Newton was highly religious, but his religion was all sorts of weird shit. He wasn't the first of the modern scientists so much as the last of the ancient warlocks.
I take it MS is supposed to do nothing and hope that you'll be nice and pay them?
In a word, yes. Microsoft is concentrating entirely too much on a market that is simply not as large as they think it is - namely, the people who a) currently pirate Microsoft software and b) would pay for Microsoft software if pirating it was too difficult. This is a vanishingly small group of people, and in order to get these people to buy Microsoft software they are adversely affecting everyone who buys Microsoft software.
Further, this means of verifying that Windows 7 installations will simply not work. Microsoft is being nice and packaging it in one update, which means that what this update does and how it works will be easily reverse engineered. Once the pirates know how it works, there are a ridiculous number of ways to circumvent it at every step of the process - it would be relatively easy to intercept the downgrade command coming from the server, or change the downgrade routine so that it does nothing, or spoof the current signature with a known-good one (and if Microsoft bans that, they'll be banning every single legitimate user with that signature), or to do any number of other things that would be come apparent after reverse-engineering the update.
So yes, Microsoft shouldn't do anything - because doing nothing is better than wasting money and goodwill on something useless.
If you're not qualified to review someone's scientific data, how do you know that he's shady? Is it because your shady-detector goes ping when you wave it over him? Then how do you quantify the accuracy of your shady-detector? How do you insulate it against the interference of the media, who love to paint things in an exaggerated light? How do you isolate it from the effect of your own emotions - after all, if global warming is happening, then you should probably behave in a different way and you might not want to.
I agree that OOXML is an unfortunate name, but naming a standard after a specific product or company name will not lend itself to becoming a standard format used by all your competitors. After all, ODF does not mention its pedigree either.
I can only imagine how bad it will be having a phone do this. "Did that guy's phone just call me what I think it did?"
Everyone says this will happen, and I don't understand it. When two human beings are trying to communicate, there's a lot more going on than just the actual words that get transmitted from one to the other. If some tourist is trying to communicate with you using his phone, and the thing comes up with "How much is your wife?", you're probably not even going to be offended - it'll be hilarious, because the stupid phone decided he wanted to buy your wife when clearly he's asking for directions or something. You'll laugh and try to get the phone to translate what he actually said, he'll maybe get it or maybe be confused a bit, and you'll both move on.
Seriously, people are generally too nice to make this not work.
Yeah, I'm 90% certain that OOXML/Open Office confusion is the basis for the name. I mean seriously, Office Open XML? Why not Word Open XML (WOX)? Microsoft Open XML Interchange (MOXI)? There's a million more marketable names than OOXML, that wouldn't cause any confusion with Open Office.
But then on the other hand, this is the company that brought us Bing.
I would imagine that in law school, there are very few diagrams. Most things are conveyed in text, right?
Just try taking notes on a free body diagram or a server/client state flowchart with your laptop. Unless you've got a Wacom or something, it just can't be done.
As an example of how this gets used, take a gander at the CSS of a page sometime. You might see something like -moz-border-radius or -moz-background-size - these are CSS attributes that Mozilla supports, and that may be similar to but not exactly the similarly named W3C standards. That's how you're supposed to do it - if you're going to claim that you support a standard, then support the goddamn standard. Don't half-ass it in an incompatible way.
Allright then - you take twelve of these clocks, grouped into clusters of three, arranged in the shape of 3D right angle with each cluster as far away from the other as possible. You isolate them as well as you can, so that they are not disturbed by local vibration and other such things. Probably the best thing to do would be to launch them into space.
Then you measure their time differences.
If there's any differences, assuming you've isolated them well enough and are filtering out the expected noise, those differences must be due to external gravity waves.
Tadaa, we've got a gravity wave antenna. Maybe someone's talking in that spectrum.
Retailer costs can drop, but most retailers still need to make a profit, even selling ebooks (servers cost money).
On icanhascheezburger.com, the average picture of a silly cat weighs in at about 40 KB. There are ten pictures per page. Twenty silly cat pictures are a bit less than a megabyte. A bit less than a megabyte is about the size of your average novel.
ICHCB.net does not charge anything for their pictures of silly cats. They are supported through ads and by selling swag.
So are you saying that selling e-books at, say, $10 each is not enough to make a profit? When ICHCB.com can be successful by transmitting half that data for free to anyone who asks for it?
You know, Amazon committed an act of extreme douchebaggery in pulling all of Macmillian's books without warning, and without really telling anyone why they were doing it. I've been reading about it on a the blogs of some of my favorite authors, and from their perspective it was basically inexcusable - they screwed over the most vulnerable people that could have been involved. So, when I was reading Brandon Sanderson's blog and saw a link directly to a Macmillian listing, I clicked on it out of curiosity and saw Amazon's point.
Macmillian wants twenty six motherfucking dollars for the ebook edition of a book that's already in mass-market paperback.
What.
No.
It's an ebook. It's a bunch of bits. It's less bits than that video of a silly cat. It's twenty silly-cat images. Where the fuck does Macmillian get off charging as much as the hardcover for the bitwise equivalent of twenty cats who want a cheeseburger? And I don't even get a physical anything? This is absolutely absurd. eBooks should cost less than a physical copy, not as much as a high-quality, well bound hard cover.
What Amazon did was retarded and counter-productive. Which sucks, because they had a very good point - ebooks should cost less, not more.
Yeah! Our current system is so much better than the crappy health care in Japan, Sweden, Great Britain, Canada and basically the rest of the civilized world! Also because of socialized health care, all those for'n countries have mandatory gym memberships and shoot people for being fat! And because those for'ners allowed gays in their military, they had to reinstate the draft!
We should keep on doing exactly what we're doing, only more because it's working so well already!
Or, you know, we could learn what works from other countries that have done it already.
You jest, but that's why you see very few bicyclists (or even pedestrians) on the streets here in Irvine. All of the surface streets are at least 45 MPH, which makes for a terrible bicycling and walking environment. The city tries to ameliorate it by making really wide sidewalks, but that doesn't help the fact that there's still cars whipping by you at fifty+ miles per hour.
e-books have additional production costs associated with them (formatting for screen, electronic distribution, electronic storage, and yes, DRM), and these are new things that don't have to happen for paper books.
How is electronic storage a cost for ebooks and not for normal books? How is electronic distribution a significant cost? How is formatting a cost for ebooks and not normal books? (hell, how is it a cost at all? LaTeX is free, after all; after that, just get an intern to read the formatted book and make sure it works).
I mean, seriously. I don't get it. I could buy Godaddy's cheapest hosting plan, and for $5/month I'd get enough disk space to store over nine thousand books at once, and enough total bandwidth to sell 300,000 e-books a month.
The only part that would actually cost real money out of the things you've mentioned is DRM, and honestly I would cheap out on that. If people want to pirate your book, they're going to pirate it. Someone who doesn't think twice about downloading $blockbuster_game 2 isn't going to blink twice at downloading a megabyte of information.
Or: you could pirate the books. There's several torrent-libraries floating around on the various sites, and it would be trivial to format-shift your library by downloading them piecemeal. Comcast wouldn't even care; in this day and age of legal multi-gigabyte Steam downloads, who's going to notice ten, twenty megabytes of information? I chew through that much bandwidth looking at videos of silly cats on Youtube.
Uhm... fyi, a scientist working for the British Ministry of Defense came up with the idea of the microchip, though he didn't create one himself.
Also, pharmaceutical companies generally just take drugs that have been found promising in publicly funded academic research, and do the lifting necessary to get them approved by the FDA and into humans; they usually don't do much of the basic research that finds these drugs (or that points to where these drugs could be).
Basically, discounting publicly funded academic research is a bad idea. Private industry turns basic research into stuff you can use, but it rarely does that basic research in the first place - because funding basic research requires that you think in terms of decades, not next quarter's financial statements.
Pro tip: if you don't like the way your local government works, you can change it. It's not like national politics, where you have a gnat's chance in hell of having any effect; in a town of a couple thousand people, you can have an effect. If Verizon fucks you over, there's really nothing you can do; their policies are set by some corporate bureaucrat somewhere. If the local municipal ISP fucks you over, you can change local government policy.
Local politics is the only politics that really matters to you as a person.
Slashdot Mirror
Newton was highly religious, but his religion was all sorts of weird shit. He wasn't the first of the modern scientists so much as the last of the ancient warlocks.
In a word, yes. Microsoft is concentrating entirely too much on a market that is simply not as large as they think it is - namely, the people who a) currently pirate Microsoft software and b) would pay for Microsoft software if pirating it was too difficult. This is a vanishingly small group of people, and in order to get these people to buy Microsoft software they are adversely affecting everyone who buys Microsoft software.
Further, this means of verifying that Windows 7 installations will simply not work. Microsoft is being nice and packaging it in one update, which means that what this update does and how it works will be easily reverse engineered. Once the pirates know how it works, there are a ridiculous number of ways to circumvent it at every step of the process - it would be relatively easy to intercept the downgrade command coming from the server, or change the downgrade routine so that it does nothing, or spoof the current signature with a known-good one (and if Microsoft bans that, they'll be banning every single legitimate user with that signature), or to do any number of other things that would be come apparent after reverse-engineering the update.
So yes, Microsoft shouldn't do anything - because doing nothing is better than wasting money and goodwill on something useless.
No company in the world... except for in Japan or Sweden. And I'm sure there's others, as well, since I was just searching Slashdot articles.
Yes, because given Google's recent conduct in China, I think it is more likely that they will not have an NSA closet in every datacenter.
Always? It never worked on newsid (though admittedly that utility isn't particularly useful). I had to issue a registry command first.
If you're not qualified to review someone's scientific data, how do you know that he's shady? Is it because your shady-detector goes ping when you wave it over him? Then how do you quantify the accuracy of your shady-detector? How do you insulate it against the interference of the media, who love to paint things in an exaggerated light? How do you isolate it from the effect of your own emotions - after all, if global warming is happening, then you should probably behave in a different way and you might not want to.
Office Open XML.
Everyone says this will happen, and I don't understand it. When two human beings are trying to communicate, there's a lot more going on than just the actual words that get transmitted from one to the other. If some tourist is trying to communicate with you using his phone, and the thing comes up with "How much is your wife?", you're probably not even going to be offended - it'll be hilarious, because the stupid phone decided he wanted to buy your wife when clearly he's asking for directions or something. You'll laugh and try to get the phone to translate what he actually said, he'll maybe get it or maybe be confused a bit, and you'll both move on.
Seriously, people are generally too nice to make this not work.
Yeah, I'm 90% certain that OOXML/Open Office confusion is the basis for the name. I mean seriously, Office Open XML? Why not Word Open XML (WOX)? Microsoft Open XML Interchange (MOXI)? There's a million more marketable names than OOXML, that wouldn't cause any confusion with Open Office.
But then on the other hand, this is the company that brought us Bing.
I would imagine that in law school, there are very few diagrams. Most things are conveyed in text, right?
Just try taking notes on a free body diagram or a server/client state flowchart with your laptop. Unless you've got a Wacom or something, it just can't be done.
You've just described Slashdot in a nutshell.
As an example of how this gets used, take a gander at the CSS of a page sometime. You might see something like -moz-border-radius or -moz-background-size - these are CSS attributes that Mozilla supports, and that may be similar to but not exactly the similarly named W3C standards. That's how you're supposed to do it - if you're going to claim that you support a standard, then support the goddamn standard. Don't half-ass it in an incompatible way.
I'm smoking 100% pure grade-A science, son.
Allright then - you take twelve of these clocks, grouped into clusters of three, arranged in the shape of 3D right angle with each cluster as far away from the other as possible. You isolate them as well as you can, so that they are not disturbed by local vibration and other such things. Probably the best thing to do would be to launch them into space.
Then you measure their time differences.
If there's any differences, assuming you've isolated them well enough and are filtering out the expected noise, those differences must be due to external gravity waves.
Tadaa, we've got a gravity wave antenna. Maybe someone's talking in that spectrum.
orly? That book's been out for a year. The paperback is out. And they still want as much for the ebook as for the hard cover version.
On icanhascheezburger.com, the average picture of a silly cat weighs in at about 40 KB. There are ten pictures per page. Twenty silly cat pictures are a bit less than a megabyte. A bit less than a megabyte is about the size of your average novel.
ICHCB.net does not charge anything for their pictures of silly cats. They are supported through ads and by selling swag.
So are you saying that selling e-books at, say, $10 each is not enough to make a profit? When ICHCB.com can be successful by transmitting half that data for free to anyone who asks for it?
You know, Amazon committed an act of extreme douchebaggery in pulling all of Macmillian's books without warning, and without really telling anyone why they were doing it. I've been reading about it on a the blogs of some of my favorite authors, and from their perspective it was basically inexcusable - they screwed over the most vulnerable people that could have been involved. So, when I was reading Brandon Sanderson's blog and saw a link directly to a Macmillian listing, I clicked on it out of curiosity and saw Amazon's point.
Macmillian wants twenty six motherfucking dollars for the ebook edition of a book that's already in mass-market paperback.
What.
No.
It's an ebook. It's a bunch of bits. It's less bits than that video of a silly cat. It's twenty silly-cat images. Where the fuck does Macmillian get off charging as much as the hardcover for the bitwise equivalent of twenty cats who want a cheeseburger? And I don't even get a physical anything? This is absolutely absurd. eBooks should cost less than a physical copy, not as much as a high-quality, well bound hard cover.
What Amazon did was retarded and counter-productive. Which sucks, because they had a very good point - ebooks should cost less, not more.
Yeah! Our current system is so much better than the crappy health care in Japan, Sweden, Great Britain, Canada and basically the rest of the civilized world! Also because of socialized health care, all those for'n countries have mandatory gym memberships and shoot people for being fat! And because those for'ners allowed gays in their military, they had to reinstate the draft!
We should keep on doing exactly what we're doing, only more because it's working so well already!
Or, you know, we could learn what works from other countries that have done it already.
You jest, but that's why you see very few bicyclists (or even pedestrians) on the streets here in Irvine. All of the surface streets are at least 45 MPH, which makes for a terrible bicycling and walking environment. The city tries to ameliorate it by making really wide sidewalks, but that doesn't help the fact that there's still cars whipping by you at fifty+ miles per hour.
How is electronic storage a cost for ebooks and not for normal books? How is electronic distribution a significant cost? How is formatting a cost for ebooks and not normal books? (hell, how is it a cost at all? LaTeX is free, after all; after that, just get an intern to read the formatted book and make sure it works).
I mean, seriously. I don't get it. I could buy Godaddy's cheapest hosting plan, and for $5/month I'd get enough disk space to store over nine thousand books at once, and enough total bandwidth to sell 300,000 e-books a month.
The only part that would actually cost real money out of the things you've mentioned is DRM, and honestly I would cheap out on that. If people want to pirate your book, they're going to pirate it. Someone who doesn't think twice about downloading $blockbuster_game 2 isn't going to blink twice at downloading a megabyte of information.
Or: you could pirate the books. There's several torrent-libraries floating around on the various sites, and it would be trivial to format-shift your library by downloading them piecemeal. Comcast wouldn't even care; in this day and age of legal multi-gigabyte Steam downloads, who's going to notice ten, twenty megabytes of information? I chew through that much bandwidth looking at videos of silly cats on Youtube.
Uhm... fyi, a scientist working for the British Ministry of Defense came up with the idea of the microchip, though he didn't create one himself.
Also, pharmaceutical companies generally just take drugs that have been found promising in publicly funded academic research, and do the lifting necessary to get them approved by the FDA and into humans; they usually don't do much of the basic research that finds these drugs (or that points to where these drugs could be).
Basically, discounting publicly funded academic research is a bad idea. Private industry turns basic research into stuff you can use, but it rarely does that basic research in the first place - because funding basic research requires that you think in terms of decades, not next quarter's financial statements.
Pro tip: if you don't like the way your local government works, you can change it. It's not like national politics, where you have a gnat's chance in hell of having any effect; in a town of a couple thousand people, you can have an effect. If Verizon fucks you over, there's really nothing you can do; their policies are set by some corporate bureaucrat somewhere. If the local municipal ISP fucks you over, you can change local government policy.
Local politics is the only politics that really matters to you as a person.
Technically, after the male-to-female surgery, you are considered to be a woman for all intents and purposes no matter what chromosomes you have.
I have expanded upon your method - I can cure people of their criminal impulses by changing the measurements of their head!
In a few years, I hope to have perfected a hammer-free version of the treatment.