Hold on, Hold on. The iPod is NOT a prosecutable monopoly. [Snipped Microsoft examples] That's illegal. iPod/iTunes is not, despite complaints by overzealous European prosecutors.
But those European prosecutors are upholding the laws of their own country, not US law. It is quite possible that what is legal in the US is illegal in the country of those `overzealous prosecutors'.
You can criticize America's policy all you want. BUT, and this is a big one, you keep a unified front while you are oversees.
This is illogical. People outside the USA are well aware what is going on in US politics, in particular regarding high-profile issues like Iraq and Guantanamo. At least in Europe, our own press reports extensively on it, and we can also read online US newspapers and blogs.
To do so in a non-free country, and give that country fodder to continue to abuse human rights, is even worse.
What are you afraid of?
Why do you protest agains our waterboarding? Richard Stallman didn't mention it last time he was here! doesn't exactly sound like powerful propaganda.
Particularly if they could also say:
Why do you protest against our waterboarding? The US governement says it is not torture!
The Overrated moderation provides an end-run around the system, and should be abolished.
Disagree. Sometimes people write illogical or factually incorrect posts. These posts do not deserve a Troll or Flamebait rating, but they do deserve to be modded down. Overrated is a good mod for this, because it describes reasonably well what the problem with the post is. Something like 'Incorrect' or 'Illogical' would be even better, but there are good reasons not to have too many moderation categories.
I know that some people argue that it is unfair to moderate otherwise unmoderated posts as 'Overrated', but I fail to see why, since it reflects that even the initial 1 or 2 rating is too high.
Any negative moderation can be abused to simply express disapproval; that is not limited to Overrated. In fact I think that Troll and Flamebait or even Offtopic are used much more for this.
Mice are significantly different than humans: for example, a 5 ft/lbs blow to the chest isn't much to a human, but it's death to a mouse.
So for research where that kind of difference is important, scientists don't use mice as a model, but use something like a crash-test dummy.
They only use mice in cases where they can take advantage of the similarities.
In April of 2001, a Chinese fighter jet "accidentally" hit a US Navy surveillance plane flying over international waters, forcing that plane to make an emergency landing in China.
They took advantage of the opportunity, yes. Most countries would, in similar circumstances. But it is highly unlikely this was the planned outcome of a deliberate collision. How could they know in advance that they would inflict just the right amount of damage to force the plane to land in China instead of ditching it or limping back to friendly ground?
You mean it sends them a Xmas card, goes to visit them from time to time, and if they are really good customers it takes them to dinner sometimes?
Or is it more like the kind of software that walks into their shop and says `Really nice place you have here, pity if it would burn, eh? Luigi here is really disappointed with your negative attitude to us.'?
The iPhone does indeed look cool, but I was kind of hoping to find out some new stuff about Leopard.
I think indirectly we did learn something about Leopard. Since the iPhone will be available in June, and will be running Mac OS X, that will amost certainly be Leopard, although probably a lite/embedded/CE version. Still, I expect that a lot of the stuff they had to develop for the iPhone will also be included in the 'big' version, both in/as applications and stuff for developers.
Conventional wisdom / rumor is that these non-volatile memories have a limited number of write cycles before they fail. I still haven't heard anyone explain why that wouldn't be a problem for these drives. Anyone?
A mixture of:
Because the limit is actually fairly high.
Because wear leveling over such a large number of bits makes the problem less serious.
Because in practice many people don't actually write that much to a disk.
Because if you buy one of these things you accept that as part of the trade-off.
The transfer rate on most flash memory is slower than hard drives (sometimes much slower). Their only speed advantage is no seek time for random access.
For this particular application that might not be a problem, since a lot of memory chips will be needed, and you can access them in parallel.
This is a great story! Let's see it posted three times to slashdot! Everybody submit the story from a different angle!
By a strange coincidence, you're the third one to say this, and your angle is indeed different from the other ones. Unfortunately, all of you have overlooked the juicy bit of this news item, buried deeply in the/. text:
SCO has been reprimanded for the second day in a row by a second judge in their campaign against Linux.
If one SCO disaster is newsworthy, two disasters in as many days surely is also newsworthy.
I would have to disagree strongly with this - the fact that you can look up Chewbacca, and the fact that you can look up what are essentially ads for companies, make Wikipedia a bit of a joke.
I fail to see what the problem is with adding trivia to wikipedia. In fact, collecting trivia is more-or-less the purpose of an encyclopedia. Why should Starwars triva be excluded? What about opera trivia? Literature? Biology? (``there are only two species of insect that yawn when they mate''.)
Regarding ads, that's just one example of editor bias, and yes, you might run across biased articles in the backwaters of Wikipedia. Is that a reason to dismiss all of Wikipedia as `a bit of a joke'?
Once you vote, your vote is publically displayed on a website using some kind of voter ID.
Unfortunately, this is not a good idea: it invites voter buying. Register your voter ID with your local corrupt politician, and you'll get $10 if the website shows you have voted for him/her/it.
The only thing worse than them collecting the creditcard numbers is if they loose them.
What you you mean, `if'? Anything on this scale is bound to have leaks. This isn't even a slur on whatever people are handling the data (sorry, this European can't come up with the right three letters from the alphabet soup), it's just a natural consequence of the huge scale of the operation and human nature.
There is an argument for saying the war was a mistake, but irrational, no.
As others have already pointed out, even at the time of the decision there was no solid information to support this, only veiled hints about incriminating intelligence. But that intelligence could not lead the weapons inspectors to a shred of proof of the existence of those WMD, so even at the time it was not rational to place too much weight on it. Moreover, it was very suspicious that during the discussion the arguments to go to war changed (WMD, Al Quada, dispose an evil dictator were all used), but the remedy was always the same: war. Clearly the facts and motivations were tailored to arrive at a desired outcome. I maintain that there was no rational argument to go to war.
With respect to European governments who were opposing the invasion, they were not viewed as entirely credible given their business relationships, which included support of Saddams WMD program(s).
Nevertheless, the points made by those European governments were very rational. Of course, like the USA they had their own interests to defend, but that's the nice thing about rational argument: you can ignore that and concentrate on the facts and the logical conclusions to draw from them.
(About action against Iran:)
Only if there is an occupation. The nuclear/military infrastructure could be bombed, special forces could raid key facilities and leave,...
Why do you think that will accomplish anything positive? Look at the smashing 'success' the Israelies had with these tactics recently...
Actually you should worry about some states too, not all states are rational.
Sorry if this comes across as flamebait, but as a European I also worry about the USA in this respect. The second Iraq war was already irrational, but the new war threat against Iran is even more so, particularly because a conventional war would require many more soldiers than the US can reasonably supply, so going nuclear would be `reasonable'. And if the USA keeps spending like there is no tomorrow, I also worry that a few years down the line one of the less rational politicians decides that indeed there rather not be a tomorrow.
I keep hoping the US people are sane enough to prevent all that, but I thought the same when Mr. Bush was up for re-election...
One thing I don't believe any other government, or people, have done throughout history is to insist other governments should be more like their own and encouraging change with a very large military.
Put as vaguely as this, there are tons off earlier examples: the Soviet empire, the French immediately after the revolution, Fascist Germany and Italy in some sense, Maoist China sort-of, the colonial empires kind-a.
Of course most were thinly veiled land grabs, but there is a grey area ranging from outright annexation, through puppet regimes and blatant political interference, to 'encouraging' regime change.
And of course every regime always is able to convince itself that it does all its meddling and sabre rattling for the good of humanity, and the Glorious Future of Mankind.
The best approach would probably be that anyone can add such a tag, but by default only a few authoritive tags are visible. If you're interested in the tag 'The US governement approves of this version' that's up to you.
The only drawback I see is that I, random outsider, may be able to improve on an authoritive version, simply by fixing a spelling error. Are these authority figures going to approve all such changes? That may grow old very fast.
Calm down. Take a DEEP breath. Think quiet thoughts. Take a DEEP breath again.
Ok. Good.
I fully understand your frustration with lock-in book readers, but if you read the product specifications you will see that it does in fact support open document formats: PDF, XHTML, and plain text. With a little extra thought you will also realize that they may have difficulty supporting annotations on these formats. PDF supports this (except when disabled in the document), but for XHTML and plain text you'll have to think where to store these annotations, and if you want this at all. Similarly, not all other formats may be scalable, for example because they are bitmaps. (I don't know what the APABI format is, but that may well be bitmap.)
You're not the only one misreading this, see other treads under this news item. It clearly demonstrates what happens when a company doesn't have a PR department.
Yes, they also implement DRM-ed formats. I don't care, as long as they support the open formats.
Although the website is not very clear about this, iRex considers the current version a developers release. On this page there is this sentence:
To individual consumers who have sent in their request for notification, we recommend to wait for our consumer version, which will have a more extended functionality (September 2006).
Discussing with an AC is a bit pointless, but this is also moderated up, so...
You might not agree with the comment, but it is a valid and ontopic post that deserves to get read.
Personally, I would have moderated it 'overrated', because it was modded up, and contains a factual error, namely:
By all accounts, this program is legal and constitutional.
Like it or not, the by all accounts is not true by a long stretch. I know it is just a rhetorical device, but I tend to take this kind of phrase literally. Since this is/., I'm probably not the only one.
And yes, I would have done the same with something like by all accounts the president is a dictator.
ok so how do you explain the opening of the source.. sure you have to register/pay for it but it is there.
Equating source code with documentation should be a criminal offense in its own right. Source code only documents the behaviour of that particular implementation, not the desired behaviour. This is particularly bad for network protocols and file formats. Not to mention that reverse-engineering protocols or behaviour from source code is a serious pain in the seating department.
Microsoft offering the source instead of documentation means they are either hoping to weasel their way out of a demand they'd rather not meet, or they are far more incompetent than even people on/. think. Make your choice.
Slashdot Mirror
But those European prosecutors are upholding the laws of their own country, not US law. It is quite possible that what is legal in the US is illegal in the country of those `overzealous prosecutors'.
This is illogical. People outside the USA are well aware what is going on in US politics, in particular regarding high-profile issues like Iraq and Guantanamo. At least in Europe, our own press reports extensively on it, and we can also read online US newspapers and blogs.
What are you afraid of? Why do you protest agains our waterboarding? Richard Stallman didn't mention it last time he was here! doesn't exactly sound like powerful propaganda. Particularly if they could also say: Why do you protest against our waterboarding? The US governement says it is not torture!
Disagree. Sometimes people write illogical or factually incorrect posts. These posts do not deserve a Troll or Flamebait rating, but they do deserve to be modded down. Overrated is a good mod for this, because it describes reasonably well what the problem with the post is. Something like 'Incorrect' or 'Illogical' would be even better, but there are good reasons not to have too many moderation categories.
I know that some people argue that it is unfair to moderate otherwise unmoderated posts as 'Overrated', but I fail to see why, since it reflects that even the initial 1 or 2 rating is too high.
Any negative moderation can be abused to simply express disapproval; that is not limited to Overrated. In fact I think that Troll and Flamebait or even Offtopic are used much more for this.
So for research where that kind of difference is important, scientists don't use mice as a model, but use something like a crash-test dummy. They only use mice in cases where they can take advantage of the similarities.
Duh.
Merry
They took advantage of the opportunity, yes. Most countries would, in similar circumstances. But it is highly unlikely this was the planned outcome of a deliberate collision. How could they know in advance that they would inflict just the right amount of damage to force the plane to land in China instead of ditching it or limping back to friendly ground?
You mean it sends them a Xmas card, goes to visit them from time to time, and if they are really good customers it takes them to dinner sometimes? Or is it more like the kind of software that walks into their shop and says `Really nice place you have here, pity if it would burn, eh? Luigi here is really disappointed with your negative attitude to us.'?
I think indirectly we did learn something about Leopard. Since the iPhone will be available in June, and will be running Mac OS X, that will amost certainly be Leopard, although probably a lite/embedded/CE version. Still, I expect that a lot of the stuff they had to develop for the iPhone will also be included in the 'big' version, both in/as applications and stuff for developers.
I thought so too, but then I realized that the iPhone runs Mac OS X, and perhaps the AppleTV thingy also does. I consider that a positive sign.
A mixture of:
For this particular application that might not be a problem, since a lot of memory chips will be needed, and you can access them in parallel.
Be careful what you wish for:p od_zapwizard/1.html/
a se-made-from-rare-woods/
http://www.bit-tech.net/modding/2005/07/05/wood_i
http://www.sybarites.org/2006/03/14/wooden-ipod-c
I fail to see what the problem is with adding trivia to wikipedia. In fact, collecting trivia is more-or-less the purpose of an encyclopedia. Why should Starwars triva be excluded? What about opera trivia? Literature? Biology? (``there are only two species of insect that yawn when they mate''.)
Regarding ads, that's just one example of editor bias, and yes, you might run across biased articles in the backwaters of Wikipedia. Is that a reason to dismiss all of Wikipedia as `a bit of a joke'?
Unfortunately, this is not a good idea: it invites voter buying. Register your voter ID with your local corrupt politician, and you'll get $10 if the website shows you have voted for him/her/it.
What you you mean, `if'? Anything on this scale is bound to have leaks. This isn't even a slur on whatever people are handling the data (sorry, this European can't come up with the right three letters from the alphabet soup), it's just a natural consequence of the huge scale of the operation and human nature.
As others have already pointed out, even at the time of the decision there was no solid information to support this, only veiled hints about incriminating intelligence. But that intelligence could not lead the weapons inspectors to a shred of proof of the existence of those WMD, so even at the time it was not rational to place too much weight on it. Moreover, it was very suspicious that during the discussion the arguments to go to war changed (WMD, Al Quada, dispose an evil dictator were all used), but the remedy was always the same: war. Clearly the facts and motivations were tailored to arrive at a desired outcome. I maintain that there was no rational argument to go to war.
Nevertheless, the points made by those European governments were very rational. Of course, like the USA they had their own interests to defend, but that's the nice thing about rational argument: you can ignore that and concentrate on the facts and the logical conclusions to draw from them.
(About action against Iran:)
Why do you think that will accomplish anything positive? Look at the smashing 'success' the Israelies had with these tactics recently...
Sorry if this comes across as flamebait, but as a European I also worry about the USA in this respect. The second Iraq war was already irrational, but the new war threat against Iran is even more so, particularly because a conventional war would require many more soldiers than the US can reasonably supply, so going nuclear would be `reasonable'. And if the USA keeps spending like there is no tomorrow, I also worry that a few years down the line one of the less rational politicians decides that indeed there rather not be a tomorrow.
I keep hoping the US people are sane enough to prevent all that, but I thought the same when Mr. Bush was up for re-election...
Put as vaguely as this, there are tons off earlier examples: the Soviet empire, the French immediately after the revolution, Fascist Germany and Italy in some sense, Maoist China sort-of, the colonial empires kind-a.
Of course most were thinly veiled land grabs, but there is a grey area ranging from outright annexation, through puppet regimes and blatant political interference, to 'encouraging' regime change. And of course every regime always is able to convince itself that it does all its meddling and sabre rattling for the good of humanity, and the Glorious Future of Mankind.
The only drawback I see is that I, random outsider, may be able to improve on an authoritive version, simply by fixing a spelling error. Are these authority figures going to approve all such changes? That may grow old very fast.
Calm down. Take a DEEP breath. Think quiet thoughts. Take a DEEP breath again.
Ok. Good.
I fully understand your frustration with lock-in book readers, but if you read the product specifications you will see that it does in fact support open document formats: PDF, XHTML, and plain text. With a little extra thought you will also realize that they may have difficulty supporting annotations on these formats. PDF supports this (except when disabled in the document), but for XHTML and plain text you'll have to think where to store these annotations, and if you want this at all. Similarly, not all other formats may be scalable, for example because they are bitmaps. (I don't know what the APABI format is, but that may well be bitmap.)
You're not the only one misreading this, see other treads under this news item. It clearly demonstrates what happens when a company doesn't have a PR department.
Yes, they also implement DRM-ed formats. I don't care, as long as they support the open formats.
And yes, I would have done the same with something like by all accounts the president is a dictator.
Or the "how-many-fingers-am-i-holding-up dept"
Equating source code with documentation should be a criminal offense in its own right. Source code only documents the behaviour of that particular implementation, not the desired behaviour. This is particularly bad for network protocols and file formats. Not to mention that reverse-engineering protocols or behaviour from source code is a serious pain in the seating department.
Microsoft offering the source instead of documentation means they are either hoping to weasel their way out of a demand they'd rather not meet, or they are far more incompetent than even people on /. think. Make your choice.