The primary and most powerful source of feminizing chemicals in our water is the vast quantities dumped into our water supply in the urine of women on the birth control pill. Anyone who considers feminizing chemicals a real problem (instead of using it as an excuse to go after industry) would be seeking, first and foremost, to ban the birth control pill.
Yeah. The same way the PowerPC would be a threat today if Apple had stuck with it. That is, none at all. Apple isn't important enough a computer company to actually threaten anyone in the computer chip business.
The only time/way I see this changing is if Windows decided to break backwards compatibility with their previous API and apps, build a new API from the ground up, and at the same time port to a new archit ecture. They bundle in an emulator to run old apps that emulates both the API and hardware.
Windows does not need to replace the APIs to move to a new architecture. Windows NT was originally designed for the i860, not x86. Commercial releases have run natively on MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, and Itanium. FX!32 was able to run x86 Windows programs on Alpha Windows back in 1996, as successfully as OS X's "Rosetta" runs PPC OS X programs on x86 OS X.
Interesting. So, your theory is, posting system requirements on a box constitutes adequate notice of additional conditions on the sale of the item, and that purchase of a box that has system requirements printed on it constitutes proof of affirmative consent to those conditions?
I'm not saying that Apple is pulling a bait and switch, or screwing anyone. It's perfectly fine, morally, if they want to put conditions on the sale. And it's easy to find out that they would like to put conditions on the sale, and what those conditions are. Nobody should be in the least surprised that Apple wants to put conditions on the sale, or as to the contents of those conditions. Apple's in the moral clear to this point.
The thing is, though, however much they dance around it, they don't actually ever get around to putting conditions on the sale. Apple does not require that you agree to any conditions when selling you a copy of OS X or a Macintosh. They make a simple sale of a box and its contents for a certain amount of money. They do not secure any other agreement from you at the time of purchase. The transaction is then done. You have the copy, and you haven't agreed to any conditions. The sale is complete. It's too late to put conditions on the sale after the money has been exchanged, even if the presentation of the conditions comes with an offer of a full refund on the completed transaction.
If Apple wants to put conditions on the sale, that's fine. They can start actually doing that any time they like. So far, they haven't.
Now, let's be clear to the people on the other side. When Apple distributes updates conditional on agreeing to a license? You haven't already bought those updates. You have no right to them. You only get them by agreeing to those conditions. If those conditions include EULA compliance, you have no business installing them unless you're EULA compliant. Apple's procedural mistake in letting you buy OS X (or a Mac with OS X) without agreeing to the EULA is not being repeated here; they're making you agree before they give you the product (in this case, the update).
They make their EULA available. They do not require you to agree to it as a condition of purchase. There is a huge difference between the two, and refusing to recognize it does not make it go away.
Why shouldn't Apple have the ability to specify conditions of sale.
I have no objection to them doing so. All they have to do is present the conditions prior to completion of the purchase, to accept or decline, like any other conditional sale.
If they aren't willing to do so, then they made the sale without conditions. I accordingly have all the rights specified in the United States Code regarding a copy of software I purchased, which explicitly includes making an adaptation to run on a machine of my choice.
Apple doesn't do this because it would cost money to actually put conditions on the sale, printing the EULA forms and auditing resellers to make sure they were signed. It would also discourage purchases. Which are understandable reasons, but doesn't suddenly make it acceptable to impose conditions after a sale has been completed.
Question: would Wired and the Huffington Post have broken the Watergate scandal? Do they even have the resources?
What sort of resources do you need to re-write an investigation file handed you by an associate director of the FBI? The legend of investigative journalism is just that--a legend. We already have a fully-functional replacement for Woodward & Bernstein, it's called Wikileaks.
I have some contact with Imperial units now that I'm living in Canada - gladly, not as much as it would be a little bit further south You would have almost no contact with Imperial units in the U.S. The Imperial System wasn't put together until 1824, and the U.S., long independent at that point, never adopted it. You would instead have contact with English units, some of which were co-opted by the Imperial System.
Can you give a little more information about the "chase rarity"?
Yeah. Specifically, describing it that way is the sort of thing you see from people who can't do math. What they did was make rares more common, then introduced the "mythic rare" at the approximate frequency ordinary rares used to be.
Odds of finding a specific rare card in the rare slot of your pack, older "large" sets: Alpha: 0.86% Beta: 0.85% Unlimited: 0.85% Revised: 0.83% 4th Edition: 0.83% 5th Edition: 0.76% 6th Edition: 0.91% 7th Edition: 0.91% 8th Edition: 0.91% 9th Edition: 0.91% 10th Edition: 0.83% Legends: 0.83% Ice Age: 0.83% Mirage: 0.91% Tempest: 0.91% Urza's Saga: 0.91% Mercadian Masques: 0.91% Invasion: 0.91% Odyssey: 0.91% Onslaught: 0.91%
Odds of finding a specific mythic rare card in the rare slot of your pack, newer "large" sets: Shards of Alara: 0.83% Magic 2010: 0.83% Zendikar: 0.83%
Odds of finding a specific rare card in the rare slot of your pack, newer "large" sets: Shards of Alara: 1.65% Magic 2010: 1.65% Zendikar: 1.65%
How can you roll out broadband when the incumbents enjoy a monopoly. How many people have a choice as to whom they get cable or landline phone service from? Governments granted these companies monopolies so even if a compeating cable, phone company, or combined company wanted to they could not install their own cable or fiber. Legally, those monopolies were all voided thirteen years ago with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
In practice, the political power structures in large urban areas tend to have, ahem, "mutually beneficial financial relationships" with the local cable providers. The result is that, for example, when competitors tried to lay cable in Philadelphia, they faced all sorts of barriers.
These same ties of money and power, of course, encourage the members of these urban power structures (like the members of the Congressional Black Caucus and leaders of "minority rights groups" discussed in the article) to oppose net neutrality.
If in-situ modification is a component of software freedom, then the fact that the GPL v3 deliberately was modified during drafting to create an exception to that right for non-consumer products means that the GPL v3 deliberately and explicitly enables non-free software.
if in-situ modification is not a component of software freedom, the GPL v3 artificially restricts the choices of consumer system manufacturers for securing a system for reasons other than promoting software freedom.
The GPL v2 may be legally unsound by accident; the GPL v3 is ethically compromised by design.
No, this isn't anywhere near as simple as just using robots.txt to deter Google from indexing.
Sure it is. If Google's spider is blocked from indexing "Murdoch" content by robots.txt, it's also blocked from caching any "Murdoch" content, the "Murdoch" headline never shows up on Google News, and there isn't any "Murdoch" text appearing to let me know if I really want to look that the whole article.
Murdoch has, in fact, deliberately made content available for free by and through Google. Before Murdoch took over the Wall Street Journal, all Wall Street Journal news content could not be accessed by Google News, and could not be obtained by using Google News or a Google cache. You could only get WSJ content by going to the WSJ site. After Murdoch took over the Wall Street Journal, all Wall Street Journal content was made accessible to Google News. Furthermore, the WSJ paywall was deliberately lowered to allow people to read articles on the WSJ site for free if they follow a link to the article from Google News.
Murdoch isn't letting Google access this content by accident or through ignorance. He has actively chosen to make this content available by and through Google. He can undo that any time he chooses, for any of his sites.
It looks like the only way to get Apple to start behaving responsibly would be for Microsoft to put Apple Software Update on the list of targets for the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, until Apple eliminates the default checkboxing of "updates" to software the user hasn't installed.
Look, he wasn't caught because Monsanto was rooting around testing people's crops. He was caught because Monsanto noticed he was buying vast quantities of Roundup, which was weird. Further investigation revealed the farmer was spraying Roundup indiscriminately over his crop.
Now, if your crop doesn't have the Roundup Ready gene, spraying it with Roundup kills it. So this farmer knew that the crop he was planting was all Roundup Ready. Then when he was caught, he then made up a cock-and-bull story about inadvertent contamination in hopes that he could avoid the legal consequences of deliberately, intentionally, and systematically violating Monsanto's patent.
BeOS was FORCED to port to Intel when Apple refused to disclose specs for the G3 line. This wasn't done on a whim, it was done out of technical necessity.
A "technical necessity" that didn't seem to stop Linux-on-PPC at all.
So just tell me what mankind has ever built that has lasted as long as it takes for high-level nuclear waste to be rendered harmless?
Reprocessed nuclear waste takes less than 200 years to become less radioactive than the original uranium ore.
The only reason we have a long-term nuclear waste problem is the lack of reprocessing.
Why don't we have reprocessing? Well, after Ronald Reagan repealed Jimmy Carter's ban on it, the U.S. started developing the Integral Fast Reactor, which would do the reprocessing on site and then use the actinides extracted as fuel. Said reactor was killed by the Clinton Administration after extensive lobbying by Senator John Kerry.
I think Mostly Harmless made it pretty clear that Douglas Adams was more than done with the series
He was more than done with the series when he wrote Mostly Harmless, yes.
However, he subsequently changed his mind, and wrote how he regretted how Mostly Harmless ended. Shortly before his death, he was talking about reworking the Salmon of Doubt from the third Dirk Gently into the sixth Hitchhiker.
I thought that with Obama USA was going to take the lead on the issue of copyright in the 21st century.
I am, frankly, amazed at the tendency of people to just assume that Obama shared their beliefs on Issue X, when absolutely nothing Obama said as a candidate or President supported the belief. On issues ranging from copyright to gay marriage, we're seeing people feeling disappointed by Obama, when they had no reason to have any hopes in the first place.
I hope he is just fixing issues by order of priority and that copyright reform is still somewhere on the list.
His administration has tried to keep a copyright treaty secret by declaring it a matter of national security, appointed lots of RIAA lawyers to the DoJ, and told the MPAA they'll like his copyright czar . . . and you still hope for Obama to do copyright "reform"???
They are a recent phenomenon: the first recorded observation of a neutron star was in 1965.
Really, sometimes you just want to scream. Noctilucent clouds are inherently hard to observe. They can be seen only between 50 and 65 degrees of latitude, when the Sun is below the horizon, during summer -- and at that resemble cirrus clouds. Given that clouds in general were not classified prior to 1801, that this specific type of cloud wasn't noticed as being distinct from cirrus until 1885 doesn't tell us anything about their existence or non-existence prior to then.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . because Nibiru is the name of Jupiter in the Babylonian compendium of astrology, Mul.Apin.
Jupiter isn't going anywhere, of course.
The primary and most powerful source of feminizing chemicals in our water is the vast quantities dumped into our water supply in the urine of women on the birth control pill. Anyone who considers feminizing chemicals a real problem (instead of using it as an excuse to go after industry) would be seeking, first and foremost, to ban the birth control pill.
ARM is a threat if Apple adopted it
Yeah. The same way the PowerPC would be a threat today if Apple had stuck with it. That is, none at all. Apple isn't important enough a computer company to actually threaten anyone in the computer chip business.
The only time/way I see this changing is if Windows decided to break backwards compatibility with their previous API and apps, build a new API from the ground up, and at the same time port to a new archit ecture. They bundle in an emulator to run old apps that emulates both the API and hardware.
Windows does not need to replace the APIs to move to a new architecture. Windows NT was originally designed for the i860, not x86. Commercial releases have run natively on MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, and Itanium. FX!32 was able to run x86 Windows programs on Alpha Windows back in 1996, as successfully as OS X's "Rosetta" runs PPC OS X programs on x86 OS X.
And Europe just did.
Interesting. So, your theory is, posting system requirements on a box constitutes adequate notice of additional conditions on the sale of the item, and that purchase of a box that has system requirements printed on it constitutes proof of affirmative consent to those conditions?
I'm not saying that Apple is pulling a bait and switch, or screwing anyone. It's perfectly fine, morally, if they want to put conditions on the sale. And it's easy to find out that they would like to put conditions on the sale, and what those conditions are. Nobody should be in the least surprised that Apple wants to put conditions on the sale, or as to the contents of those conditions. Apple's in the moral clear to this point.
The thing is, though, however much they dance around it, they don't actually ever get around to putting conditions on the sale. Apple does not require that you agree to any conditions when selling you a copy of OS X or a Macintosh. They make a simple sale of a box and its contents for a certain amount of money. They do not secure any other agreement from you at the time of purchase. The transaction is then done. You have the copy, and you haven't agreed to any conditions. The sale is complete. It's too late to put conditions on the sale after the money has been exchanged, even if the presentation of the conditions comes with an offer of a full refund on the completed transaction.
If Apple wants to put conditions on the sale, that's fine. They can start actually doing that any time they like. So far, they haven't.
Now, let's be clear to the people on the other side. When Apple distributes updates conditional on agreeing to a license? You haven't already bought those updates. You have no right to them. You only get them by agreeing to those conditions. If those conditions include EULA compliance, you have no business installing them unless you're EULA compliant. Apple's procedural mistake in letting you buy OS X (or a Mac with OS X) without agreeing to the EULA is not being repeated here; they're making you agree before they give you the product (in this case, the update).
They make their EULA available. They do not require you to agree to it as a condition of purchase. There is a huge difference between the two, and refusing to recognize it does not make it go away.
Why shouldn't Apple have the ability to specify conditions of sale.
I have no objection to them doing so. All they have to do is present the conditions prior to completion of the purchase, to accept or decline, like any other conditional sale.
If they aren't willing to do so, then they made the sale without conditions. I accordingly have all the rights specified in the United States Code regarding a copy of software I purchased, which explicitly includes making an adaptation to run on a machine of my choice.
Apple doesn't do this because it would cost money to actually put conditions on the sale, printing the EULA forms and auditing resellers to make sure they were signed. It would also discourage purchases. Which are understandable reasons, but doesn't suddenly make it acceptable to impose conditions after a sale has been completed.
Question: would Wired and the Huffington Post have broken the Watergate scandal? Do they even have the resources?
What sort of resources do you need to re-write an investigation file handed you by an associate director of the FBI? The legend of investigative journalism is just that--a legend. We already have a fully-functional replacement for Woodward & Bernstein, it's called Wikileaks.
I have some contact with Imperial units now that I'm living in Canada - gladly, not as much as it would be a little bit further south
You would have almost no contact with Imperial units in the U.S. The Imperial System wasn't put together until 1824, and the U.S., long independent at that point, never adopted it. You would instead have contact with English units, some of which were co-opted by the Imperial System.
Can you give a little more information about the "chase rarity"?
Yeah. Specifically, describing it that way is the sort of thing you see from people who can't do math. What they did was make rares more common, then introduced the "mythic rare" at the approximate frequency ordinary rares used to be.
Odds of finding a specific rare card in the rare slot of your pack, older "large" sets:
Alpha: 0.86%
Beta: 0.85%
Unlimited: 0.85%
Revised: 0.83%
4th Edition: 0.83%
5th Edition: 0.76%
6th Edition: 0.91%
7th Edition: 0.91%
8th Edition: 0.91%
9th Edition: 0.91%
10th Edition: 0.83%
Legends: 0.83%
Ice Age: 0.83%
Mirage: 0.91%
Tempest: 0.91%
Urza's Saga: 0.91%
Mercadian Masques: 0.91%
Invasion: 0.91%
Odyssey: 0.91%
Onslaught: 0.91%
Odds of finding a specific mythic rare card in the rare slot of your pack, newer "large" sets:
Shards of Alara: 0.83%
Magic 2010: 0.83%
Zendikar: 0.83%
Odds of finding a specific rare card in the rare slot of your pack, newer "large" sets:
Shards of Alara: 1.65%
Magic 2010: 1.65%
Zendikar: 1.65%
How can you roll out broadband when the incumbents enjoy a monopoly. How many people have a choice as to whom they get cable or landline phone service from? Governments granted these companies monopolies so even if a compeating cable, phone company, or combined company wanted to they could not install their own cable or fiber.
Legally, those monopolies were all voided thirteen years ago with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
In practice, the political power structures in large urban areas tend to have, ahem, "mutually beneficial financial relationships" with the local cable providers. The result is that, for example, when competitors tried to lay cable in Philadelphia, they faced all sorts of barriers.
These same ties of money and power, of course, encourage the members of these urban power structures (like the members of the Congressional Black Caucus and leaders of "minority rights groups" discussed in the article) to oppose net neutrality.
If in-situ modification is a component of software freedom, then the fact that the GPL v3 deliberately was modified during drafting to create an exception to that right for non-consumer products means that the GPL v3 deliberately and explicitly enables non-free software.
if in-situ modification is not a component of software freedom, the GPL v3 artificially restricts the choices of consumer system manufacturers for securing a system for reasons other than promoting software freedom.
The GPL v2 may be legally unsound by accident; the GPL v3 is ethically compromised by design.
What, you haven't encountered the idea before? It's been around a while. Look here.
No, this isn't anywhere near as simple as just using robots.txt to deter Google from indexing.
Sure it is. If Google's spider is blocked from indexing "Murdoch" content by robots.txt, it's also blocked from caching any "Murdoch" content, the "Murdoch" headline never shows up on Google News, and there isn't any "Murdoch" text appearing to let me know if I really want to look that the whole article.
Murdoch has, in fact, deliberately made content available for free by and through Google. Before Murdoch took over the Wall Street Journal, all Wall Street Journal news content could not be accessed by Google News, and could not be obtained by using Google News or a Google cache. You could only get WSJ content by going to the WSJ site. After Murdoch took over the Wall Street Journal, all Wall Street Journal content was made accessible to Google News. Furthermore, the WSJ paywall was deliberately lowered to allow people to read articles on the WSJ site for free if they follow a link to the article from Google News.
Murdoch isn't letting Google access this content by accident or through ignorance. He has actively chosen to make this content available by and through Google. He can undo that any time he chooses, for any of his sites.
After you've made a z/OS competitor derived from Linux, will you make a sports car from lego and a house from silly putty?
You're right. You should make a z/OS competitor derived from MVS 3.8J You could call it, say, MVS/380.
It looks like the only way to get Apple to start behaving responsibly would be for Microsoft to put Apple Software Update on the list of targets for the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, until Apple eliminates the default checkboxing of "updates" to software the user hasn't installed.
Look, he wasn't caught because Monsanto was rooting around testing people's crops. He was caught because Monsanto noticed he was buying vast quantities of Roundup, which was weird. Further investigation revealed the farmer was spraying Roundup indiscriminately over his crop.
Now, if your crop doesn't have the Roundup Ready gene, spraying it with Roundup kills it. So this farmer knew that the crop he was planting was all Roundup Ready. Then when he was caught, he then made up a cock-and-bull story about inadvertent contamination in hopes that he could avoid the legal consequences of deliberately, intentionally, and systematically violating Monsanto's patent.
BeOS was FORCED to port to Intel when Apple refused to disclose specs for the G3 line. This wasn't done on a whim, it was done out of technical necessity.
A "technical necessity" that didn't seem to stop Linux-on-PPC at all.
So just tell me what mankind has ever built that has lasted as long as it takes for high-level nuclear waste to be rendered harmless?
Reprocessed nuclear waste takes less than 200 years to become less radioactive than the original uranium ore.
The only reason we have a long-term nuclear waste problem is the lack of reprocessing.
Why don't we have reprocessing? Well, after Ronald Reagan repealed Jimmy Carter's ban on it, the U.S. started developing the Integral Fast Reactor, which would do the reprocessing on site and then use the actinides extracted as fuel. Said reactor was killed by the Clinton Administration after extensive lobbying by Senator John Kerry.
Is that a big-endian 11 or a little-endian 11?
I think Mostly Harmless made it pretty clear that Douglas Adams was more than done with the series
He was more than done with the series when he wrote Mostly Harmless, yes.
However, he subsequently changed his mind, and wrote how he regretted how Mostly Harmless ended. Shortly before his death, he was talking about reworking the Salmon of Doubt from the third Dirk Gently into the sixth Hitchhiker.
I thought that with Obama USA was going to take the lead on the issue of copyright in the 21st century.
I am, frankly, amazed at the tendency of people to just assume that Obama shared their beliefs on Issue X, when absolutely nothing Obama said as a candidate or President supported the belief. On issues ranging from copyright to gay marriage, we're seeing people feeling disappointed by Obama, when they had no reason to have any hopes in the first place.
I hope he is just fixing issues by order of priority and that copyright reform is still somewhere on the list.
His administration has tried to keep a copyright treaty secret by declaring it a matter of national security, appointed lots of RIAA lawyers to the DoJ, and told the MPAA they'll like his copyright czar . . . and you still hope for Obama to do copyright "reform"???
I found upgrading the Dell Mini 9 to Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix cleared up #3, and probably fixes 1 & 2, too.
(Granted, 9.04 Netbook Remix has a different alternative desktop than the one that comes with the Dell version of 8.04.)
$530 million is a lot of money, but what's the total salary and benefits of GM's BoD and C*O-level executives? I'll bet it's in the billions
You lose the bet, by two orders of magnitude. Thanks for playing.
They are a recent phenomenon: the first recorded observation of a neutron star was in 1965.
Really, sometimes you just want to scream. Noctilucent clouds are inherently hard to observe. They can be seen only between 50 and 65 degrees of latitude, when the Sun is below the horizon, during summer -- and at that resemble cirrus clouds. Given that clouds in general were not classified prior to 1801, that this specific type of cloud wasn't noticed as being distinct from cirrus until 1885 doesn't tell us anything about their existence or non-existence prior to then.