Here's the thing : pagers emit zero RF, but are still able to do their job.
Since a cellphone probably contains all the circuitry that you'd need to make a pager (and then some), it's not unreasonable to suppose that it could be programmed to function as one.
Who is to say that a cellphone in standby mode doesn't have a "pager command" mode that will induce it to power up the transmitter, disclose it's location to the network, and then go back off again - but only on command. Monitoring the RF emissions of a cellphone doesn't prove that this feature doesn't exist, it just proves that no-one is using it on your phone right now. I will grant that it does provide some evidence that such a system is not in ubiquitous constant use.
I find the idea stretches credibility - that governments and phone manufacturers could successfully collude to create such a system, operate it, and manage to keep it secret at the same time beggars belief. But RF monitoring a small sample of cell phones for a limited amount of time does not prove it's absence.
Why is calling it "openwashing" arrogance? People saying "Open API" are basically saying "an API that we have documented with the intent that a third party may use it".
This used to be called a "software development kit". Changing the term to "Open API" is an attempt to associate your product with some of the caché of the Open Source movement, without actually doing anything Open Source.
"Whitewashing" being a term used to denote the representation of an activity in a more positive light that it would ordinarily attract, I find "openwashing" to be a more descriptive specialization of the term that describes the activity of labelling a "software development kit" as an "Open API". I don't see what's arrogant about a clever and accurate neologism.
OpenAPI doesn't always imply that the original component the API abstracts is available - it's usually the opposite, as OpenAPI typically refers to APIs mediated by remote procedure calls. So if the upgrade breaks your software, you don't get to choose the old version, you have to live with it, even if the changes remove features that your application cannot function without.
It's easy to see how this might be exploited
* BigCorp witnesses success of LittleCorp's "SuperThing" project which is based on their BigAPI service * BigCorp develops "UltraThing" with some set of the features of "SuperThing" * BigCorp changes their BigAPI service in a way that breaks SuperThing and watches LittleCorp haemorrhage customers who migrate to UltraThing
To a lesser extent this is also true of operating systems - while MS do bend over backwards to maintain backward compatibility (which is the cause of a lot of the woes on Windows), if they change part of the Windows API in a way that breaks your product, you either have to tell your customers to avoid certain service packs (which makes you look stupid), or fix your code ; you don't really have a cost-free choice there.
For point 2, how hard is it for the author of GIMP to provide 16-bit per channel support?
A sibling points out that this is probably harder than it might seem, and why.
I'll throw my tuppence in and also point out - how hard is it for someone OTHER than the author of GIMP to provide 16-bit per channel support? Because GIMP is GPL software, there are no legal obstacles. The GIMP authors don't even have to like or accept your patches - because the software is GPL, you can distribute a modified version yourself ("HexaGIMP"?), and if 16-bit channel support is the killer feature that all users demand, the original GIMP will rapidly die on the vine.
Hell, put up a Kickstarter project or something. If there are so many users who can't live without this feature, presumably you can get them to pony up enough dollars to pay someone to implement it. Something you'd never be able to do with Photoshop - if Adobe, for much the same reasons as the GIMP authorship team, had insufficient resources to devote to developing a new feature, then you'd either have to i) live with it ii) pester Adobe until they develop it. You don't get option iii) get the feature developed by someone else, and if option ii) does eventually work, you're going to have to pay handsomely to upgrade your software.
GM crops are often modified so you CAN spray chemicals on them.
Monsanto's most famous line is Roundup Ready® corn seed. This has glyphosate resistance engineered into it, so the farmer can go to town spraying this herbicide on their field and kill all the weeds.
The definition of a "job" in the UK includes being paid a minimum wage.
Since you can't claim Job Seekers Allowance if you're working more than 16 hours a week, we'll assume that they are being given 16 hours a week work as interns, which means they're earning 54% of minimum wage. Again, eerily similar to Foxconn, who give their interns about half the wage of their standard factory workers.
If these interns were being put to some general social use I would be less offended by it*, but a vast, profitable corporation (not some struggling mom and pop business) is getting cheap (I think they pay their travelling expenses) labour subsidised by the taxpayer. So yet another case of corporate welfare at the expense of the general public.
* But still offended. If work has value, pay for that value.
They're sending people on "Jobseekers Allowance" into "internships" with the likes of Tesco (our own national Wal-Mart), on the promise of gaining useful job experience which will gain them employment. So they stack shelves for the duration of their internship, which gives them literally zero marketable experience (and indeed, probably damages their prospects - who wants to hire a shelf-stacker for anything less menial?)
If they leave after a short "cooling off period", their benefits will be cut off, removing even the social safety net provided by the state. While Tesco have been recruiting unpaid interns on a voluntary basis for some years now, this recent trend is essentially state-sponsored slavery, and sounds eerily like the complicity of the Chinese local government in these Foxconn internships.
These guys are in the same league as Big Tobacco with their bullshit.
These guys were actually in league with Big Tobacco to distribute their bullshit (questioning the link between second hand smoking and ill health for Philip Morris).
Creation science is an oxymoron ; there isn't any science in it. Proper science engages in rigorous efforts to prove itself wrong. Creationist "science" doctrine is just a bunch of assertions like "It's all too complicated to have arisen by chance!". The irony is that if they actually engaged in the scientific method, they would have to attempt to prove that speciation level changes DO arise from evolution (in order to try to disprove their hypothesis that they don't).
Teachers don't want to teach science that's controversial and uncertain.
Science teachers DO want to teach science. They just don't want to cop the flak because some parties are using political, rather than scientific methods, to promote their ideas by excluding others through force. Part of science is the in-built assumption that if the evidence contradicts your theory, then you change your theory - so it embraces and accommodates the concept of "uncertain". And perhaps that is the part of it deemed most dangerous by those who want to force the world to change to fit their mind, instead of the mind changing to fit the world.
As represented in the book, the storage has pick-ups, so it knows what the things are that have been stored in it. Equipped with an indicator light, the storage doesn't even need to know where it is - it just blinks it's light when you send a signal corresponding to the item you are looking for.
E-ink is not a bi-stable liquid crystal. It's a multicellular suspension of microcapsules of electrically charged ink, with a layer of electrodes that can be charged to cause migration of the desired colour to the surface.
They are there to protect *other* drivers as much as anyone else. Insurance is a legal requirement because it's reckoned to be better that there is some means of providing financial support to those who suffer at the hands of incompetent drivers, rather than to just resort to suing them and getting the run around for 10 years because they are a deadbeat who can''t pay for your medical bills and loss of income. The kind of idiot who drives badly probably also correlates strongly with the kind of idiot who thinks insurance is for idiots, so in that case I'm very glad to have my policy to fall back on. If driving insurance wasn't mandatory, driving insurance would be too expensive for anyone to afford, and the costs would fall back upon society in another form, which I get the sense you wouldn't agree with either.
While I agree that society is overly litigious, I think the chief manifestation of that is unnecessary paperwork like entire manuals devoted to what NOT to do with a product (do not eat your mobile phone...), and excessive medical tests and interventions. I don't like insurance companies either - because as for-profit entities, they offer a service which has value, and then do their level best to weasel out of providing it. But they do provide a valuable service, even if it's grudgingly.
AFAIK they are doing so ; the main use of Java is for Base, which few people use AFAIK. The secondary use of Java is for some of the file export filters - like the "flat" XML outputs which are good for some XSLT sheets. I think these are getting rewritten in C++.
Indeed. Alec Guinness famously did very well out of Star Wars because he insisted on a percentage of the merchandising in his contract - whereas the likes of Peter Mahew only made enough to start a company making bed frames, before chucking that in to join the tour circuit. I hope he insisted on a big fat cheque to reprise his role as Chewbacca in the prequels.
Because $1.99 puts it in the region of an impulse buy. It's less than you spend on a cup of coffee. This means that people who would previously have made the effort to pirate something will go "ah - screw it", and pay up, if they are getting an equivalent product.
Take a look at articles on Hollywood Accounting - that is far more responsible for taking money out the hands of content creators than piracy.
You honestly think films that gross over $600M just at the box office, are making a loss? Of $167M dollars? And then they go on to make 3 more? (this is Harry Potter 5 - after which they made 6, 7a, and 7b). You think that businesses will make films just because they can't bear to disappoint the fans? That's not even believable in a Hollywood movie. In any other business, a product that made a huge loss would never get a sequel - but they did it three more times for HP? Just because they love JK Rowling so much? Get real.
You need to get a better contract. One that stipulates a percentage of the gross.
Some think this is behind the push to include RFID tags in money ; once you can identify each note, you can trace it's path through the economy. It's not such a giant leap to imagine ATMs and the tellers desk in the bank having RFID pickup loops to associate a given wad of cash with your account number.
Under GPLv2, if you violate, you lose your license to distribute permanently, and only the copyright holder can grant you a new one. The SFLC being the copyright holder for BusyBox.
Under GPLv3, if you offer the appropriate restitution (releasing your source), you automatically regain your license to distribute. This is a more enlightened position, given the mixed set of authors that many open-source projects have - getting permission from every copyright holder would be an onerous, and potentially impossible, task. It's also rather friendlier to business interests - the people who claim that Stallman is anti-business should take that message home.
Since the kernel is under GPLv2, all it would take for the SFLC to gain a position of some leverage over the kernel as well would be for them to convince some number of significant kernel contributors to assign their kernel source copyrights to SFLC ; whether Linus would allow their contributions to enter the kernel sources or remain there is another matter.
I really have no idea ; it's very simple to comply. I guess they fear giving up any commercial advantage they have gained by patching the BusyBox sources.
The thing is, they are giving up a massive commercial advantage by rewriting it from scratch - they are making the same mistake that Netscape did - source code represents a vast repository of knowledge, of lessons learned, not all of them obvious from reading the source code, and you give all that up when you re-implement from scratch.
It's also feasible that someone in the higher ranks at Sony just doesn't grok the license and fears it "infecting" some part of their product that they'd rather keep secret. Engineers typically only do irrational things when they have incomplete information, or they are being forced to do so by their superiors.
It will be no consolation to discover that it's too late for him anyway. The secondary damage from CF related illnesses is what kills you ; this treatment would help to prevent that from accumulating, which is one of the reasons it's such a potential moneyspinner - not only does it cost so much, it improves the prospect of the treatment being necessary for an extended period, and it's best applied to children - and who doesn't think of them?
Well, yes, you can configure it. But I would have thought the default settings would be something less annoying than "update automatically then show a popup-dialogue and spontaneously reboot in 5 minutes. Do not offer an option to not reboot - make the user keep deferring it in chunks of between 5 minutes and 4 hours". If the updates happen at lunchtime and you left a bunch of windows open while you stepped out for lunch, say goodbye to any work you haven't saved.
Whereas the default on my other OS is "open the update manager, present the available updates list, and wait for user input". And when it's finished updating, it colours one UI element red to let you know that a reboot would be good, but it's not going to force you. You can configure this behaviour too.
My gripe is that the default settings on Windows cause you pain - at the very least, they force you to save your work and reboot, or constantly poke at a nag-box to prevent it rebooting, whereas the default settings on my chosen working OS don't even force you to update, and when you do, you can carry on working as long as you like before you reboot - I typically just shut down at the end of the day and consider that the first half of my reboot cycle.
I was especially thrilled when I installed Windows 7 for the first time recently and it spent around twenty minutes rebooting no fewer than 6 times before I could actually use it.
I find it equally pleasing when it downloads updates in the background and then spontaneously reboots 5 minutes later, particularly when it does it behind a game and I lose my online match.
Really, the only mitigating factor is that I no longer attempt to do any useful work with Windows.
Surgical nurses typically handle the "tool inventory" on surgery ; all the operating theatres I've worked in have had excellent procedures, but you still hear stories about things being left behind in the patient...
Sounds like a great case for RFID inventory control ; tag every tool, log them out of the toolbox with a loop mounted on the side, log them back in again when you return them.
The article linked mentions this on the second page ; I don't see why you should be limited to the 3M solution though (except maybe they'll bribe someone to make it a regulatory necessity). You can get nearly 2,000 tags for about $100, so it's not like it would be expensive.
It would be easy enough to swing around a YAGI antenna from the confines of a mesh hide - net curtains would be enough to conceal a distant antenna spook from view without obscuring his view of potential targets.
Combine a YAGI with an invisible laser rangefinder to set the power and you have yourself a range-safe power snooper for RFID cards.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the thing : pagers emit zero RF, but are still able to do their job.
Since a cellphone probably contains all the circuitry that you'd need to make a pager (and then some), it's not unreasonable to suppose that it could be programmed to function as one.
Who is to say that a cellphone in standby mode doesn't have a "pager command" mode that will induce it to power up the transmitter, disclose it's location to the network, and then go back off again - but only on command. Monitoring the RF emissions of a cellphone doesn't prove that this feature doesn't exist, it just proves that no-one is using it on your phone right now. I will grant that it does provide some evidence that such a system is not in ubiquitous constant use.
I find the idea stretches credibility - that governments and phone manufacturers could successfully collude to create such a system, operate it, and manage to keep it secret at the same time beggars belief. But RF monitoring a small sample of cell phones for a limited amount of time does not prove it's absence.
Why is calling it "openwashing" arrogance? People saying "Open API" are basically saying "an API that we have documented with the intent that a third party may use it".
This used to be called a "software development kit". Changing the term to "Open API" is an attempt to associate your product with some of the caché of the Open Source movement, without actually doing anything Open Source.
"Whitewashing" being a term used to denote the representation of an activity in a more positive light that it would ordinarily attract, I find "openwashing" to be a more descriptive specialization of the term that describes the activity of labelling a "software development kit" as an "Open API". I don't see what's arrogant about a clever and accurate neologism.
OpenAPI doesn't always imply that the original component the API abstracts is available - it's usually the opposite, as OpenAPI typically refers to APIs mediated by remote procedure calls. So if the upgrade breaks your software, you don't get to choose the old version, you have to live with it, even if the changes remove features that your application cannot function without.
It's easy to see how this might be exploited
* BigCorp witnesses success of LittleCorp's "SuperThing" project which is based on their BigAPI service
* BigCorp develops "UltraThing" with some set of the features of "SuperThing"
* BigCorp changes their BigAPI service in a way that breaks SuperThing and watches LittleCorp haemorrhage customers who migrate to UltraThing
To a lesser extent this is also true of operating systems - while MS do bend over backwards to maintain backward compatibility (which is the cause of a lot of the woes on Windows), if they change part of the Windows API in a way that breaks your product, you either have to tell your customers to avoid certain service packs (which makes you look stupid), or fix your code ; you don't really have a cost-free choice there.
For point 2, how hard is it for the author of GIMP to provide 16-bit per channel support?
A sibling points out that this is probably harder than it might seem, and why.
I'll throw my tuppence in and also point out - how hard is it for someone OTHER than the author of GIMP to provide 16-bit per channel support? Because GIMP is GPL software, there are no legal obstacles. The GIMP authors don't even have to like or accept your patches - because the software is GPL, you can distribute a modified version yourself ("HexaGIMP"?), and if 16-bit channel support is the killer feature that all users demand, the original GIMP will rapidly die on the vine.
Hell, put up a Kickstarter project or something. If there are so many users who can't live without this feature, presumably you can get them to pony up enough dollars to pay someone to implement it. Something you'd never be able to do with Photoshop - if Adobe, for much the same reasons as the GIMP authorship team, had insufficient resources to devote to developing a new feature, then you'd either have to i) live with it ii) pester Adobe until they develop it. You don't get option iii) get the feature developed by someone else, and if option ii) does eventually work, you're going to have to pay handsomely to upgrade your software.
GM crops are often modified so you CAN spray chemicals on them.
Monsanto's most famous line is Roundup Ready® corn seed. This has glyphosate resistance engineered into it, so the farmer can go to town spraying this herbicide on their field and kill all the weeds.
The definition of a "job" in the UK includes being paid a minimum wage.
Since you can't claim Job Seekers Allowance if you're working more than 16 hours a week, we'll assume that they are being given 16 hours a week work as interns, which means they're earning 54% of minimum wage. Again, eerily similar to Foxconn, who give their interns about half the wage of their standard factory workers.
If these interns were being put to some general social use I would be less offended by it*, but a vast, profitable corporation (not some struggling mom and pop business) is getting cheap (I think they pay their travelling expenses) labour subsidised by the taxpayer. So yet another case of corporate welfare at the expense of the general public.
* But still offended. If work has value, pay for that value.
They're sending people on "Jobseekers Allowance" into "internships" with the likes of Tesco (our own national Wal-Mart), on the promise of gaining useful job experience which will gain them employment. So they stack shelves for the duration of their internship, which gives them literally zero marketable experience (and indeed, probably damages their prospects - who wants to hire a shelf-stacker for anything less menial?)
If they leave after a short "cooling off period", their benefits will be cut off, removing even the social safety net provided by the state. While Tesco have been recruiting unpaid interns on a voluntary basis for some years now, this recent trend is essentially state-sponsored slavery, and sounds eerily like the complicity of the Chinese local government in these Foxconn internships.
These guys are in the same league as Big Tobacco with their bullshit.
These guys were actually in league with Big Tobacco to distribute their bullshit (questioning the link between second hand smoking and ill health for Philip Morris).
'Creation Science'
Creation science is an oxymoron ; there isn't any science in it. Proper science engages in rigorous efforts to prove itself wrong. Creationist "science" doctrine is just a bunch of assertions like "It's all too complicated to have arisen by chance!". The irony is that if they actually engaged in the scientific method, they would have to attempt to prove that speciation level changes DO arise from evolution (in order to try to disprove their hypothesis that they don't).
Teachers don't want to teach science that's controversial and uncertain.
Science teachers DO want to teach science. They just don't want to cop the flak because some parties are using political, rather than scientific methods, to promote their ideas by excluding others through force. Part of science is the in-built assumption that if the evidence contradicts your theory, then you change your theory - so it embraces and accommodates the concept of "uncertain". And perhaps that is the part of it deemed most dangerous by those who want to force the world to change to fit their mind, instead of the mind changing to fit the world.
As represented in the book, the storage has pick-ups, so it knows what the things are that have been stored in it. Equipped with an indicator light, the storage doesn't even need to know where it is - it just blinks it's light when you send a signal corresponding to the item you are looking for.
E-ink is not a bi-stable liquid crystal. It's a multicellular suspension of microcapsules of electrically charged ink, with a layer of electrodes that can be charged to cause migration of the desired colour to the surface.
They are there to protect *other* drivers as much as anyone else. Insurance is a legal requirement because it's reckoned to be better that there is some means of providing financial support to those who suffer at the hands of incompetent drivers, rather than to just resort to suing them and getting the run around for 10 years because they are a deadbeat who can''t pay for your medical bills and loss of income. The kind of idiot who drives badly probably also correlates strongly with the kind of idiot who thinks insurance is for idiots, so in that case I'm very glad to have my policy to fall back on. If driving insurance wasn't mandatory, driving insurance would be too expensive for anyone to afford, and the costs would fall back upon society in another form, which I get the sense you wouldn't agree with either.
While I agree that society is overly litigious, I think the chief manifestation of that is unnecessary paperwork like entire manuals devoted to what NOT to do with a product (do not eat your mobile phone...), and excessive medical tests and interventions. I don't like insurance companies either - because as for-profit entities, they offer a service which has value, and then do their level best to weasel out of providing it. But they do provide a valuable service, even if it's grudgingly.
AFAIK they are doing so ; the main use of Java is for Base, which few people use AFAIK. The secondary use of Java is for some of the file export filters - like the "flat" XML outputs which are good for some XSLT sheets. I think these are getting rewritten in C++.
Indeed. Alec Guinness famously did very well out of Star Wars because he insisted on a percentage of the merchandising in his contract - whereas the likes of Peter Mahew only made enough to start a company making bed frames, before chucking that in to join the tour circuit. I hope he insisted on a big fat cheque to reprise his role as Chewbacca in the prequels.
Because $1.99 puts it in the region of an impulse buy. It's less than you spend on a cup of coffee. This means that people who would previously have made the effort to pirate something will go "ah - screw it", and pay up, if they are getting an equivalent product.
Take a look at articles on Hollywood Accounting - that is far more responsible for taking money out the hands of content creators than piracy.
You honestly think films that gross over $600M just at the box office, are making a loss? Of $167M dollars? And then they go on to make 3 more? (this is Harry Potter 5 - after which they made 6, 7a, and 7b). You think that businesses will make films just because they can't bear to disappoint the fans? That's not even believable in a Hollywood movie. In any other business, a product that made a huge loss would never get a sequel - but they did it three more times for HP? Just because they love JK Rowling so much? Get real.
You need to get a better contract. One that stipulates a percentage of the gross.
Use cash?
Some think this is behind the push to include RFID tags in money ; once you can identify each note, you can trace it's path through the economy. It's not such a giant leap to imagine ATMs and the tellers desk in the bank having RFID pickup loops to associate a given wad of cash with your account number.
Under GPLv2, if you violate, you lose your license to distribute permanently, and only the copyright holder can grant you a new one. The SFLC being the copyright holder for BusyBox.
Under GPLv3, if you offer the appropriate restitution (releasing your source), you automatically regain your license to distribute. This is a more enlightened position, given the mixed set of authors that many open-source projects have - getting permission from every copyright holder would be an onerous, and potentially impossible, task. It's also rather friendlier to business interests - the people who claim that Stallman is anti-business should take that message home.
Since the kernel is under GPLv2, all it would take for the SFLC to gain a position of some leverage over the kernel as well would be for them to convince some number of significant kernel contributors to assign their kernel source copyrights to SFLC ; whether Linus would allow their contributions to enter the kernel sources or remain there is another matter.
I really have no idea ; it's very simple to comply. I guess they fear giving up any commercial advantage they have gained by patching the BusyBox sources.
The thing is, they are giving up a massive commercial advantage by rewriting it from scratch - they are making the same mistake that Netscape did - source code represents a vast repository of knowledge, of lessons learned, not all of them obvious from reading the source code, and you give all that up when you re-implement from scratch.
It's also feasible that someone in the higher ranks at Sony just doesn't grok the license and fears it "infecting" some part of their product that they'd rather keep secret. Engineers typically only do irrational things when they have incomplete information, or they are being forced to do so by their superiors.
It will be no consolation to discover that it's too late for him anyway. The secondary damage from CF related illnesses is what kills you ; this treatment would help to prevent that from accumulating, which is one of the reasons it's such a potential moneyspinner - not only does it cost so much, it improves the prospect of the treatment being necessary for an extended period, and it's best applied to children - and who doesn't think of them?
I don't know, but I think the parking lot is full
Well, yes, you can configure it. But I would have thought the default settings would be something less annoying than "update automatically then show a popup-dialogue and spontaneously reboot in 5 minutes. Do not offer an option to not reboot - make the user keep deferring it in chunks of between 5 minutes and 4 hours". If the updates happen at lunchtime and you left a bunch of windows open while you stepped out for lunch, say goodbye to any work you haven't saved.
Whereas the default on my other OS is "open the update manager, present the available updates list, and wait for user input". And when it's finished updating, it colours one UI element red to let you know that a reboot would be good, but it's not going to force you. You can configure this behaviour too.
My gripe is that the default settings on Windows cause you pain - at the very least, they force you to save your work and reboot, or constantly poke at a nag-box to prevent it rebooting, whereas the default settings on my chosen working OS don't even force you to update, and when you do, you can carry on working as long as you like before you reboot - I typically just shut down at the end of the day and consider that the first half of my reboot cycle.
I was especially thrilled when I installed Windows 7 for the first time recently and it spent around twenty minutes rebooting no fewer than 6 times before I could actually use it.
I find it equally pleasing when it downloads updates in the background and then spontaneously reboots 5 minutes later, particularly when it does it behind a game and I lose my online match.
Really, the only mitigating factor is that I no longer attempt to do any useful work with Windows.
Surgical nurses typically handle the "tool inventory" on surgery ; all the operating theatres I've worked in have had excellent procedures, but you still hear stories about things being left behind in the patient...
Sounds like a great case for RFID inventory control ; tag every tool, log them out of the toolbox with a loop mounted on the side, log them back in again when you return them.
The article linked mentions this on the second page ; I don't see why you should be limited to the 3M solution though (except maybe they'll bribe someone to make it a regulatory necessity). You can get nearly 2,000 tags for about $100, so it's not like it would be expensive.
It would be easy enough to swing around a YAGI antenna from the confines of a mesh hide - net curtains would be enough to conceal a distant antenna spook from view without obscuring his view of potential targets.
Combine a YAGI with an invisible laser rangefinder to set the power and you have yourself a range-safe power snooper for RFID cards.