I doubt the veracity of calling GSM a form of DRM. GSM isn't content protection, it's a form of end-to-end privacy encryption. Calling it DRM is as much of a stretch as calling SSH a form of DRM.
Re:Ban all Microsoft Users from the Internet...
on
DNS Root Servers Attacked
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And most Linux users would scream and freak if there was an automatically set-up cron job to apt-get update/upgrade once a week - but will often do so themselves.
"1) There's nothing wrong with becoming a doctor to make money"
I disagree. There's everything wrong with becoming a doctor to make money. Without the passion for helping people, the training means nothing; like any profession, you have to give a damn about what you're working on. I'm not saying you shouldn't get into medicine without the expectation of making money; it's a profession, you have to expect returns on it. I'm just saying that the AMOUNT of money you make is peripheral to a good doctor: It should be enough to live comfortably; anything less is unfair, anything more makes his services prohibitively expensive.
Of course, below the surface, I'm agreeing with you, it's just that I'm picking nits. A good doctor performs a valuable service, and as a result should be compensated justly for it. The nit that I'm picking is that 'doing it for the money' implies that in this theoretical doctor's mind, the money is paramount. The second I sense that sort of thinking in a doctor, I no longer trust him; I feel that suddenly, a little green bit of paper takes precedence over my health.
After all, I've seen the same thing happen in IT; a tech fixes your computer *just enough* that it works today, but some strange fault *will* happen in the next week, so that you go calling the tech again, getting him a new fee. With money as primary motivator, a doctor is likely to do the same thing.
Of course, I never ever trust other people to be good; I only trust them to follow their motivations. If I believe a doctor is motivated by a passion to help people, I trust him.
Additionally, I never trust a doctor that uses the excuse of unreasonably high insurance as an excuse to gouge his customers; a doctor is charged high insurance for either being too 'inexperienced' (in which case he should still be working at a hospital), or having a propensity for lawsuits (in which case trust, while not explicitly undeserved, is questionable).
I do have a certain trust in hospitals; with enough MDs watching each others backs, I'm almost certain they're not going to accidentally kill me. Yes I watch Scrubs. No, that doesn't scare me, nor does it reflect on my opinions of the real world of medicine.
Notes: 'him' is used as a convenient placeholder only because writing 'him/her' everywhere seems... annoying. This would be well solved by a singular form of gender-neutral personal pronoun, which doesn't exist in the English language, as far as I know. My own physician is female, has her own practice, is quite good at the job, and has what I believe to be reasonable prices.
"I find it truly bizzare that radical anti-intellectual Christian splinter groups call themselves conservative - paticularly the ones that seem to think it's all about making money and smiting people."
Overall, I agree with you, but a couple points:
1) There's a word for extreme conservatives, and it's reactionary. Radicals are the extremists on the other side of the spectrum. 2) Conservatives are very likely to think everything is about making a buck; what do you think one tries to conserve in politics?
What I find hilarious is that, while I understand conservatism, and am in some ways conservative, I'm almost certain that I haven't seen a conservative politician yet. Just republicans and democrats.
Oh, sure, they like to use the illusion of conservatism or liberalism as their respective shouting boxes, but from what I can tell, there are only a few goals in politics: To get elected and paid, to avoid responsibility, to give business to your friends, and to remain in office. Of these:
The first gives motivation to, effectively, lie and raise your own salary.
The second gives motivation to avoid voting at all on touchy issues.
The third gives motivation to waste tax money.
Only the last seems to be any incentive towards the public good - when in fact, it's just more motivation to lie, in the shape of 'spin'.
Really, a nice racket if you can get into it, but no way to run a country.
Sorry, I can't see how Scientology gets protection under these laws; it's hardly a religion, and the founder of this farce himself (L. Ron Hubbard - great Sci-Fi writer, by the by) noted prior to his death that the book is 'spiritual' merely as a tax dodge.
Sounds to me like the well-monied members of the church are using it as a front for some underhanded shit.
"Still, that's hardly shoving anything down anyone's throat"
Of course it is, along with the rest of Windows. Anything that comes 'pre-installed' has already been shoved down your throat, and at a nicely lucrative price.
Mind you, some people have sufficiently distended throats - from Microsoft having shoved its junk down their throats for so long - that they hardly even notice.
"Does Apple force Safari down people's throats?"
Yup. Along with OS-X. Not that the alternative for a long time (ie: PPC Linux, with all its limited driver / boot support) was anything to gloat about.
Before you go all, 'but- but-', I want to tell you, it's O.K. In both Microsoft's and Apple's case, as long as the customer doesn't care if - or is indeed pleased that - this stuff is pre-installed, it's just good business sense (after all, if a prostitute's 'John' wants to deepthroat a strap-on, hers is not to question why.) to hook them up.
It's just the duty of the technicians to inform the masses - if only to save the virus-related headaches.
"Does Red Hard force Firefox down people's throats?"
I guess you mean Red Hat. Not really. They also offer Galeon, Konqueror, and Lynx if you're feeling all consoley. Meanwhile, you don't need a web browser installed to download and install any of them.
That said, Red Hat DOES shove a number of things down their customers' and developers' throats, including a very large number of 'compatibility' hacks for their official packages. I do believe this sort of behavior pisses off the developers from time to time, but the Community tolerates it so they can have an 800 lb. Gorrilla in their corner.
"Being conservative does not equate to being stupid"
No, but toeing the party line would.
Just so's you know.
"(Jack Thompson)... is better described as a Liberal; i.e.... knows whats best for society, and has made it his personal crusade to make the world safe for everybody by changing social laws."
Hm. You mean like trying to overturn Roe v. Wade? Or perhaps outlawing gay marraige. Yeah. Those damned liberals. Always thinkin' they know what's best.
Seriously. The second I hear 'liberals are like this' or 'conservatives are like that' I know the speaker has immediately gone into an irrational defensive mode.
Jack Thompson is a conservative; he's almost a reactionary. He's trying to use the legal system to 'protect' the citizens from a new form of content, which is a very conservative thing.
The fact that he's a nutjob has nothing to do with that. There are conservative nutjobs and there are liberal nutjobs. Please, accept your own nutjobs. No one else will.
But... but... can't we PRETEND that he's the example of the everyday neo-conservative uberchristian freak?? I mean, much of the US does that for mid-east terrorists, pretending they're examples of muslims. Why can't I assume Jack Thopson is the official spokesmoron of the religious right?
"Huh? Actually, they DO legally have to give you two weeks notice, or two weeks pay in lieu of notice, and you legally have to give them two weeks notice. Or maybe that's just here. Is it different where you are? (Just joking. I know that the laws are different in some primitive places, like where you apparently live.)"
It's a state-to-state thing. In PA, it's just a courtesy. Meanwhile, in PA, you can sue for an ex-employer saying bad things about you. With my employer, at least, they can fire you on the spot, but they do have to pay any unpaid PTO upon termination of your position from either party - even if you switch jobs within the company.
You're correct; the two weeks is just a courtesy you give if you want to ensure a set of good references.
As for being distrusted; I don't know about all that. Why would they trust you any less than when you were working there. 'Course, I'm very much a 'anything I can do to help' sort of guy, even in my exit time, so I guess that's why I never have that problem.
Why would Sony do things that way? Without direct memory access - even in 'user mode' or equivalent - I can't think of a single thing for which having eight CPUs would be useful. Why wouldn't they have one Kernel mode CPU that can dole out memory allocations and do the under the hood stuff, and seven others that can ask for RAM ('pleeeeeeeze? It's really important! I need to be an AI in MGS!) and handle the brute stuff.
Seems like a chip designed by a retar- I mean, committee.
"Cell as implemented in the PS3 has 8 cells. One is disabled (probably due to poor yields when demanding that all 8 be working.) In Linux, one is devoted to kernel tasks. That leaves you with six Cell SPEs to work with besides the PPC PPE."
Which makes you wonder why they didn't let Linux's SMP support take over the seven.
I know this is my own post, and thus a bit fart-sniffery, but I gotta.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of *those*
Re:Interested....
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"The process of separating the hydrogen could be powered by the wind-generated electricity it would seem."
The energy efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells is roughly 50%. That means that if you put 100W into splitting the output water into hydrogen and oxygen, the resulting fuel cell would produce 50W. Seeing as generator efficiency can be as low as 80% due to heat losses, that means you would get about 40% of the wind energy in the form of electricity when you go to use the fuel cell.
Now, if you're talking about using it as a charger for your fuel cells (like a Niven's CARM), you could probably buffet it with solar paint (low efficiency, but no engineering cost) and have a working charger in light or wind, and it would be kinda useful. Still, you'd do better to save the water for something else and pump the electricity directly into an ultracapacitor or other type of high-power battery.
"imagine giving a portable version of this to sailors. If you could create drinking water and electricity from this while floating on the ocean that would be a real life saver."
First off, I'm going to guess that a 'portable' version would be problematic; make a windmill too small, and it doesn't generate enough power to run a vibrator. Second, there are many, less cumbersome ways to power a portable distiller, including an old-school type evaporative distiller.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt the veracity of calling GSM a form of DRM. GSM isn't content protection, it's a form of end-to-end privacy encryption. Calling it DRM is as much of a stretch as calling SSH a form of DRM.
And most Linux users would scream and freak if there was an automatically set-up cron job to apt-get update/upgrade once a week - but will often do so themselves.
I openly admit to being one of those.
I dunno, but check this:
http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/d2144.htm
Look at the bottom of part 15:
"WARNING:
THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS A CHEMICAL(S) KNOWN TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER."
Either California - as usual - is crazy, or there's something wrong with UA's findings.
Or, you know, dosage matters.
"1) There's nothing wrong with becoming a doctor to make money"
... annoying. This would be well solved by a singular form of gender-neutral personal pronoun, which doesn't exist in the English language, as far as I know. My own physician is female, has her own practice, is quite good at the job, and has what I believe to be reasonable prices.
I disagree. There's everything wrong with becoming a doctor to make money. Without the passion for helping people, the training means nothing; like any profession, you have to give a damn about what you're working on. I'm not saying you shouldn't get into medicine without the expectation of making money; it's a profession, you have to expect returns on it. I'm just saying that the AMOUNT of money you make is peripheral to a good doctor: It should be enough to live comfortably; anything less is unfair, anything more makes his services prohibitively expensive.
Of course, below the surface, I'm agreeing with you, it's just that I'm picking nits. A good doctor performs a valuable service, and as a result should be compensated justly for it. The nit that I'm picking is that 'doing it for the money' implies that in this theoretical doctor's mind, the money is paramount. The second I sense that sort of thinking in a doctor, I no longer trust him; I feel that suddenly, a little green bit of paper takes precedence over my health.
After all, I've seen the same thing happen in IT; a tech fixes your computer *just enough* that it works today, but some strange fault *will* happen in the next week, so that you go calling the tech again, getting him a new fee. With money as primary motivator, a doctor is likely to do the same thing.
Of course, I never ever trust other people to be good; I only trust them to follow their motivations. If I believe a doctor is motivated by a passion to help people, I trust him.
Additionally, I never trust a doctor that uses the excuse of unreasonably high insurance as an excuse to gouge his customers; a doctor is charged high insurance for either being too 'inexperienced' (in which case he should still be working at a hospital), or having a propensity for lawsuits (in which case trust, while not explicitly undeserved, is questionable).
I do have a certain trust in hospitals; with enough MDs watching each others backs, I'm almost certain they're not going to accidentally kill me. Yes I watch Scrubs. No, that doesn't scare me, nor does it reflect on my opinions of the real world of medicine.
Notes: 'him' is used as a convenient placeholder only because writing 'him/her' everywhere seems
Hm. Afraid I wouldn't trust you as my doctor, mostly due to your last comment.
"I find it truly bizzare that radical anti-intellectual Christian splinter groups call themselves conservative - paticularly the ones that seem to think it's all about making money and smiting people."
Overall, I agree with you, but a couple points:
1) There's a word for extreme conservatives, and it's reactionary. Radicals are the extremists on the other side of the spectrum.
2) Conservatives are very likely to think everything is about making a buck; what do you think one tries to conserve in politics?
What I find hilarious is that, while I understand conservatism, and am in some ways conservative, I'm almost certain that I haven't seen a conservative politician yet. Just republicans and democrats.
Oh, sure, they like to use the illusion of conservatism or liberalism as their respective shouting boxes, but from what I can tell, there are only a few goals in politics: To get elected and paid, to avoid responsibility, to give business to your friends, and to remain in office. Of these:
The first gives motivation to, effectively, lie and raise your own salary.
The second gives motivation to avoid voting at all on touchy issues.
The third gives motivation to waste tax money.
Only the last seems to be any incentive towards the public good - when in fact, it's just more motivation to lie, in the shape of 'spin'.
Really, a nice racket if you can get into it, but no way to run a country.
Sorry, I can't see how Scientology gets protection under these laws; it's hardly a religion, and the founder of this farce himself (L. Ron Hubbard - great Sci-Fi writer, by the by) noted prior to his death that the book is 'spiritual' merely as a tax dodge.
Sounds to me like the well-monied members of the church are using it as a front for some underhanded shit.
"Still, that's hardly shoving anything down anyone's throat"
Of course it is, along with the rest of Windows. Anything that comes 'pre-installed' has already been shoved down your throat, and at a nicely lucrative price.
Mind you, some people have sufficiently distended throats - from Microsoft having shoved its junk down their throats for so long - that they hardly even notice.
"Does Apple force Safari down people's throats?"
Yup. Along with OS-X. Not that the alternative for a long time (ie: PPC Linux, with all its limited driver / boot support) was anything to gloat about.
Before you go all, 'but- but-', I want to tell you, it's O.K. In both Microsoft's and Apple's case, as long as the customer doesn't care if - or is indeed pleased that - this stuff is pre-installed, it's just good business sense (after all, if a prostitute's 'John' wants to deepthroat a strap-on, hers is not to question why.) to hook them up.
It's just the duty of the technicians to inform the masses - if only to save the virus-related headaches.
"Does Red Hard force Firefox down people's throats?"
I guess you mean Red Hat. Not really. They also offer Galeon, Konqueror, and Lynx if you're feeling all consoley. Meanwhile, you don't need a web browser installed to download and install any of them.
That said, Red Hat DOES shove a number of things down their customers' and developers' throats, including a very large number of 'compatibility' hacks for their official packages. I do believe this sort of behavior pisses off the developers from time to time, but the Community tolerates it so they can have an 800 lb. Gorrilla in their corner.
Nah. Last place I saw it was on my employment application. I think disclosure must be on the books too.
"Being conservative does not equate to being stupid"
... is better described as a Liberal; i.e. ... knows whats best for society, and has made it his personal crusade to make the world safe for everybody by changing social laws."
No, but toeing the party line would.
Just so's you know.
"(Jack Thompson)
Hm. You mean like trying to overturn Roe v. Wade? Or perhaps outlawing gay marraige. Yeah. Those damned liberals. Always thinkin' they know what's best.
Seriously. The second I hear 'liberals are like this' or 'conservatives are like that' I know the speaker has immediately gone into an irrational defensive mode.
Jack Thompson is a conservative; he's almost a reactionary. He's trying to use the legal system to 'protect' the citizens from a new form of content, which is a very conservative thing.
The fact that he's a nutjob has nothing to do with that. There are conservative nutjobs and there are liberal nutjobs. Please, accept your own nutjobs. No one else will.
But... but... can't we PRETEND that he's the example of the everyday neo-conservative uberchristian freak?? I mean, much of the US does that for mid-east terrorists, pretending they're examples of muslims. Why can't I assume Jack Thopson is the official spokesmoron of the religious right?
Fact: This is a spam post. I've seen it in at least three other places on /. this week.
That, and I don't even know what Twofo is, but my guess is that Twofo is not only going strong, but pwns this AC's ass.
"Huh? Actually, they DO legally have to give you two weeks notice, or two weeks pay in lieu of notice, and you legally have to give them two weeks notice. Or maybe that's just here. Is it different where you are? (Just joking. I know that the laws are different in some primitive places, like where you apparently live.)"
It's a state-to-state thing. In PA, it's just a courtesy. Meanwhile, in PA, you can sue for an ex-employer saying bad things about you. With my employer, at least, they can fire you on the spot, but they do have to pay any unpaid PTO upon termination of your position from either party - even if you switch jobs within the company.
Yeah, that's a pretty sewwt deal, AFAIC.
Mebbe not in your state, but it's actually a criminal AND actionable offense in PA.
You're correct; the two weeks is just a courtesy you give if you want to ensure a set of good references.
As for being distrusted; I don't know about all that. Why would they trust you any less than when you were working there. 'Course, I'm very much a 'anything I can do to help' sort of guy, even in my exit time, so I guess that's why I never have that problem.
"the PS3 has no chance to survive so it should make its time"
For great justice, lauch every Cell!
That said, though...
Why would Sony do things that way? Without direct memory access - even in 'user mode' or equivalent - I can't think of a single thing for which having eight CPUs would be useful. Why wouldn't they have one Kernel mode CPU that can dole out memory allocations and do the under the hood stuff, and seven others that can ask for RAM ('pleeeeeeeze? It's really important! I need to be an AI in MGS!) and handle the brute stuff.
Seems like a chip designed by a retar- I mean, committee.
You, lad, would get modded informative had I not already posted in this area. Thank you!
No, I want a 1024x768x24 bit capable video controller on a device the size of an SD card.
Wait, are we talking about those little contraptions that are, in sum, a small RC oscillator, a watch battery, an LED, and a magnet?
'tards.
"Cell as implemented in the PS3 has 8 cells. One is disabled (probably due to poor yields when demanding that all 8 be working.) In Linux, one is devoted to kernel tasks. That leaves you with six Cell SPEs to work with besides the PPC PPE."
Which makes you wonder why they didn't let Linux's SMP support take over the seven.
He's not trolling. Note that GGPP said 'I want to play with the cell processor'
The fileserver isn't the only goal, otherwise any random lump of hardware would do.
Special drivers for PS3 hardware? If you don't need 'em, don't compile 'em. If you probably wont need 'em, compile 'em as modules.
Cool thing about the Linux Kernel; it's got drivers for a whole RANGE of things you'll likely never use. But if you do, they're there.
I know this is my own post, and thus a bit fart-sniffery, but I gotta.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of *those*
"The process of separating the hydrogen could be powered by the wind-generated electricity it would seem."
The energy efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells is roughly 50%. That means that if you put 100W into splitting the output water into hydrogen and oxygen, the resulting fuel cell would produce 50W. Seeing as generator efficiency can be as low as 80% due to heat losses, that means you would get about 40% of the wind energy in the form of electricity when you go to use the fuel cell.
Now, if you're talking about using it as a charger for your fuel cells (like a Niven's CARM), you could probably buffet it with solar paint (low efficiency, but no engineering cost) and have a working charger in light or wind, and it would be kinda useful. Still, you'd do better to save the water for something else and pump the electricity directly into an ultracapacitor or other type of high-power battery.
"imagine giving a portable version of this to sailors. If you could create drinking water and electricity from this while floating on the ocean that would be a real life saver."
First off, I'm going to guess that a 'portable' version would be problematic; make a windmill too small, and it doesn't generate enough power to run a vibrator. Second, there are many, less cumbersome ways to power a portable distiller, including an old-school type evaporative distiller.