I have to wonder about the definition of temperature at such high energies. I would think it would be difficult to envisage a situation where you have anything resembling a Maxwell-Boltsman distribution at 10^33 K, so just what is meant with temperature in this case?
If you're referring to exp(-B/kT), then the high temperature will swamp the B (activation energy), meaning that all states will be effectively uniformly populated. So at infinity, I believe a Botzmann distribution ends up as pretty much a uniform distribution.
...if the US decides to try some form of economic bullying on Antigua, then it's possible that Europe and Japan might step in. The US is rich and powerful, but not so rich that it will risk a devastating trade war with Europe when the dollar's already on the slide, over a few gambling sites and pirate havens in the Caribbean.
That's true, but what does 'step in' mean? Would that imply a stern lecture? The US won't care. Would it imply an escalating tarrif war? Europe/Japan wouldn't risk playing that card for a fight that's not even theirs. No way do they break out the economic 'nuclear option' in defense of Antigua when they would be harmed as much as the US.
That's the problem with these treaty organizations: they only work to keep the small fries in line. If the biggest kid decides to break the rules...who gets him back in line?
Of course, you can always pick someone from the inside, but you reduce substantially the pool of people who have CEO qualities.
The other problems with promoting from within are:
1) You now have another job vacancy to fill, and presumably are losing someone very good at their job (otherwise, why promote them?)
2) There will probably be resentment from his new subordinates who were his former peers. This can lead to people leaving, and sometimes can cause the new boss to overdo the 'alpha dog' thing as he tries to gain their respect/obedience.
Of course, there can be advantages to an inside promotion, but one has to recognize the problems too.
Has this administration's FTC ever seen a merger it didn't like? I'm pretty sure they'd approve a merger of Standard Oil, Microsoft, AT&T, and Google into one enormous uber-monopoly that controlled everything on the planet.
So now corporations will determine what independent press is able to say or shut them down? Our news is already skewed enough as it is by the various corporate news outlets who cater to this and that political party.
Journalists are no less obligated to respond to subpoenas than anyone else. In this case, TS was obligated to name the source who had illegally leaked trade secret information. He chose not to do that.
Note that he actually was not barred from printing the information. It was not giving the guy up that was the problem.
CMS's remove the content of the webpage from the webpage. CSS removes the formatting of the page from the page. This leaves you with pages, formatting, and content. Welcome to the 21st Century.I bet you're a hit at parties. I'll tag my posts as SARCASM for you in the future.
To think that the span of a human life is at best about 1/250 millionth of that cycle.
On nth other hand, consider that by living well into old age, one can have lived through almost 2% of recorded human history. That's a lot, really. So if you chose correctly, it would only take about 50 people to have lived at the time that everything happened.
Just shows in how short a time humans have become what we are.
I would prefer he do a series of short films based on the Unfinished Tales, then a documentary based on the Silmarilion. That would be awesome beyond all reason.
Don't think he could do it, sleeping aids are subject to a strict FDA approval process.
What everybody seems to misunderstand is that as a world wide monopoly, Microsoft is supposed to act in a responsible way so as not to inhibit the growth of competition.
At the same time, there's nothing preventing them from simply outcompeting their competition. Opera has to prove that MS is doing something unfair, and including a browser with their OS probably doesn't cut it. Nor does interpreting HTML in a slightly different way.
By creating a browser that is non-standard it skews the entire browser market and online experience.
So? Since MS has over 80% of the market share, one could easily say they are the de-facto standard and if Opera doesn't like it, they can interpret pages how MS does. If they don't want to do that, it's their choice, but then don't bitch about pages not rendering correctly. Additionally, the ultimate fault is with web developers - if they cared about Opera's users, they'd test their pages on it. They don't, and that tells you all you need to know.
That is why Microsoft was found guilty of being an aggressive predatory monopoly.
No it's not. MS was found to be anticompetitive because they strongarmed OEMs to not bundle non-MS products, and because they intentionally made Windows not work with applications that compete with other MS products. That's not happening here. Equating the use of proprietary file formats and non-comformity to "standards" that some group has adopted with anticompetitive practices is ludicrous.
I sincerely hope the EU takes their head off because we sure can't rely on the Americans to do the right thing.
It's not the government's job to shut a company down because you don't like them. Also, simply because MS has a monopoly market share with Windows does not allow any company to dictate to them how they engineer their products.
I believe because it doesn't require that many bots to send a bajillion emails, and even if the response rate is 0.000001, they still make money.
Put it another way - since spam is the major driver of botnets, the price of botnet rental will drop such that it's profitable for the spammers to use them, or spammers will use something else.
I assume you're not working on huge datasets all the time
No, I pretty much am, actually. If that changes for any appreciable length of time I just repoint my.xinitrc, but it's sort of rare that I can go for more than a few days without needing the memory.
I don't use KDE, but I use fluxbox so I can use my gigs of ram for actual applications. Until memory is literally free, all you "but memory is so cheap" people can kiss my ass.
The problem isn't the cost of memory in a standard configuration. Most anybody can get up to 2GB on their current MOBO. The issue is when you have your MOBO maxed out and still need more, because at that point you're looking at a whole other computer.
That's why I use fluxbox - because I do some pretty heavy crunching on some huge datasets. I need every byte I have, and that means no KDE, and usually closing most everything else when I've got the system maxed out.
As many personal freedoms that the DMCA stepped all over it was passed with a 100% vote. Since no one wants to be seen as soft on crime, I predict this one will too.
I know what you mean, voting against anything anti-crime is usually election suicide.
BUT - I think this might just be the one real counterexample, because this is a situation in which you can make a compelling case that this isn't anti-crime, but anti-citizen crap. If I'm an incumbent and someone points to that and calls me anti-crime, I'll run a counter ad that says I voted to let ISPs NOT SPY on their customers. Then I'll counter and say that if my opponent would have been in office, he'd initiate a police state to monitor everyone's internet access just to make sure that Hollywood takes more of their money.
Normally that technique doesn't work, but I think the fear of internet snooping might be compelling enough that you can fight back against it.
good luck lugging around the power cord you'll need to charge these things
And the air conditioner. Even if the power cord doesn't act like a big fuse, the battery will turn into a griddle. Maybe it will incorporate an integrated Peltier plate or something.
They are leveraging their OS monopoly to dominate the browser market
Are they? I know they *were*. They were doing that by preventing OEMs from including, say, Netscape on machines they sold. To my knowledge, they're not doing that anymore. Are they?
they are using their dominance in the browser market to damage competitors
How are they doing that now (not 10 years ago)? Simply having a product (an OS) that has good features (like a browser) is not unfairly damaging to competitors - that's just outcompeting your competitors. What are they doing now that was found to be illegal anticompetitive behavior last time? Because as I recall just bundling a browser wasn't part of that.
Without the lever, the intentional incompatabilities of IE would make it 3rd choice or drive it into extinction. With the lever, web designers are forced to adapt to the "quirks" instead, producing webpages that work well on IE but not so on other (standards-complient) browsers, which in turn drives more people to IE, creating a lock-in effect.
Seems a little weak to me. Seems to me it would be fairly easy for the Opera devs to get their browser to work with the IE quirks if they were interested in doing so. I realize they're not, but that's not the point. It just doesn't seem all that compelling a reason, to me, to go to a business and say "this is the engineering spec you have to work with by law". Doesn't seem at all reasonable to me. And again, I don't like MS. But remember, just having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. You'd have to prove that MS is using embrace and extend to intentionally make Opera not work. And that might be provable. But even then, best-case scenario is that MS would have to document how IE treats web pages (which I believe is documented now). I can't see the government deciding, by law, what HTTP standard they have to use.
And somewhere along that route, a dozen or so laws have been broken and the only reason MS hasn't been drawn and quartered in the courts is that they move faster than the court system and will probably be bancrupt long before the final, crushing verdict is rendered.
This is certainly true, but I think there are probably other places where MS is causing more problems than the browser "market". Heck, we saw the trial from the Win95 days drag on so long that it was made totally irrelevant by later versions of Windows. But I don't think that's at issue here. To me, this is kind of like the North trying to re-fight the Civil War - the issues are now largely irrelevant and we already won. MS lost. Like I said, unless they're still pressuring the OEMs....
To me, the bigger issue is that these days almost any browser is "good enough" and free, so people will use whatever comes with their machine. That's not a matter of anticompetitive practices, it's a matter of consumer apathy. As such, Opera should focus more on OEMs than trying to sue their competition.
I dislike MS's monopolistic practices as much as anyone. But really, there's not much harm in bundling an OS with a browser IF they don't prevent OEMs from including other browsers or from removing the IE icon from the desktop.
Even if MS were forced to include some other browser along with IE, that probably wouldn't help Opera. Unless, of course, their actual goal is to simply force MS to bundle *their* browser. And that would seem to be a fairly ridiculous demand.
Because the US always pays for everything and never starts things then leave others to clean up the mess... like, say, Afghanistan where the party line recently switched to pressuring NATO to "do their part"
Yep, and it's about f'ing time the non-US part of NATO started doing something other than sitting around with their thumbs up you-know-where.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to wonder about the definition of temperature at such high energies. I would think it would be difficult to envisage a situation where you have anything resembling a Maxwell-Boltsman distribution at 10^33 K, so just what is meant with temperature in this case?
If you're referring to exp(-B/kT), then the high temperature will swamp the B (activation energy), meaning that all states will be effectively uniformly populated. So at infinity, I believe a Botzmann distribution ends up as pretty much a uniform distribution.
That's true, but what does 'step in' mean? Would that imply a stern lecture? The US won't care. Would it imply an escalating tarrif war? Europe/Japan wouldn't risk playing that card for a fight that's not even theirs. No way do they break out the economic 'nuclear option' in defense of Antigua when they would be harmed as much as the US.
That's the problem with these treaty organizations: they only work to keep the small fries in line. If the biggest kid decides to break the rules...who gets him back in line?
Man, I thought that headline was "Yahoo! Slammed Over Privacy By Chinese Court", and I was really confused.
Really, either one makes about the same amount of sense. Which is none.
Of course, you can always pick someone from the inside, but you reduce substantially the pool of people who have CEO qualities.
The other problems with promoting from within are:
1) You now have another job vacancy to fill, and presumably are losing someone very good at their job (otherwise, why promote them?)
2) There will probably be resentment from his new subordinates who were his former peers. This can lead to people leaving, and sometimes can cause the new boss to overdo the 'alpha dog' thing as he tries to gain their respect/obedience.
Of course, there can be advantages to an inside promotion, but one has to recognize the problems too.
Has this administration's FTC ever seen a merger it didn't like? I'm pretty sure they'd approve a merger of Standard Oil, Microsoft, AT&T, and Google into one enormous uber-monopoly that controlled everything on the planet.
So now corporations will determine what independent press is able to say or shut them down? Our news is already skewed enough as it is by the various corporate news outlets who cater to this and that political party.
Journalists are no less obligated to respond to subpoenas than anyone else. In this case, TS was obligated to name the source who had illegally leaked trade secret information. He chose not to do that.
Note that he actually was not barred from printing the information. It was not giving the guy up that was the problem.
CMS's remove the content of the webpage from the webpage. CSS removes the formatting of the page from the page. This leaves you with pages, formatting, and content. Welcome to the 21st Century. I bet you're a hit at parties. I'll tag my posts as SARCASM for you in the future.
To think that the span of a human life is at best about 1/250 millionth of that cycle.
On nth other hand, consider that by living well into old age, one can have lived through almost 2% of recorded human history. That's a lot, really. So if you chose correctly, it would only take about 50 people to have lived at the time that everything happened.
Just shows in how short a time humans have become what we are.
I build my pages using only HTML that would parse in 1992. CMS is for nancyboys!
I would prefer he do a series of short films based on the Unfinished Tales, then a documentary based on the Silmarilion. That would be awesome beyond all reason.
Don't think he could do it, sleeping aids are subject to a strict FDA approval process.
I started the "*BSD is dead" thing you know.
We know, AC. You're responsible for all the evil posts and memes around here. Here's a song for you:
"Sympathy for the AC"
Please allow me to introduce myself/ I'm a man who's crass and vile.
Ive been around for over 10 long years/ Hijacked many a story's forum.
And I was round when Cmdr Taco/ Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that the GNAA/ Put ASCII Goatse in every post
Pleased to meet you/Hope you guess my name/But whats puzzling you,/Is the nature of my game
I stuck around in the BSD forums/ When I saw it was time for a change
Killed Open, Net, and Free BSD/ And posted the Netcraft server stats
I got inside /Hacked an editor's account
While the dupe stories rained /And the forums sucked
Pleased to meet you/Hope you guess my name, oh yeah/Ah, whats puzzling you/Is the nature of my game, oh yeah
I watched with glee/ As your Apple and MS fanboys
Fought for a decade/ For the Gods they made
I shouted out,/Who killed Stephen King?
When after all/He's still not dead!
Pleased to meet you/Hope you guess my name, oh yeah/Ah, whats puzzling you/Is the nature of my game, oh yeah
Just as every editor downmods forum posts,/ and all the trolls are saints!
As heads is tails/ Just call me "Mr. A. C."
'Cause I'm in need of an IP ban
So if you meet me/Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-earned Mod points/Or I'll lay your posts to waste
Pleased to meet you/Hope you guess my name, oh yeah/Ah, whats puzzling you/Is the nature of my game, oh yeah....
It's OK, little emo, don't do it!
What everybody seems to misunderstand is that as a world wide monopoly, Microsoft is supposed to act in a responsible way so as not to inhibit the growth of competition.
At the same time, there's nothing preventing them from simply outcompeting their competition. Opera has to prove that MS is doing something unfair, and including a browser with their OS probably doesn't cut it. Nor does interpreting HTML in a slightly different way.
By creating a browser that is non-standard it skews the entire browser market and online experience.
So? Since MS has over 80% of the market share, one could easily say they are the de-facto standard and if Opera doesn't like it, they can interpret pages how MS does. If they don't want to do that, it's their choice, but then don't bitch about pages not rendering correctly. Additionally, the ultimate fault is with web developers - if they cared about Opera's users, they'd test their pages on it. They don't, and that tells you all you need to know.
That is why Microsoft was found guilty of being an aggressive predatory monopoly.
No it's not. MS was found to be anticompetitive because they strongarmed OEMs to not bundle non-MS products, and because they intentionally made Windows not work with applications that compete with other MS products. That's not happening here. Equating the use of proprietary file formats and non-comformity to "standards" that some group has adopted with anticompetitive practices is ludicrous.
I sincerely hope the EU takes their head off because we sure can't rely on the Americans to do the right thing.
It's not the government's job to shut a company down because you don't like them. Also, simply because MS has a monopoly market share with Windows does not allow any company to dictate to them how they engineer their products.
I believe because it doesn't require that many bots to send a bajillion emails, and even if the response rate is 0.000001, they still make money.
Put it another way - since spam is the major driver of botnets, the price of botnet rental will drop such that it's profitable for the spammers to use them, or spammers will use something else.
Do the executives wnat them for the reasons stated, or do they want them as a status symbol when they're on the golf course?
That's half of it. The other half does appear to be the ability to keep their tentacles around their employees, keeping them available at all times.
I assume you're not working on huge datasets all the time
No, I pretty much am, actually. If that changes for any appreciable length of time I just repoint my .xinitrc, but it's sort of rare that I can go for more than a few days without needing the memory.
I really am cruel to my machine.
I don't use KDE, but I use fluxbox so I can use my gigs of ram for actual applications. Until memory is literally free, all you "but memory is so cheap" people can kiss my ass.
The problem isn't the cost of memory in a standard configuration. Most anybody can get up to 2GB on their current MOBO. The issue is when you have your MOBO maxed out and still need more, because at that point you're looking at a whole other computer.
That's why I use fluxbox - because I do some pretty heavy crunching on some huge datasets. I need every byte I have, and that means no KDE, and usually closing most everything else when I've got the system maxed out.
If the basis of your 'article' is speculation whose sole citation is science fiction, send it to /dev/null next time.
As many personal freedoms that the DMCA stepped all over it was passed with a 100% vote. Since no one wants to be seen as soft on crime, I predict this one will too.
I know what you mean, voting against anything anti-crime is usually election suicide.
BUT - I think this might just be the one real counterexample, because this is a situation in which you can make a compelling case that this isn't anti-crime, but anti-citizen crap. If I'm an incumbent and someone points to that and calls me anti-crime, I'll run a counter ad that says I voted to let ISPs NOT SPY on their customers. Then I'll counter and say that if my opponent would have been in office, he'd initiate a police state to monitor everyone's internet access just to make sure that Hollywood takes more of their money.
Normally that technique doesn't work, but I think the fear of internet snooping might be compelling enough that you can fight back against it.
good luck lugging around the power cord you'll need to charge these things
And the air conditioner. Even if the power cord doesn't act like a big fuse, the battery will turn into a griddle. Maybe it will incorporate an integrated Peltier plate or something.
They are leveraging their OS monopoly to dominate the browser market
Are they? I know they *were*. They were doing that by preventing OEMs from including, say, Netscape on machines they sold. To my knowledge, they're not doing that anymore. Are they?
they are using their dominance in the browser market to damage competitors
How are they doing that now (not 10 years ago)? Simply having a product (an OS) that has good features (like a browser) is not unfairly damaging to competitors - that's just outcompeting your competitors. What are they doing now that was found to be illegal anticompetitive behavior last time? Because as I recall just bundling a browser wasn't part of that.
Without the lever, the intentional incompatabilities of IE would make it 3rd choice or drive it into extinction. With the lever, web designers are forced to adapt to the "quirks" instead, producing webpages that work well on IE but not so on other (standards-complient) browsers, which in turn drives more people to IE, creating a lock-in effect.
Seems a little weak to me. Seems to me it would be fairly easy for the Opera devs to get their browser to work with the IE quirks if they were interested in doing so. I realize they're not, but that's not the point. It just doesn't seem all that compelling a reason, to me, to go to a business and say "this is the engineering spec you have to work with by law". Doesn't seem at all reasonable to me. And again, I don't like MS. But remember, just having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. You'd have to prove that MS is using embrace and extend to intentionally make Opera not work. And that might be provable. But even then, best-case scenario is that MS would have to document how IE treats web pages (which I believe is documented now). I can't see the government deciding, by law, what HTTP standard they have to use.
And somewhere along that route, a dozen or so laws have been broken and the only reason MS hasn't been drawn and quartered in the courts is that they move faster than the court system and will probably be bancrupt long before the final, crushing verdict is rendered.
This is certainly true, but I think there are probably other places where MS is causing more problems than the browser "market". Heck, we saw the trial from the Win95 days drag on so long that it was made totally irrelevant by later versions of Windows. But I don't think that's at issue here. To me, this is kind of like the North trying to re-fight the Civil War - the issues are now largely irrelevant and we already won. MS lost. Like I said, unless they're still pressuring the OEMs....
To me, the bigger issue is that these days almost any browser is "good enough" and free, so people will use whatever comes with their machine. That's not a matter of anticompetitive practices, it's a matter of consumer apathy. As such, Opera should focus more on OEMs than trying to sue their competition.
I dislike MS's monopolistic practices as much as anyone. But really, there's not much harm in bundling an OS with a browser IF they don't prevent OEMs from including other browsers or from removing the IE icon from the desktop.
Even if MS were forced to include some other browser along with IE, that probably wouldn't help Opera. Unless, of course, their actual goal is to simply force MS to bundle *their* browser. And that would seem to be a fairly ridiculous demand.
Because the US always pays for everything and never starts things then leave others to clean up the mess... like, say, Afghanistan where the party line recently switched to pressuring NATO to "do their part"
Yep, and it's about f'ing time the non-US part of NATO started doing something other than sitting around with their thumbs up you-know-where.
Piker.
Wanker.
Can't it be both?
Probably not.
Something smells...and it aint my pants
It's your pants. Totally.