Probably because the NDA they signed forbids them from discussing the patents with other companies. If they even discussed which patents each party was going to work on invalidating, they would violate the NDA and be in breach of contract.
What happens when you take that card out and slot it into your Windows laptop? If it's formatted with ext2, nothing. Yes, there are ext2 drivers for Windows, but average people aren't going to know that, much less install them. Using FAT / FAT32 makes your filesystem compatible with every operating system out there, meaning that you can yank the card and transfer files to or from anyone, not just people who installed the drivers.
And not everyone will be able to install the drivers - corporate users, etc.
Network effects are the winner again here ; it's the reason they bought Skype, so they could control another defacto standard.
It might be better to support UDF rather than ext2
If a wife husband are European and the baby comes out with black or Asian features that's going to be hard to explain away.
True ; but such varied phenotypic intermixing is a relatively new phenomenon for humans, so it will not have biased the evolution of these behavioural traits (as you point out, evolution happens slowly).
Once a certain age is reached it's not the playboys or cheats that are happiest.
Once you've reached a certain age, from an evolutionary perspective, it no longer matters. Once they reach that certain age, the playboys and cheats will have spread their seed far and wide, which is great for giving their genes the most opportunities. The genes you've passed onto your offspring don't care if you cry yourself to death in a dumpster clutching a bottle of meths - it's not like you were around to provide for them anyway. The point is that there are now more copies of them than those of a more beta male who is a "steady guy".
I completely agree that from a personal point of view, it's better to behave in a way that maximises your happiness and that of those around you. But this was not the intention of my post, which was discussing potential explanations of certain stereotypical sexual behaviour patterns in an evolutionary context and from an impersonal point of view.
Many of the generation of programmers I'm in were self-taught.
At my school, we had no structured lessons involving computers, but we did have a computer lab packed with BBC Micros on a network (I went to a reasonably posh private school). My career is based on something I have zero formal schooling in - just the proclivity to muck about with computers, and the opportunity to do so. Couple that with computers that are sufficiently primitive that you are *forced* to learn stuff about them just to get them to do something interesting, and you have an environment where you can learn.
I believe the Raspberry Pi is trying to recreate these conditions but I'm not sure how successful it will be. This was a different era, when there were only four channels on television and about an hour or two of dedicated children's programming a day. Computers were both primitive AND expensive - the BBC Micro was £335 back then, about £1,100 in 2012 pounds, and you needed an extra TV if you weren't going to annoy your parents too much. But they were the most interesting thing around, which certainly contributed to their charm.
The Pi makes it cheap to obtain a powerful computer - but it's *already* cheap to obtain a powerful computer ; for just a shade under £400 I recently bought the family a Core i3 laptop with a full HD screen and 4GB of RAM. The lives of children are already filled with "boxes that go bing" ; adding one that has significantly less "bing" out of the box may just leave them nonplussed.
I'll still be getting one though, and "playing with it" in front of my daughter, if only for the sake of nostalgia.
It's unfortunately all too believable. There are not technical obstacles currently preventing the 1.0 versions of the management software in this story, except the general unwillingness of middle management to contemplate being replaced with a computer system. I even find myself not disagreeing too much with the ubiquitous surveillance built into his utopian alternative - while I'm sure it would make me feel uncomfortable at first, I'm forced to concede that it might be necessary, and at least his system has adequate checks and balances.
Indeed. If the USA were really being proper capitalists about it, they'd ship all their cancer patients to Cuba - they spend a tenth of what the USA does per capita, but have better cancer survival rates.
Even paying a third of what you pay in the states, both the USA and Cuba would be getting a bargain.
While the Minecraft download page insists that you should use the Sun JVM, I've yet to have a problem running it on OpenJDK (although I confess, I'm not a big player like some).
I have a whole TB (for SD) ; I think the phenomenon is more that if you have the storage, you'll fill it. My wife in particular is a real squirrel with cheesy old movies.
Fortunately I can blame the auto-expiry when they "drop off the bottom" of the storage. Ahem.
To be honest ; when and if I upgrade my setup to HD, I'll stick to 2TB and no more - there's such a thing as too much choice and too much TV.
On the one hand, I can see the point of view of the designers who are annoyed about the counterfeiting of their product.
On the other hand, what does it say about the actual value of their designs? It says that people are not willing to pay the prices they demand for the somewhat ephemeral value that their design commands.
It used to be that artisans had makers marks because their product was of superior quality and they wished to differentiate it. People seeing the superior quality of the product and desiring that quality for themselves would see the makers mark and know where they could get an item of similar quality.
Quality is no longer the differentiation though - price is. The relationship has inverted ; a maker no longer puts their mark on something to identify the maker of the product and generate sales, he puts the mark on to increase the perceived value of the product. As some people are no doubt pointing out - a lot of the so-called "counterfeit" product is made on the same production line, from the same materials, by the same workers using the same amount of labour.
There is no difference in the intrinsic value of the product - it's the same material object with the same properties - so why can Loius Vuitton sell it for more than Mr Chang? Because Loius Vuitton inflates the perception of value of their products in ways that have nothing to do with their actual utility - they put them in a swanky shop with a flunky on the door, they don't pile them high, and they don't sell them cheap.
The real counterfeit is therefore the perceived value of the "genuine" product - people are buying fake value. This is not an artisan product made by a skilled craftsman. This is a product designed to be made as piecework in a third world sweatshop - a product that by definition, has to be makable by the lowest common denominator of skill.
It's not a judgement, it's just rebalancing the invisible hand of the market.
Fuel has costs that are not reflected at the pump - environmental damage, oil subsidy, military costs.
In a true free market system, the price of a product should reflect the cost of a product, such that an informed choice about purchase can be made. If the value of your need exceeds the price of fueling an SUV, that's how you know you really need to drive one.
seeing that she escaped death by inches only by flat-spotting all four tires hitting the brakes
ABS may have reduced the stopping distance. If you're flat-spotting tyres, you don't have ABS.
Aside from that, SUVs are safer than sports, compacts, and subcompacts, but not by a multiple of 5. On the flip side, compacts and subcompacts are much safer if you happen to be the other driver.
The best all round choice seems to be luxury imports, which are least risky for everyone. But they are expensive ; minivans seem to be a good compromise - they're not as forgiving on the other driver as mid to large size cars, but they are much safer for you. SUVs seem to be nearly twice as dangerous as a large size car to the other vehicle and slightly less safe for you than a mid to large size car, which I presume is what your wife was driving if she was getting 25 mpg.
Did you have a citation for that "5 times safer" figure?
I've noticed that the copyright holders of religious material are some of the most zealous about demanding their royalties, even to the point of performance rights for hymns, etc.
If you're playing the numbers, a single good bet PLUS some bad ones is a much better spread.
Not to put a damper on a fine theory of misogyny, but women also have affairs. The stereotype of "fucks bad boys, marries nice men" is there for a reason. For women, children are a much more expensive proposition in terms of resources than for the men. If they can hook a nice man who will provide them with resources, that's excellent for the prospects of their offspring. But it's not so good for genetic diversity - but that can be remedied by screwing a few bad boys on the side, and collecting some of that strong, healthy alpha-male genetic material ; the more advantageous traits you can mix your genes with, the more likely they are to produce another generation.
Because of this phenomenon, it pays (genetically speaking) for some individuals to be the stereotypically promiscuous male - it's especially sweet from an evolutionary perspective if you can get your offspring fed and clothed by the efforts of another man.
People obviously don't consciously plan the best genetic spread bets they can.. but it serves to illustrate that it's not a one-sided thing ; both sexes get something out of it from a purely animal perspective, so it makes sense that the behaviours are not bred out of us. It also makes sense that we get angry about cheating - although really, the men should be angrier than the women - men give away very little when they fertilize a woman, but if your woman has been fertilized by another man, that both crowds out your own genes, and consumes resources that could be applied to raising your offspring. You would expect women to be angry about the prospect of losing their man to another woman - he is their source of resources - but more tolerant of casual sexual infidelity as long as there is no prospect of their man withdrawing their support.
This is presumably why some women tolerate their men having mistresses or even multiple wives, but men rarely suffer their women cheating.
Of course, the theoretical dynamics of all this has probably been changed by the emancipation of women, but the wet-wiring has yet to evolve to adjust.
You can't have free-market capitalism though - because capitalism concentrates wealth and power, monopoly, aka fascism/dictatorship, is always inevitable. The free market is a mythical land where companies compete on the merits of their product, rather than the size of the budget they have available for marketing, lobbying, and mercenary private security forces.
The best you can do with capitalism is try to keep it in check. The worst... well, it's beginning to look like the worst is coming.
I'm afraid it's undemocratic. In fact, strictly speaking, for total fairness, 50% of them should have below average IQ, but the electorate always seem to select a larger percentage than that.
Because the software is running on your server, you are not distributing it, therefore you can even derive your product from GPL licensed code, provide an API, and never have to distribute your source.
Writing your application on top of that means that you relinquish your software freedoms ; you are dependant on an implementation you cannot elect to control for yourself. Which is fine, as long as you are happy with that risk. Most people already do this on their own hardware, so it's not much of a stretch. And software increasingly comes with remotely operable "off switches", so I guess that's equivalent too.
But even proprietary software on your local hardware doesn't require you to deliver your data into the hands of others to make it useful (by design - since it's proprietary you have no easy assurance that it doesn't do this covertly).
Because they can? Absolute power (root / Domain Admin) corrupts absolutely.
On a more sensible note, amateur users cause problems with their computers, and IT aren't given enough resources to deal with that, so they turn into lockdown nazis. Unfortunately, this nullifies the main advantage that a computer has - that it's a tremendous general-purpose tool that can be reconfigured to work in the way that's most efficient and helpful for each user.
The root of the problem is that people don't know enough to get their computer where it needs to be to make it work better for them, without taking one or more fatal missteps along the way. Most of us will have spent many hours, and made our own fatal mistakes, gaining this skill.
Perhaps the answer is to hire people to specifically be "superusers" and help other users in a positive way with their computer, instead of only hiring people who's job it is to react to the negative. Somewhere between a software developer and a normal user.
For a bunch of whiners who want everything for free you people sure expect to be highly paid
I read this and I thought you meant the management.. sounds right, doesn't it - they want all the labour and resources for free, and to be highly paid?
Re:Anyone else do an easy Domains by Proxy?
on
GoDaddy Backs SOPA
·
· Score: 1
I reckon there's a dark side to Domains by Proxy as well. I did a whois lookup at GoDaddy for a domain I wanted. I dithered over it, and a few days later someone else had bought it, hidden behind Domains by Proxy. I wouldn't be at all surprised if I were to find that GoDaddy had a number of proxy companies of their own who buy domains, informed by hits on their whois logs, and then squeeze people.
Did you have more than 4GB of RAM on this system before you installed 64-bit Windows? I was running with 6GB of RAM and seeing all sorts of crashes and nasties in 64-bit Linux, but nothing untoward in Windows. It turned out I had memory errors in the upper regions where 32-bit Windows could not reach.
Apache Software License 2.0 is GPL3 compatible. Which doesn't actually matter ; LibreOffice and OOo are actually released under the same license - LGPL3
The main license issue was that Sun / Oracle wouldn't accept patches without copyright attribution. This kept their options open - because they owned the copyrights of all the source, they could re-license it as they saw fit, including as a commercial product (StarOffice).
Since then I am not aware of The Document Foundation demanding copyright attribution. There was basically no point doing so - the copyrights were still owned by Oracle, so it's not as if they could ever re-license the code as anything other than the license they acquired it under. The positive effect this has is that patches are easier to get into the code because contributors don't have to enter into a legal agreement with the foundation (which they may or may not be permitted to do, depending on their employment conditions, age, etc).
Because the licenses continue to be LGPL3, LibreOffice can continue to merge patches from OOo at their leisure. Apache may only merge patches from LibreOffice if they have abandoned the practice of demanding copyright attribution (as of right now, the relevant page still demands that you sign the Oracle Contributor Agreement).
So until Apache makes it very clear what their position on copyright attribution is, they remain the less Free of the two projects, and LibreOffice definitely has a purpose, and continues to have a technical advantage, despite being somewhat overshadowed by the brand capital that the OpenOffice.org name has accrued.
Biological engineering is incredibly cheap compared to nuclear engineering.
The main reason that nuclear weapons are not more of a threat is that uranium enrichment is such an expensive process. The economic and manufacturing activity associated with doing it is easy to spot. Chemical weapons require feedstocks that are often tracked. It's harder to control, because the level of activity required to produce a successful weapon is much lower.
You could make a biological weapon in a lab with a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, a small team or a lone worker, and sufficient patience. The base materials (biological samples) are available for a few hundred dollars from any number of lab supply companies. You don't need large scale manufacturing to make it effective - bacteria and viruses have this neat property that they will arrange to manufacture themselves. The main constraint on biological weapon manufacture is thus the availability of skills and knowledge, which are becoming much cheaper and easier to obtain.
I also abhor the censorship, but they do have a point. It's a shame they have the wrong response - if the knowledge is already out there (and from comments here, it is), then making a fuss about it will only draw attention from the kind of nutjobs they want to prevent using it. I wouldn't be surprised if radical organizations and individuals are already investigating the requirements to set up their own labs, in response to this.
I'm not sure what the right response would be. Mostly to grow up as a society and stop alienating people to the point where they decide that the solution to their problems with the rest of society is to eliminate as much of it as possible. But I really have no idea how to achieve that.
MythTV does have a shutdown / wakeup architecture, and is quite flexible in this regard.
MythTV can do a wake on RTC if your BIOS supports it, either via the older nvram-wakeup program or the newer ACPI Wakeup built into newer kernels. Or if your hardware supports neither of these things, and still supports WOL, you could use your router to do it ; configure your MythTV shutdown to add a command to your router cron tab to send a WOL packet at the appropriate time. If you are using a machine as a combined frontend / backend, the mythwelcome program provides a means of manually overriding power-up cycles that just happen to coincide with RTC powerups. Mine uses nvram-wakeup, it was configured quite a long time ago.
The EyeTV is displaying the advantage of a stable and constrained hardware platform though - like a console, you can be sure of certain features being present, and not have to worry about how to set them up.
The router is on all the time because I do routinely use it every day while away from home, even if it's just to tunnel some traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because the NDA they signed forbids them from discussing the patents with other companies. If they even discussed which patents each party was going to work on invalidating, they would violate the NDA and be in breach of contract.
Compatibility.
What happens when you take that card out and slot it into your Windows laptop? If it's formatted with ext2, nothing. Yes, there are ext2 drivers for Windows, but average people aren't going to know that, much less install them. Using FAT / FAT32 makes your filesystem compatible with every operating system out there, meaning that you can yank the card and transfer files to or from anyone, not just people who installed the drivers.
And not everyone will be able to install the drivers - corporate users, etc.
Network effects are the winner again here ; it's the reason they bought Skype, so they could control another defacto standard.
It might be better to support UDF rather than ext2
If a wife husband are European and the baby comes out with black or Asian features that's going to be hard to explain away.
True ; but such varied phenotypic intermixing is a relatively new phenomenon for humans, so it will not have biased the evolution of these behavioural traits (as you point out, evolution happens slowly).
Once a certain age is reached it's not the playboys or cheats that are happiest.
Once you've reached a certain age, from an evolutionary perspective, it no longer matters. Once they reach that certain age, the playboys and cheats will have spread their seed far and wide, which is great for giving their genes the most opportunities. The genes you've passed onto your offspring don't care if you cry yourself to death in a dumpster clutching a bottle of meths - it's not like you were around to provide for them anyway. The point is that there are now more copies of them than those of a more beta male who is a "steady guy".
I completely agree that from a personal point of view, it's better to behave in a way that maximises your happiness and that of those around you. But this was not the intention of my post, which was discussing potential explanations of certain stereotypical sexual behaviour patterns in an evolutionary context and from an impersonal point of view.
Many of the generation of programmers I'm in were self-taught.
At my school, we had no structured lessons involving computers, but we did have a computer lab packed with BBC Micros on a network (I went to a reasonably posh private school). My career is based on something I have zero formal schooling in - just the proclivity to muck about with computers, and the opportunity to do so. Couple that with computers that are sufficiently primitive that you are *forced* to learn stuff about them just to get them to do something interesting, and you have an environment where you can learn.
I believe the Raspberry Pi is trying to recreate these conditions but I'm not sure how successful it will be. This was a different era, when there were only four channels on television and about an hour or two of dedicated children's programming a day. Computers were both primitive AND expensive - the BBC Micro was £335 back then, about £1,100 in 2012 pounds, and you needed an extra TV if you weren't going to annoy your parents too much. But they were the most interesting thing around, which certainly contributed to their charm.
The Pi makes it cheap to obtain a powerful computer - but it's *already* cheap to obtain a powerful computer ; for just a shade under £400 I recently bought the family a Core i3 laptop with a full HD screen and 4GB of RAM. The lives of children are already filled with "boxes that go bing" ; adding one that has significantly less "bing" out of the box may just leave them nonplussed.
I'll still be getting one though, and "playing with it" in front of my daughter, if only for the sake of nostalgia.
Beyond that, your plan takes the utopian dream of a day when machines render human labor unnecessary and turn it into a dystopian nightmare
Obligatory short story.
It's unfortunately all too believable. There are not technical obstacles currently preventing the 1.0 versions of the management software in this story, except the general unwillingness of middle management to contemplate being replaced with a computer system. I even find myself not disagreeing too much with the ubiquitous surveillance built into his utopian alternative - while I'm sure it would make me feel uncomfortable at first, I'm forced to concede that it might be necessary, and at least his system has adequate checks and balances.
Indeed. If the USA were really being proper capitalists about it, they'd ship all their cancer patients to Cuba - they spend a tenth of what the USA does per capita, but have better cancer survival rates.
Even paying a third of what you pay in the states, both the USA and Cuba would be getting a bargain.
While the Minecraft download page insists that you should use the Sun JVM, I've yet to have a problem running it on OpenJDK (although I confess, I'm not a big player like some).
I have a whole TB (for SD) ; I think the phenomenon is more that if you have the storage, you'll fill it. My wife in particular is a real squirrel with cheesy old movies.
Fortunately I can blame the auto-expiry when they "drop off the bottom" of the storage. Ahem.
To be honest ; when and if I upgrade my setup to HD, I'll stick to 2TB and no more - there's such a thing as too much choice and too much TV.
On the one hand, I can see the point of view of the designers who are annoyed about the counterfeiting of their product.
On the other hand, what does it say about the actual value of their designs? It says that people are not willing to pay the prices they demand for the somewhat ephemeral value that their design commands.
It used to be that artisans had makers marks because their product was of superior quality and they wished to differentiate it. People seeing the superior quality of the product and desiring that quality for themselves would see the makers mark and know where they could get an item of similar quality.
Quality is no longer the differentiation though - price is. The relationship has inverted ; a maker no longer puts their mark on something to identify the maker of the product and generate sales, he puts the mark on to increase the perceived value of the product. As some people are no doubt pointing out - a lot of the so-called "counterfeit" product is made on the same production line, from the same materials, by the same workers using the same amount of labour.
There is no difference in the intrinsic value of the product - it's the same material object with the same properties - so why can Loius Vuitton sell it for more than Mr Chang? Because Loius Vuitton inflates the perception of value of their products in ways that have nothing to do with their actual utility - they put them in a swanky shop with a flunky on the door, they don't pile them high, and they don't sell them cheap.
The real counterfeit is therefore the perceived value of the "genuine" product - people are buying fake value. This is not an artisan product made by a skilled craftsman. This is a product designed to be made as piecework in a third world sweatshop - a product that by definition, has to be makable by the lowest common denominator of skill.
It's not a judgement, it's just rebalancing the invisible hand of the market.
Fuel has costs that are not reflected at the pump - environmental damage, oil subsidy, military costs.
In a true free market system, the price of a product should reflect the cost of a product, such that an informed choice about purchase can be made. If the value of your need exceeds the price of fueling an SUV, that's how you know you really need to drive one.
seeing that she escaped death by inches only by flat-spotting all four tires hitting the brakes
ABS may have reduced the stopping distance. If you're flat-spotting tyres, you don't have ABS.
Aside from that, SUVs are safer than sports, compacts, and subcompacts, but not by a multiple of 5. On the flip side, compacts and subcompacts are much safer if you happen to be the other driver.
See page 8
The best all round choice seems to be luxury imports, which are least risky for everyone. But they are expensive ; minivans seem to be a good compromise - they're not as forgiving on the other driver as mid to large size cars, but they are much safer for you. SUVs seem to be nearly twice as dangerous as a large size car to the other vehicle and slightly less safe for you than a mid to large size car, which I presume is what your wife was driving if she was getting 25 mpg.
Did you have a citation for that "5 times safer" figure?
I've noticed that the copyright holders of religious material are some of the most zealous about demanding their royalties, even to the point of performance rights for hymns, etc.
They would definitely not like this.
If you're playing the numbers, a single good bet PLUS some bad ones is a much better spread.
Not to put a damper on a fine theory of misogyny, but women also have affairs. The stereotype of "fucks bad boys, marries nice men" is there for a reason. For women, children are a much more expensive proposition in terms of resources than for the men. If they can hook a nice man who will provide them with resources, that's excellent for the prospects of their offspring. But it's not so good for genetic diversity - but that can be remedied by screwing a few bad boys on the side, and collecting some of that strong, healthy alpha-male genetic material ; the more advantageous traits you can mix your genes with, the more likely they are to produce another generation.
Because of this phenomenon, it pays (genetically speaking) for some individuals to be the stereotypically promiscuous male - it's especially sweet from an evolutionary perspective if you can get your offspring fed and clothed by the efforts of another man.
People obviously don't consciously plan the best genetic spread bets they can.. but it serves to illustrate that it's not a one-sided thing ; both sexes get something out of it from a purely animal perspective, so it makes sense that the behaviours are not bred out of us. It also makes sense that we get angry about cheating - although really, the men should be angrier than the women - men give away very little when they fertilize a woman, but if your woman has been fertilized by another man, that both crowds out your own genes, and consumes resources that could be applied to raising your offspring. You would expect women to be angry about the prospect of losing their man to another woman - he is their source of resources - but more tolerant of casual sexual infidelity as long as there is no prospect of their man withdrawing their support.
This is presumably why some women tolerate their men having mistresses or even multiple wives, but men rarely suffer their women cheating.
Of course, the theoretical dynamics of all this has probably been changed by the emancipation of women, but the wet-wiring has yet to evolve to adjust.
You can't have free-market capitalism though - because capitalism concentrates wealth and power, monopoly, aka fascism/dictatorship, is always inevitable. The free market is a mythical land where companies compete on the merits of their product, rather than the size of the budget they have available for marketing, lobbying, and mercenary private security forces.
The best you can do with capitalism is try to keep it in check. The worst... well, it's beginning to look like the worst is coming.
I'm afraid it's undemocratic. In fact, strictly speaking, for total fairness, 50% of them should have below average IQ, but the electorate always seem to select a larger percentage than that.
Because the software is running on your server, you are not distributing it, therefore you can even derive your product from GPL licensed code, provide an API, and never have to distribute your source.
Writing your application on top of that means that you relinquish your software freedoms ; you are dependant on an implementation you cannot elect to control for yourself. Which is fine, as long as you are happy with that risk. Most people already do this on their own hardware, so it's not much of a stretch. And software increasingly comes with remotely operable "off switches", so I guess that's equivalent too.
But even proprietary software on your local hardware doesn't require you to deliver your data into the hands of others to make it useful (by design - since it's proprietary you have no easy assurance that it doesn't do this covertly).
Because they can? Absolute power (root / Domain Admin) corrupts absolutely.
On a more sensible note, amateur users cause problems with their computers, and IT aren't given enough resources to deal with that, so they turn into lockdown nazis. Unfortunately, this nullifies the main advantage that a computer has - that it's a tremendous general-purpose tool that can be reconfigured to work in the way that's most efficient and helpful for each user.
The root of the problem is that people don't know enough to get their computer where it needs to be to make it work better for them, without taking one or more fatal missteps along the way. Most of us will have spent many hours, and made our own fatal mistakes, gaining this skill.
Perhaps the answer is to hire people to specifically be "superusers" and help other users in a positive way with their computer, instead of only hiring people who's job it is to react to the negative. Somewhere between a software developer and a normal user.
For a bunch of whiners who want everything for free you people sure expect to be highly paid
I read this and I thought you meant the management.. sounds right, doesn't it - they want all the labour and resources for free, and to be highly paid?
I reckon there's a dark side to Domains by Proxy as well. I did a whois lookup at GoDaddy for a domain I wanted. I dithered over it, and a few days later someone else had bought it, hidden behind Domains by Proxy. I wouldn't be at all surprised if I were to find that GoDaddy had a number of proxy companies of their own who buy domains, informed by hits on their whois logs, and then squeeze people.
Did you have more than 4GB of RAM on this system before you installed 64-bit Windows? I was running with 6GB of RAM and seeing all sorts of crashes and nasties in 64-bit Linux, but nothing untoward in Windows. It turned out I had memory errors in the upper regions where 32-bit Windows could not reach.
Apache Software License 2.0 is GPL3 compatible. Which doesn't actually matter ; LibreOffice and OOo are actually released under the same license - LGPL3
The main license issue was that Sun / Oracle wouldn't accept patches without copyright attribution. This kept their options open - because they owned the copyrights of all the source, they could re-license it as they saw fit, including as a commercial product (StarOffice).
Since then I am not aware of The Document Foundation demanding copyright attribution. There was basically no point doing so - the copyrights were still owned by Oracle, so it's not as if they could ever re-license the code as anything other than the license they acquired it under. The positive effect this has is that patches are easier to get into the code because contributors don't have to enter into a legal agreement with the foundation (which they may or may not be permitted to do, depending on their employment conditions, age, etc).
Because the licenses continue to be LGPL3, LibreOffice can continue to merge patches from OOo at their leisure. Apache may only merge patches from LibreOffice if they have abandoned the practice of demanding copyright attribution (as of right now, the relevant page still demands that you sign the Oracle Contributor Agreement).
So until Apache makes it very clear what their position on copyright attribution is, they remain the less Free of the two projects, and LibreOffice definitely has a purpose, and continues to have a technical advantage, despite being somewhat overshadowed by the brand capital that the OpenOffice.org name has accrued.
Biological engineering is incredibly cheap compared to nuclear engineering.
The main reason that nuclear weapons are not more of a threat is that uranium enrichment is such an expensive process. The economic and manufacturing activity associated with doing it is easy to spot. Chemical weapons require feedstocks that are often tracked. It's harder to control, because the level of activity required to produce a successful weapon is much lower.
You could make a biological weapon in a lab with a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, a small team or a lone worker, and sufficient patience. The base materials (biological samples) are available for a few hundred dollars from any number of lab supply companies. You don't need large scale manufacturing to make it effective - bacteria and viruses have this neat property that they will arrange to manufacture themselves. The main constraint on biological weapon manufacture is thus the availability of skills and knowledge, which are becoming much cheaper and easier to obtain.
I also abhor the censorship, but they do have a point. It's a shame they have the wrong response - if the knowledge is already out there (and from comments here, it is), then making a fuss about it will only draw attention from the kind of nutjobs they want to prevent using it. I wouldn't be surprised if radical organizations and individuals are already investigating the requirements to set up their own labs, in response to this.
I'm not sure what the right response would be. Mostly to grow up as a society and stop alienating people to the point where they decide that the solution to their problems with the rest of society is to eliminate as much of it as possible. But I really have no idea how to achieve that.
Surely it was by infinity%* ?
If there are zero sales, and even one guy pirates it....
* Stupid slashcode, won't allow you to use the ∞ entity.
MythTV does have a shutdown / wakeup architecture, and is quite flexible in this regard.
MythTV can do a wake on RTC if your BIOS supports it, either via the older nvram-wakeup program or the newer ACPI Wakeup built into newer kernels. Or if your hardware supports neither of these things, and still supports WOL, you could use your router to do it ; configure your MythTV shutdown to add a command to your router cron tab to send a WOL packet at the appropriate time. If you are using a machine as a combined frontend / backend, the mythwelcome program provides a means of manually overriding power-up cycles that just happen to coincide with RTC powerups. Mine uses nvram-wakeup, it was configured quite a long time ago.
The EyeTV is displaying the advantage of a stable and constrained hardware platform though - like a console, you can be sure of certain features being present, and not have to worry about how to set them up.
The router is on all the time because I do routinely use it every day while away from home, even if it's just to tunnel some traffic.
The *router* is running.
Couple that with Wake-on-LAN, and you can switch on any machine in your network that supports it. That includes my MythTV box and my desktop.
Why would I want to waste electricity running a full sized computer just on the off-chance I might want to access it?