Korean's are *paranoid* about mosquitos I mean freaking irrational.
Yeah, malaria(along with a dozen other various mosquito-born illnesses) can tend to make you that way.
The difference between here and there is that most of the mosquitoes ARE carrying something- I remember there was a travel advisory about it at one point. Here in the US, you have a greater chance of winning the lottery than catching, say, West Nile disease, which the press has been beating to death("dead bird found!" "dead bird has west nile!" etc etc.)
I never understood why it was so hard to give funding to a program that could make the most important discovery yet
Are you smoking crack? It would be entirely useless. Communications would be impossible(remember, the closest object is what, hundreds, if not thousands of light years away?), as would be travelling there(we can barely get people to the moon.)
The SETI people are an embarassment to the scientific community- they're basically religious fanatics, almost cultists- convinced that there MUST be intelligent life out there, and they're arrogant enough to think that they have a snowball's chance in hell of actually discovering life if it does exist. Have you ever stopped to think of the sheer impossibility of almost every aspect of the SETI project?
You know you're stupid when you zap yourself like that...
Not really. People just don't realize that ring voltage is 100+ VAC. I electrocuted myself when I was changing the wiring on the phones and someone called the house while I was doing it.
The lesson here is to unplug the house at the network interface box(aka a demarcation, or demarc, box- a two-compartment box on the side of the house or in the basement, don't touch anything except the stuff marked "customer access" or similar.)
That's why they do this. To find out who is planning to do bad things that hurt lots of people. They certainly don't care that you are having a fight with your wife and calling your girlfriend to make arrangements to stay over tonight.
Okay Mr Stalin. What if they hear you say "and I'll be bringin' over a boatload of pot so we can smoke the night away!", and they send a bunch of stormtrooper types to say hello, and oh by the way, you're under arrest.
You'd be bullshit, and rightly so(if you live in the US, for example)- it would be an illegal search to be listening to your conversation without a warrant(or, these days, suspicion of terrorist activities), and entering your premises would also be illegal- since the eavesdropping(considered a search) was illegal, there's no basis for a physical search/arrest warrant(no judge in their right mind would grant one, anyways). That doesn't mean that they can still listen, as long as they don't do anything. They can't listen, period- the mere act is illegal, and if anyone ever found out it was happening(supervisor or IA, for example), heads would roll.
If the police/FBI are randomly allowed to listen in on phone calls, what's next? I'll tell you what's next- East Germany, before the cold war, where the police DID listen in on everything, you could be stopped+searched at any time, your home searched, etc...and it was estimated that a substantial portion of the population itself were informants, spying on their neighbors. From your post, you could use a couple hours talking to someone from East Germany about how horrible it was to have the government spying into absolutely every aspect of your life. Where's the line, a listening device or camera in your bedroom, taping you having sex with your girlfriend? Hello 1984!
Some police departments in major cities were flying helicopters over residential areas using FLIR cameras, looking for heat sources from high wattage growing lights used by pot growers; these houses stuck out like sore thumbs on the video image. The Supreme Court bitch-slapped them and said "no, sorry, that's a search, you can't do that." There's a VERY fine line between observing and searching- and using a technological device such as an IR camera is considered a search because it reveals details about something inside the property that would otherwise be hidden.
Wouldn't supplying substantial amounts of power through network cable (lets say cat5) make enough EMI to scramble the data going through the other pairs?
If it's DC only and well filtered/buffered, no. If it's RF, or DC that's not well filtered(noise is generated from any kind of switching, even in low power ICs). Buffering it isn't that tough- you can sorta think of it like a bucket under a faucet. As long as your average water needs over time don't exceed the flow out the faucet, you can take whatever you want, even large amounts suddenly, without causing pressure changes in the rest of the house. Now, imagine drawing a cup of water every once in a while from a faucet directly and shutting the water off really hard- helloooo water hammer!(similar things happen when you switch on/off power down a long line, or to/from an inductive component.)
Also, would this work in situations using coax cable, where there is no other pair?
Actually, Dallas Semiconductor(now part of Maxim) came up with what they call the One Wire protocol; it only needs one line for power+data(hence the name, even though you still need some sort of ground.) It's a pretty well set up system, works nicely- plenty of info on the web and their site, and there's even guides on designing a proper network- and shows the effects of cable length on things like pulse smoothing, noise, etc caused by communications and device power draw. It's VERY thorough.
Lastly, can you put 120VAC along wires that thin without causing lots of power loss and making a lovely fire hazard?
Actually, power loss is less with higher voltages- that's why high tension wires are tens of thousands of volts. P = I * V; 100W at 120V is.83 amps, but at 12v, it's 8.3A.
This is important, because the higher the current, the higher the voltage drop; V = I * R. All wire(except superconducting) has some resistance, and the lower the current, the lower the voltage drop end-to-end, and the lower the amount of power(heat) the wire absorbs. Wire(or perhaps more accurately, cable) is rated in terms of maximum voltage mostly from the insulation type(its dielectric strength) and current- its gauge, or thickness of the solid or stranded bundle(larger #'s = smaller thickness).
This is one reason automotive manufacturers want to go to 48V systems; the wiring between the battery and main bus/alternator can be much thinner, for example. Take a look at your battery cables some time- they're VERY heavy gauge. Also, as previously mentioned, stuff like dirt on contacts and corrosion between clamps+terminals or in splices are much less bothersome at lower currents.
It goes on to say that the RIAA also wanted to eliminate smaller webcasters, who tend to play more independent material, in order to maintain their monopoly on music distribution.
What prevents smaller webcasters from hooking up with those indie labels? A record label can set any license they want. If SuperBanana Records(and the artist) wants to let webcasters play 'It Aint Easy Being Yellow' by the Bananaettes, so be it, right?
Why is it "Unfortunate" that they're using a new tool for their warehousing?
I think the writer meant that it was unfortunate for the RFID industry that Walmart is backing down from the more ambitious plan; it's not exactly great PR any time a client downgrades their plans. Walmart was supposedly the main power behind UPC barcodes and hence their every move is watched...and if they're backing down and going for a less-ambitious implementation, it might be interpreted as a sort of warning flag to the business world that maybe RFID isn't quite ready for primetime.
It's not a terribly surprising move, and is pretty intelligent, honestly; this is sort of the retail equivalent of the "staging" concept in IT. Walmart's forging new ground, so they're taking it one step at a time. Warehousing operations are more centralized, there's fewer units of equipment than for a POS system change, and so on. It's also a little easier to keep it transparent to end users.
You know, I've noticed that as linux grows more popular, the HOWTOs and mini-HOWTOs are in a pitiful state...yet books on Linux and networking are exploding on the market. When I first started with Linux, the HOWTOs were great sources of information- current, relevant...often funny, too.
Nowadays, they're languishing. Outdated to the point of near uselessness. Just today someone asked me if the Software RAID HOWTO was up to date or not- it was dated 5/8/2002 and referred only to kernel 2.2!
The networking howtos are worse- documentation for iptables/ipchains, and especially the QoS stuff, is SEVERELY out of date, incomplete, or just plain wrong. Dozens of kernel options or features have ZERO documentation, not even a help message.
Folks, if you find a howto that's really out of date, try to contact the author. If they're not interested in continuing to develop it, work with the Linux Documentation Project to see if you can take it over or if they have someone that can. At the very least, give the current author some 'patches'(if anything, if they don't make corrections, that's a good argument for finding a new maintainer.)
Lunch paid for by Microsoft? We could perform an en-masse, real-life slashdot on them!
How about an en-masse, real-life, guaranteed-to-be-more-effective, boycott? RSVP(if necessary), but don't show up. Spread the word, and make it clear it's in protest of MS's ties to SCO(they're practically pulling the strings at SCO, right?). DO NOT turn it into a "MS sucks" boycott- the press will (rightly) see that as childish, and the industry will see it as the Linux community not "playing nice with others". If it has a clear purpose and reason, it'll be another matter entirely, so make sure people understand what it's all about- Microsoft's support of SCO and SCO's actions. Wouldn't hurt to include any other companies involved even slightly with SCO, if there are any in attendance.
You won't hurt the caterers or the facility(if it's one thing caterers are good at, it's covering their own asses; up-front payment, contracts, etc). Probably the only downside is that a lot of food might go to waste, although one would hope the food would get donated(a few heads-up calls to local shelters and food pantries along the lines of "there will be considerable amounts of food available on..." might help)
Imagine if they could now cut out parts of the rules and hide them.
They don't have to hide them. They're effectively hidden already- there are so many laws, and they're so complex, written in such a confusing manner, etc- that the average citizen has no chance in HELL of even possibly knowing a fraction of a percent of them, much less understanding them.
Like the "open source" software arena, we need simplification and consolidation VERY, VERY badly.
Sure the first generation cruise missiles and guided missiles were dumb, pointed in a direction or steered by a wire
Um...one of the first cruise missles(the AGM-86) used radar-based terrain profile matching. It was neither "dumb", "pointed in a direction" or "steered by a wire". Think that last one through-how the hell do you guide a cruise missile(speeds 500+ mph, range, 1000's of miles) by WIRE?(answer: you don't. Some TORPEDOES have wire-guidance.) The system was incredibly accurate, and capable of flying VERY low and VERY fast, making the missile virtually impossible to stop.
The standard cruise missile was later upgraded to include inertial navigation and self-correcting features(missle could correct its flightpath mid-flight based on available data), and then GPS was added very recently. For the last 10 years or so, it's been the Tomahawk we all know and love, great for reining shit down on your enemy from thousands of miles away, even from underwater. Nah, that's not cowardly at all:-)
...just require a literacy test prior to voting. I fail to see how anyone who can't read can responsibly vote.
Believe it or not, this was one of the ways the southern states kept blacks from voting. The other was a land ownership clause, and since few blacks were anything other than sharecroppers(and sharecroppers didn't own the land they worked), they were disqualified.
I'd say Apple is about to release iTunes for windows. But I'm never very accurate on this guesses by it makes sense to me...
How very intuitive, considering Apple has publicly stated that they'll be releasing a Windows version. They've even given a timeframe, though I don't recall what it was.
Did you know the Audi A8 has an all-aluminum body?
You mean like the Ford/AC Cobra, back in 1965? Or the Land Rover?...ho hum....
The Ford/AC Cobra had a steel chassis- ONLY aluminum body panels. If you're referring to the brand new Range Rover, to quote RR themselves: "The hood, doors, and front fenders are all made from aluminum." Same thing. Steel chassis, aluminum panels. It's nothing new, and very commonly used up front when the beast is nose-heavy.
The entire chassis of an A8(including the new one) is made from aluminum, top to bottom. They worked with ALCOA(huge aluminum company) in the late 80's/very early 90's to make it happen; it's not exactly run of the mill stuff to make such a complex structure out of aluminum; it's very different from steel in countless ways. They invented dozens of manufacturing technologies, demonstrated first on the AVUS Quattro, a concept car- a couple of years later, they put it into use on the production line with the A8. Part of the achievement is that it has chassis dynamics that are superior to a similarly sized steel chassis car.
As pretty good proof of the technological advancement(keep in mind there were a few all-aluminum cars 50+ years ago, but chassis technology, requirements, and safety requirements aren't even close to what they are today), it's taken around 8 years for another company to do the same- mainly, Jaguar(the new XJ is aluminum).
Sorry bud. Don't pick an argument on technicalities with an Audi enthusiast:-)
You've fallen victim to some of the strategies outlined in the articles this whole story is about. You've been pacified into believing radio waves are severely limited in range.
Actually, they are. Like any other form of radiation, unless tightly focused(by, say a ham's antenna?), RF quickly disappears in all the background noise as distance increases.
If you want to think of it in a crude sort of way, you can think of a can of paint exploding on the space station. Who gets covered in more paint, the guy 5 feet away, or the guy 50 feet away? This whole idea is also why ENORMOUS radio dishes are required to conduct radio astronomy- you have HUGE amouns of surface area, and you still get really, really, really weak signals.
I believe the relationship is exponential- I'm probably wrong on the exact numbers(so grab a physics book), but I think that one radian is equal to the angle covered by one square meter at one meter- or 4 square meters at 2 feet, 9 square meters at 3 feet, etc. So as distance increases, the power available to an antenna, no matter how good it is, decreases radically. The energy needed to excite an RFID device, which is practically microscopic(and hence can't have that big an antenna!) has to be either VERY high, VERY focused, or VERY close. Then there's the matter of recieving the VERY weak reply from the RFID tag...
Several Mercedes-Benz GPS navigation systems actually do support the reception of traffic information embedded inside of radio signals.
Supposedly the Audi navigation systems were going to support this as well...as early as 1999 or 2000 in the US, but to my knowledge they're still not doing it; I have no idea about the euro units. I think it was mostly an infrastructure problem- either lack or incompatibility.
Honestly, I question the value of such information in the first place. Rarely are other routes unblocked, at least here in Boston. You're pretty much screwed no matter which way you go. If that wasn't enough, they randomly close/open exits due to the massive construction(the Big Dig), and in the last 6-12 months, lots of big changes have been going on as new tunnels and exchanges open(which is going to wreak havoc with people with old databases for their nav systems!)
don't publish them on the web at least, not without putting some kind of protection in front of them.
Siiiigh.
There is no "protection" for images put on the web. There are various hackish ways to make it slightly more difficult, such as splitting the image and using a table to display it(but making copying any one piece hard)- easily defeated by simply taking a screenshot; same for Flash stuff. There are various javascripts that capture a click(or sometimes even the pointer crossing over the image!) to display a popup telling you the image is copyrighted. Easily defeated by using a browser where you can turn off java/javascript(duh). Simple watermarks are VERY easily reverseable, since all they are is non-destructive brightness level modification. The invisble "digital watermarking" that's been in photoshop for years doesn't stop people from copying the image- it just helps to prove that in fact they DID steal the image. Which is completely redundant to, well, simply looking at the image.
There are well known solutions to this guys problem, and he choses the courts?
Yes, and it's his right to do so, because when you copy/use something that's copyrighted, without permission, YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW. And quite frankly, as a non-pro photographer, I agree with the guy- companies are going to take this as a go-ahead for a free-for-all on photographer's images, as long as they keep the images small, etc. It's not a valid interpretation of course- but it won't stop companies from using it as an excuse. Sorry, but I think a thumbnail is a derivative work, and I should be able to publish my work on ANY medium and have the protection of the law should I find someone abusing said work.
I suppose next you'll say that photographers are using an "outdated business model" just like the music companies- how DARE they license an image they've taken, right?
Here is why Adobe didn't port Premiere to Macs This comment here explains the business situation fine:(link)
Interesting, except for the fact that the author(and you) don't use correct terminology. Premiere started as a Macintosh app, and always has been- it's never been "ported" to the Macintosh. Rather, it was "ported" to the PC.
Who cares? Adobe, like Microsoft, is slowly being made a moot point on the Macintosh platform. Adobe- like Microsoft, has always had the "you should be grateful to be doing business with us" kind of attitude. As the story poster says- Apple says "sure, come on over Adobe users!"
I worked at a company that did plugin development for Premier and After Effects- and not a day went by without Adobe getting pissed off about something. They'd accuse the their 3rd-party plugin development community of giving out prereleases. They'd "change their mind" about giving the company developer licenses. They were constantly getting upset about the slightest things developers or marketing people said at tradeshows. Each little temper-tantrum from Adobe would take hours of people's time to "fix"(fix being "kiss adobe ass until they're happy".)
The funny thing is that when you act like that, everyone else puts up with it, but slowly works to make you irrelevant. This former employer is doing great business with Apple- their plugin is included with every copy of Final Cut Pro, and while I was still there, I never heard a bad word about relations with Apple.
It's really great to see a company that saw it had made a mistake, corrected it and moved on. My only wish is that more companies would take that attitude.
How cheerfully naive. Let me play devil's advocate, for you:
"It's not very nice that companies are violating the GPL freely, and only after intense pressure and negative PR does one of them actually follow the terms of the license. My only wish is that people would wake up to how many other companies are doing exactly what Linksys did, or even worse, simply cutting and pasting sections of code".
Sorry, but you'd have to live in a fucking cave to not know what the GPL is by now if you're in the computer industry, especially a programmer. These guys knowingly violated the license and figured no one would ever catch them.
The open firmware password can still be circumvented with physical access to the machine. Change the amount of RAM
That'll work great, unless there's a lock on the securing bar, which has been standard on every system since the G3 and keeps the case from being opened VERY effectively- the case is riveted together under that plastic, and the bar engages in a whole bunch of places. You'd have to take a die grinder, drill, or dremel tool to it to get it open.
To date, 3 states and 130 cities have passed legislation forbidding local authorities from cooperating with federal PATRIOT requests, not to mention the numerous businesses who are taking pains to hamper the Act's coverage
How about mentioning some of the loudest critics- librarians. Most are madder than hell about the Patriot Act, and politicians are finding that going up against librarians(which are seen as by the public as incredibly smart, among other things) isn't very popular. From some of our youngest years, librarians have earned a place of respect as wise, intelligent, helpful, kind people.
Most libraries now display signs at checkout desks and computer workstations warning you they can be forced to turn over information about what you check out etc....and most also now destroy those records on a daily basis, paper or electronic.
And, as Peter Jennings pointed out with a smile on his face, your local library is a great place to sit down and read a copy of the Patriot Act. The librarians will be more than happy to assist.
Folks- libraries across the country are suffering from budget cutbacks just like everyone else. If you think it's awesome that librarians are on your side against the Patriot Act, might I suggest helping them back by volunteering? Think outside the (computer) box too- help reshelf books, read to kids in the children's library, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
Korean's are *paranoid* about mosquitos I mean freaking irrational.
Yeah, malaria(along with a dozen other various mosquito-born illnesses) can tend to make you that way.
The difference between here and there is that most of the mosquitoes ARE carrying something- I remember there was a travel advisory about it at one point. Here in the US, you have a greater chance of winning the lottery than catching, say, West Nile disease, which the press has been beating to death("dead bird found!" "dead bird has west nile!" etc etc.)
I never understood why it was so hard to give funding to a program that could make the most important discovery yet
Are you smoking crack? It would be entirely useless. Communications would be impossible(remember, the closest object is what, hundreds, if not thousands of light years away?), as would be travelling there(we can barely get people to the moon.)
The SETI people are an embarassment to the scientific community- they're basically religious fanatics, almost cultists- convinced that there MUST be intelligent life out there, and they're arrogant enough to think that they have a snowball's chance in hell of actually discovering life if it does exist. Have you ever stopped to think of the sheer impossibility of almost every aspect of the SETI project?
You know you're stupid when you zap yourself like that...
Not really. People just don't realize that ring voltage is 100+ VAC. I electrocuted myself when I was changing the wiring on the phones and someone called the house while I was doing it.
The lesson here is to unplug the house at the network interface box(aka a demarcation, or demarc, box- a two-compartment box on the side of the house or in the basement, don't touch anything except the stuff marked "customer access" or similar.)
That's why they do this. To find out who is planning to do bad things that hurt lots of people. They certainly don't care that you are having a fight with your wife and calling your girlfriend to make arrangements to stay over tonight.
Okay Mr Stalin. What if they hear you say "and I'll be bringin' over a boatload of pot so we can smoke the night away!", and they send a bunch of stormtrooper types to say hello, and oh by the way, you're under arrest.
You'd be bullshit, and rightly so(if you live in the US, for example)- it would be an illegal search to be listening to your conversation without a warrant(or, these days, suspicion of terrorist activities), and entering your premises would also be illegal- since the eavesdropping(considered a search) was illegal, there's no basis for a physical search/arrest warrant(no judge in their right mind would grant one, anyways). That doesn't mean that they can still listen, as long as they don't do anything. They can't listen, period- the mere act is illegal, and if anyone ever found out it was happening(supervisor or IA, for example), heads would roll.
If the police/FBI are randomly allowed to listen in on phone calls, what's next? I'll tell you what's next- East Germany, before the cold war, where the police DID listen in on everything, you could be stopped+searched at any time, your home searched, etc...and it was estimated that a substantial portion of the population itself were informants, spying on their neighbors. From your post, you could use a couple hours talking to someone from East Germany about how horrible it was to have the government spying into absolutely every aspect of your life. Where's the line, a listening device or camera in your bedroom, taping you having sex with your girlfriend? Hello 1984!
Some police departments in major cities were flying helicopters over residential areas using FLIR cameras, looking for heat sources from high wattage growing lights used by pot growers; these houses stuck out like sore thumbs on the video image. The Supreme Court bitch-slapped them and said "no, sorry, that's a search, you can't do that." There's a VERY fine line between observing and searching- and using a technological device such as an IR camera is considered a search because it reveals details about something inside the property that would otherwise be hidden.
Wouldn't supplying substantial amounts of power through network cable (lets say cat5) make enough EMI to scramble the data going through the other pairs?
If it's DC only and well filtered/buffered, no. If it's RF, or DC that's not well filtered(noise is generated from any kind of switching, even in low power ICs). Buffering it isn't that tough- you can sorta think of it like a bucket under a faucet. As long as your average water needs over time don't exceed the flow out the faucet, you can take whatever you want, even large amounts suddenly, without causing pressure changes in the rest of the house. Now, imagine drawing a cup of water every once in a while from a faucet directly and shutting the water off really hard- helloooo water hammer!(similar things happen when you switch on/off power down a long line, or to/from an inductive component.)
Also, would this work in situations using coax cable, where there is no other pair?
Actually, Dallas Semiconductor(now part of Maxim) came up with what they call the One Wire protocol; it only needs one line for power+data(hence the name, even though you still need some sort of ground.) It's a pretty well set up system, works nicely- plenty of info on the web and their site, and there's even guides on designing a proper network- and shows the effects of cable length on things like pulse smoothing, noise, etc caused by communications and device power draw. It's VERY thorough.
Lastly, can you put 120VAC along wires that thin without causing lots of power loss and making a lovely fire hazard?
Actually, power loss is less with higher voltages- that's why high tension wires are tens of thousands of volts. P = I * V; 100W at 120V is .83 amps, but at 12v, it's 8.3A.
This is important, because the higher the current, the higher the voltage drop; V = I * R. All wire(except superconducting) has some resistance, and the lower the current, the lower the voltage drop end-to-end, and the lower the amount of power(heat) the wire absorbs. Wire(or perhaps more accurately, cable) is rated in terms of maximum voltage mostly from the insulation type(its dielectric strength) and current- its gauge, or thickness of the solid or stranded bundle(larger #'s = smaller thickness).
This is one reason automotive manufacturers want to go to 48V systems; the wiring between the battery and main bus/alternator can be much thinner, for example. Take a look at your battery cables some time- they're VERY heavy gauge. Also, as previously mentioned, stuff like dirt on contacts and corrosion between clamps+terminals or in splices are much less bothersome at lower currents.
What prevents smaller webcasters from hooking up with those indie labels? A record label can set any license they want. If SuperBanana Records(and the artist) wants to let webcasters play 'It Aint Easy Being Yellow' by the Bananaettes, so be it, right?
I think the writer meant that it was unfortunate for the RFID industry that Walmart is backing down from the more ambitious plan; it's not exactly great PR any time a client downgrades their plans. Walmart was supposedly the main power behind UPC barcodes and hence their every move is watched...and if they're backing down and going for a less-ambitious implementation, it might be interpreted as a sort of warning flag to the business world that maybe RFID isn't quite ready for primetime.
It's not a terribly surprising move, and is pretty intelligent, honestly; this is sort of the retail equivalent of the "staging" concept in IT. Walmart's forging new ground, so they're taking it one step at a time. Warehousing operations are more centralized, there's fewer units of equipment than for a POS system change, and so on. It's also a little easier to keep it transparent to end users.
You know, I've noticed that as linux grows more popular, the HOWTOs and mini-HOWTOs are in a pitiful state...yet books on Linux and networking are exploding on the market. When I first started with Linux, the HOWTOs were great sources of information- current, relevant...often funny, too.
Nowadays, they're languishing. Outdated to the point of near uselessness. Just today someone asked me if the Software RAID HOWTO was up to date or not- it was dated 5/8/2002 and referred only to kernel 2.2!
The networking howtos are worse- documentation for iptables/ipchains, and especially the QoS stuff, is SEVERELY out of date, incomplete, or just plain wrong. Dozens of kernel options or features have ZERO documentation, not even a help message.
Folks, if you find a howto that's really out of date, try to contact the author. If they're not interested in continuing to develop it, work with the Linux Documentation Project to see if you can take it over or if they have someone that can. At the very least, give the current author some 'patches'(if anything, if they don't make corrections, that's a good argument for finding a new maintainer.)
It could be a very smooth, fast drop.
As the old saying goes about leaping off a bridge, it's not the trip down that sucks- it's the ending.
The joke among some pilots, after a hard landing, is the term "unintentional ground contact."
How about an en-masse, real-life, guaranteed-to-be-more-effective, boycott? RSVP(if necessary), but don't show up. Spread the word, and make it clear it's in protest of MS's ties to SCO(they're practically pulling the strings at SCO, right?). DO NOT turn it into a "MS sucks" boycott- the press will (rightly) see that as childish, and the industry will see it as the Linux community not "playing nice with others". If it has a clear purpose and reason, it'll be another matter entirely, so make sure people understand what it's all about- Microsoft's support of SCO and SCO's actions. Wouldn't hurt to include any other companies involved even slightly with SCO, if there are any in attendance.
You won't hurt the caterers or the facility(if it's one thing caterers are good at, it's covering their own asses; up-front payment, contracts, etc). Probably the only downside is that a lot of food might go to waste, although one would hope the food would get donated(a few heads-up calls to local shelters and food pantries along the lines of "there will be considerable amounts of food available on..." might help)
Imagine if they could now cut out parts of the rules and hide them.
They don't have to hide them. They're effectively hidden already- there are so many laws, and they're so complex, written in such a confusing manner, etc- that the average citizen has no chance in HELL of even possibly knowing a fraction of a percent of them, much less understanding them.
Like the "open source" software arena, we need simplification and consolidation VERY, VERY badly.
Sure the first generation cruise missiles and guided missiles were dumb, pointed in a direction or steered by a wire
Um...one of the first cruise missles(the AGM-86) used radar-based terrain profile matching. It was neither "dumb", "pointed in a direction" or "steered by a wire". Think that last one through-how the hell do you guide a cruise missile(speeds 500+ mph, range, 1000's of miles) by WIRE?(answer: you don't. Some TORPEDOES have wire-guidance.) The system was incredibly accurate, and capable of flying VERY low and VERY fast, making the missile virtually impossible to stop.
The standard cruise missile was later upgraded to include inertial navigation and self-correcting features(missle could correct its flightpath mid-flight based on available data), and then GPS was added very recently. For the last 10 years or so, it's been the Tomahawk we all know and love, great for reining shit down on your enemy from thousands of miles away, even from underwater. Nah, that's not cowardly at all :-)
Believe it or not, this was one of the ways the southern states kept blacks from voting. The other was a land ownership clause, and since few blacks were anything other than sharecroppers(and sharecroppers didn't own the land they worked), they were disqualified.
BLAM!
Audience: "oooooo"
NASA engineer: "Folks, this COULD be more proof that MAYBE this is what POSSIBLY caused the accident."
Audience: "Oh, you mean "POSSIBLY" as in, there's POSSIBLY life on mars?"
Emergency Duct Tape (as any studious watcher of the Red Green Show knows, you can make or fix anything with duct tape!)
I'd say Apple is about to release iTunes for windows. But I'm never very accurate on this guesses by it makes sense to me...
How very intuitive, considering Apple has publicly stated that they'll be releasing a Windows version. They've even given a timeframe, though I don't recall what it was.
Did you know the Audi A8 has an all-aluminum body?
...ho hum....
You mean like the Ford/AC Cobra, back in 1965? Or the Land Rover?
The Ford/AC Cobra had a steel chassis- ONLY aluminum body panels. If you're referring to the brand new Range Rover, to quote RR themselves: "The hood, doors, and front fenders are all made from aluminum." Same thing. Steel chassis, aluminum panels. It's nothing new, and very commonly used up front when the beast is nose-heavy.
The entire chassis of an A8(including the new one) is made from aluminum, top to bottom. They worked with ALCOA(huge aluminum company) in the late 80's/very early 90's to make it happen; it's not exactly run of the mill stuff to make such a complex structure out of aluminum; it's very different from steel in countless ways. They invented dozens of manufacturing technologies, demonstrated first on the AVUS Quattro, a concept car- a couple of years later, they put it into use on the production line with the A8. Part of the achievement is that it has chassis dynamics that are superior to a similarly sized steel chassis car.
As pretty good proof of the technological advancement(keep in mind there were a few all-aluminum cars 50+ years ago, but chassis technology, requirements, and safety requirements aren't even close to what they are today), it's taken around 8 years for another company to do the same- mainly, Jaguar(the new XJ is aluminum).
Sorry bud. Don't pick an argument on technicalities with an Audi enthusiast :-)
You've fallen victim to some of the strategies outlined in the articles this whole story is about. You've been pacified into believing radio waves are severely limited in range.
Actually, they are. Like any other form of radiation, unless tightly focused(by, say a ham's antenna?), RF quickly disappears in all the background noise as distance increases.
If you want to think of it in a crude sort of way, you can think of a can of paint exploding on the space station. Who gets covered in more paint, the guy 5 feet away, or the guy 50 feet away? This whole idea is also why ENORMOUS radio dishes are required to conduct radio astronomy- you have HUGE amouns of surface area, and you still get really, really, really weak signals.
I believe the relationship is exponential- I'm probably wrong on the exact numbers(so grab a physics book), but I think that one radian is equal to the angle covered by one square meter at one meter- or 4 square meters at 2 feet, 9 square meters at 3 feet, etc. So as distance increases, the power available to an antenna, no matter how good it is, decreases radically. The energy needed to excite an RFID device, which is practically microscopic(and hence can't have that big an antenna!) has to be either VERY high, VERY focused, or VERY close. Then there's the matter of recieving the VERY weak reply from the RFID tag...
Several Mercedes-Benz GPS navigation systems actually do support the reception of traffic information embedded inside of radio signals.
Supposedly the Audi navigation systems were going to support this as well...as early as 1999 or 2000 in the US, but to my knowledge they're still not doing it; I have no idea about the euro units. I think it was mostly an infrastructure problem- either lack or incompatibility.
Honestly, I question the value of such information in the first place. Rarely are other routes unblocked, at least here in Boston. You're pretty much screwed no matter which way you go. If that wasn't enough, they randomly close/open exits due to the massive construction(the Big Dig), and in the last 6-12 months, lots of big changes have been going on as new tunnels and exchanges open(which is going to wreak havoc with people with old databases for their nav systems!)
don't publish them on the web
at least, not without putting some kind of protection in front of them.
Siiiigh.
There is no "protection" for images put on the web. There are various hackish ways to make it slightly more difficult, such as splitting the image and using a table to display it(but making copying any one piece hard)- easily defeated by simply taking a screenshot; same for Flash stuff. There are various javascripts that capture a click(or sometimes even the pointer crossing over the image!) to display a popup telling you the image is copyrighted. Easily defeated by using a browser where you can turn off java/javascript(duh). Simple watermarks are VERY easily reverseable, since all they are is non-destructive brightness level modification. The invisble "digital watermarking" that's been in photoshop for years doesn't stop people from copying the image- it just helps to prove that in fact they DID steal the image. Which is completely redundant to, well, simply looking at the image.
There are well known solutions to this guys problem, and he choses the courts?
Yes, and it's his right to do so, because when you copy/use something that's copyrighted, without permission, YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW. And quite frankly, as a non-pro photographer, I agree with the guy- companies are going to take this as a go-ahead for a free-for-all on photographer's images, as long as they keep the images small, etc. It's not a valid interpretation of course- but it won't stop companies from using it as an excuse. Sorry, but I think a thumbnail is a derivative work, and I should be able to publish my work on ANY medium and have the protection of the law should I find someone abusing said work.
I suppose next you'll say that photographers are using an "outdated business model" just like the music companies- how DARE they license an image they've taken, right?
Here is why Adobe didn't port Premiere to Macs
This comment here explains the business situation fine:(link)
Interesting, except for the fact that the author(and you) don't use correct terminology. Premiere started as a Macintosh app, and always has been- it's never been "ported" to the Macintosh. Rather, it was "ported" to the PC.
Who cares? Adobe, like Microsoft, is slowly being made a moot point on the Macintosh platform. Adobe- like Microsoft, has always had the "you should be grateful to be doing business with us" kind of attitude. As the story poster says- Apple says "sure, come on over Adobe users!"
I worked at a company that did plugin development for Premier and After Effects- and not a day went by without Adobe getting pissed off about something. They'd accuse the their 3rd-party plugin development community of giving out prereleases. They'd "change their mind" about giving the company developer licenses. They were constantly getting upset about the slightest things developers or marketing people said at tradeshows. Each little temper-tantrum from Adobe would take hours of people's time to "fix"(fix being "kiss adobe ass until they're happy".)
The funny thing is that when you act like that, everyone else puts up with it, but slowly works to make you irrelevant. This former employer is doing great business with Apple- their plugin is included with every copy of Final Cut Pro, and while I was still there, I never heard a bad word about relations with Apple.
It's really great to see a company that saw it had made a mistake, corrected it and moved on. My only wish is that more companies would take that attitude.
How cheerfully naive. Let me play devil's advocate, for you:
"It's not very nice that companies are violating the GPL freely, and only after intense pressure and negative PR does one of them actually follow the terms of the license. My only wish is that people would wake up to how many other companies are doing exactly what Linksys did, or even worse, simply cutting and pasting sections of code".
Sorry, but you'd have to live in a fucking cave to not know what the GPL is by now if you're in the computer industry, especially a programmer. These guys knowingly violated the license and figured no one would ever catch them.
The open firmware password can still be circumvented with physical access to the machine. Change the amount of RAM
That'll work great, unless there's a lock on the securing bar, which has been standard on every system since the G3 and keeps the case from being opened VERY effectively- the case is riveted together under that plastic, and the bar engages in a whole bunch of places. You'd have to take a die grinder, drill, or dremel tool to it to get it open.
To date, 3 states and 130 cities have passed legislation forbidding local authorities from cooperating with federal PATRIOT requests, not to mention the numerous businesses who are taking pains to hamper the Act's coverage
How about mentioning some of the loudest critics- librarians. Most are madder than hell about the Patriot Act, and politicians are finding that going up against librarians(which are seen as by the public as incredibly smart, among other things) isn't very popular. From some of our youngest years, librarians have earned a place of respect as wise, intelligent, helpful, kind people.
Most libraries now display signs at checkout desks and computer workstations warning you they can be forced to turn over information about what you check out etc....and most also now destroy those records on a daily basis, paper or electronic.
And, as Peter Jennings pointed out with a smile on his face, your local library is a great place to sit down and read a copy of the Patriot Act. The librarians will be more than happy to assist.
Folks- libraries across the country are suffering from budget cutbacks just like everyone else. If you think it's awesome that librarians are on your side against the Patriot Act, might I suggest helping them back by volunteering? Think outside the (computer) box too- help reshelf books, read to kids in the children's library, etc...