registrar as well, because they may be able to take action against ICLS for the misuse of their WHOIS service. Network Solutions recently sent an email to their subscribers asking them to report false renewal notices and other scams. I received a similar scam snail mail, and I assume it was from ICLS but I disposed of it before I thought of reporting it.
With all the dupes, you'd think CmdrTaco wrote the RFC too.
Come to Alaska, enough of an existing libertarian mindset and only 600,000 some residents to overpower. I think most would enjoy the economical benefits of being a major technology hub anyway. Residents get free money, too.
It looks like the concept is to group common methods from many different classes into a form that can be acted on uniformly. The example they gave allows for the creation of several multi-layer classes, all related and built upon each other. A "join point" is constructed as a collection of all methods that actually create new objects. The article explained that this is particularly useful for security, since while there may be many different classes that can be created, a join point can be used to allow or disallow the creation of any or all of them in a single place. The advantage is that security code does not have to be maintained in each class independantly.
How glaringly obvious is it that the "leaked email" is merely a troll? Major economic collapse? Recession? It's filled with buzzwords to make people notice and talk about it. Typical troll.
I would much rather be out on the town partying with friends than sitting in a darkened room figuring out why libDV is miscompiling - don't you people understand? When you are gone, none of this will matter, and the best you can hope for is that you will have left some happy memories for those that survive you. Really? Do we remember Newton for who he married or which friends he had? Who, besides notorious sociolizers, are remembered for their interpersonal relationships? We remember people because of their societal achievements, for better or for worse.