"The International Space Station, starrring in the film Skylab 2: Bigger, More Expensive, and Less Science!"
The ISS is an exceptionally pointless venture, and the single best justification for junking NASA since the boondgle of the space shuttle that the ISS was supposed to justify. There is exactly one accomplishment of the Shuttle-era manned space program -- Hubble. Which, frankly, isn't worth all the money we spent on the shuttle, much less fourteen lives.
Maybe someday we'll have a real manned space program again. I just wish we had the twenty years and billions of dollars that have been wasted back; they'd make the task of building one easier.
Since, hydrologically, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are the same lake with two lobes, the top three are technically the Caspian Sea, Lake Huron-Michigan, and Lake Superior, with Lake Victoria at 4th, and the old Aral Sea at fifth.
If we instead use the scentifically inaccurate but traditional division of the Huron-Michigan into two bodies, then the order is the Caspian Sea, Lake Superior, Lake Victoria, the (old) Aral Sea at fourth, then Huron and Michigan as fifth and sixth, respectively.
So, starting from that four or five (after we remove the Aral Sea), the next seven are Tanganyika, Baykal, Great Bear, Nyasa, Great Slave, Erie, and Winnipeg.
(NB: If you want to be scientifically accurate but still want there to be five Great Lakes, count Lake Nipigon. It's the 32nd-largest lake in the world, and a part of the GL basin, with its waters flowing down into Superior.)
China might be marginally stronger than any Asian power, but not enough to go on the offensive.
China has 700,000 fewer males reach military age each year than India does, the border terrain vastly favors defense, and India's military equipment is as latest-Russian as China's.
Invading Taiwan requires the ability to invade an island. China can't get its troops across the Straits; its amphibious lift capability is so meager it couldn't land a force 10% the size of the active-duty Taiwanese army. You can't fight a war of attrition that way, no matter how hard you try.
Neither China nor Japan posess any aircraft carriers; zero minus zero is zero, so they obviously have parity. China does have more subs, but most of those are old Romeo-class (i.e., late 1950s Soviet) designs, which might as well be oil drums with "Shoot Me" signs on them for all the good they'd do against the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces. Additionally, the Chinese lack of amphibious lift capability makes an invasion of Japan impossible.
Of course they all support gzip. Zip and gzip use the same "deflate" algorithm. In fact, it's likely that whatever zip software you're using uses a derivative of the BSD-style-licensed Info-Zip code -- the same code gzip is derived from.
The interesting bit is that PKWare has done both. Because Phil Katz documented both his algorithm and file format, the open-source Info-Zip project was able to get off the ground. The Info-Zip code was later incorporated into such open source products as gzip and zlib, and in such shareware products as WinZip.
It'd be interesting to see exactly what the scope of the claims are in the patent, since this is a potential threat to encrypted gzip as well.
How?
Zip and gzip use the same 'deflate' compression alogrithm. In fact, zlib was based on the Info-Zip code, a free software/open source alternative to pkzip, and the GZip homepage specifically credits Info-Zip as where "all this started", and mentions that the decompression code was based on the code of the major author of Info-Zip. And WinZip's.zip support is another direct derivative of this Info-Zip code.
So, gzip, zlib, Info-Zip, and WinZip all share common code from common authors implementing the same algorithm. As a result, it would take a very narrowly-tailored patent to allow gzip-and-encryption without allowing Winzip's zip-and-encryption.
4 (00000 00100) or 128 (00100 00000) would just be the middle finger on one of a person's two hands. 132 (00100 00100) obviously would be it on both hands.
If I am productive enough to justify my salary and am not reducing the productivity of others, I shouldn't be fired even if I'm taking 30 minutes of bathroom breaks every hour for the six hours a day Monday-Thursday I show up for work. If I am not productive enough to justify my salary, I should be fired even though I work fourteen uninterrupted hours a day, seven days a week.
"You did your best" is for kindergarten, not the real world. Results, not effort, count.
I guess my thought process runs like this: Anyone who really wants to run OSX (and thinks about it for a while) and is buying a new machine will run it on a dual-proc G5 instead of running MOL.
Right, because nobody is going to be tempted to run OS X on a quad-970 machine. I mean, having twice as many of the same processors as the top-end Mac G5 isn't something that would attract anybody to the idea of running OS X on non-Apple hardware.
But Arianne doesn't operate outside of France. French Guiana is part of France's territory and is represented in the French Parliament. French laws and regulations apply as much in French Guiana as they do in Paris.
Your posit is like using U.S. oil companies that drill in Alaska as an example of an American company operating outside the U.S. to avoid U.S. regulations. It's ludicrous to anybody who actually knows political geography, not a subtle point that those more knowlegdeable than you have missed.
If they weren't selling decently, why would they not only still have them available, but have updated the line at least twice? Trust me, Wal-Mart always includes escape clauses in its contracts for products that lets it abandon a struggling line.
However, it's not enough for a product to be profitable to sell to justify giving it floor space in a retail store: it must be at least as profitable per unit of physical volume per unit of time as the product it replaces, given that the physical volume of a retail store is fixed.
Computers running anything generally don't meet that criterion for getting space on a Wal-Mart floor; a George Foreman grill will whip it any time.
The business decision should be: will my sales be superior to my costs, if the answer is yes, then it should be worthwhile to make the product.
Nope, and the reason why is that Adobe doesn't have infinite money to spend.
Let's say you have $1 to invest, and you are presented with five buisness opportunities, each requiring an investment of $1.
#1 gives you a 10% shot at a $500 return, and an 90% shot of losing the money.
#2 gives you a 50% chance of a $50 return, and a 50% chance of losing the money.
#3 gives you a 90% chance of a $5 return, and a 10% chance of losing the money
#4 gives you a 100% chance of a $2.50 return
#5 gives you a 100% chance of a $1.25 return
Should you invest your buck in #5? Of course not!
Even if you limit yourself to the sure things, you'd only make $0.25 profit with #5, vs. $1.50 with #4. Even though you would make a profit over your investment with #5, you'd wind up $1.25 pooer than you could have been.
That's why the higher ROI for larger market share matters.
Actually, you're the one operating under the misconception. The article is about international copyright, not U.S. copyright here, and the intent of the U.S.'s Founding Fathers when they wrote the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution is irrelevant.
European copyright laws are about authors' rights, not the rights of the public, especially on the Contient itself. In fact,the laws often do not speak of "copyright", but the "rights of the author". And the Berne Convention was an evolution of European copyright law; the United States did not join it until 1987, sixteen years after it was finalized.
Yes, Mao did say that. Then, a few short years later, after people had used the freedom to take positions other than orthodox Maoist ones, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution and killed them or put them in labor camps. It had all been a ploy to draw secret dissenters out into the open.
So the phrase nowadays is only used unironically by people who aren't aware of Communist Chinese history.
First, that was never true; it was always a local option whether to grant a monopoly or not, never a requirement.
And now it is explicitly not true. Since the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, municipalities must give nondiscriminatory access to utility right-of-ways to competing cable firms.
Even then, undercutting your competition is a very poor business decision in many cases; ask K-Mart and other deep-discounters, or perhaps the airline industry, how price warfare worked for them.
It worked quite well for the companies that actually did the price undercutting, Wal-Mart and Southwest Airlines.
In ISO format, when omitting the year, 9-11 is clearly September 11th. Admittedly, the U.S. customarily adds the year in the wrong place, but at least we get the month-day in the right order. "11-9" for September 11th is like writing forty two "24".
Yes, there's a very serious problem. Diamonds are not stable at STP, only metastable; over time, it turns to graphite. That would make the diamond even less reliable than platinum-iridium, which at least does not with time spontaneously change to another form that flakes off.
Is this of enough importance to enough people that you can organize a single-issue lobby like the Brady Campaign, NRA, Right-to-Life, or ProChoice America?
If not, then in the long run you can't compete. Because the MPAA will maintain a concerted effort to push their views, because it means money to them. If it takes fifteen years of annual campaigning and bills, it takes fifteen years.
The "temperance" movement took decades, but it won a Constitutional amendment over the generalized opposition of most of the American people, because they didn't organize to oppose it long-term. (The consequences were severe enough to create a backlash that repealed it a decade later, but it happened).
In Detroit, casino gambling was voted down four times in ten years. Guess what? There are casinos in Detroit now.
Government power, no matter how beneficiently intended, will always fall under the control with those who have a financial interest in bending it to their ends. Regulatory capture.
The best protection ever devised is a combination of constitutional limits on government power and a broad social belief that government shouldn't interfere. But the belief, inevitably followed the constitutional limit, falls to the "the government ought to do something about [foo]" syndrome.
Witness, for example, the fact there is a Supreme Court-recognized Federal power to bar you from growing your own vegetables for your own consumption, brought to you by "the government ought to do something about the Great Depression."
Which works -- right up to the moment that IBM knows and does nothing to stop its distribution. After that, they are knowingly distrbuting their code under the GPL, and they are intentionally distributing their code under the GPL.
Re:Simple... it's antiwater
on
Water Flows Uphill
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The troubles here are two:
1) We have no experimental evidence as to how antimatter reacts to gravity (beond a couple of small ones where the externally-caused experimental error bars render the results statistically meaningless)
2) We don't know how gravity works. In GR, yes, antimatter has normal mass and reacts normally to gravity. But GR is not the last and final word on how gravity works, and several models otherwise fully consistent with known experimental data allow for anitmatter to be affected to a greater or lesser extent than normal matter by gravity, even to the point of sign reversal.
Since we have no experimental evidence and several potentially correct theories that give different answers, the only conclusion is that we don't know. The general opinion is that animatter is affected by gravity as normal matter, but we don't know that it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, yes.
"The International Space Station, starrring in the film Skylab 2: Bigger, More Expensive, and Less Science!"
The ISS is an exceptionally pointless venture, and the single best justification for junking NASA since the boondgle of the space shuttle that the ISS was supposed to justify. There is exactly one accomplishment of the Shuttle-era manned space program -- Hubble. Which, frankly, isn't worth all the money we spent on the shuttle, much less fourteen lives.
Maybe someday we'll have a real manned space program again. I just wish we had the twenty years and billions of dollars that have been wasted back; they'd make the task of building one easier.
(PEDANT MODE=ON)
Since, hydrologically, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are the same lake with two lobes, the top three are technically the Caspian Sea, Lake Huron-Michigan, and Lake Superior, with Lake Victoria at 4th, and the old Aral Sea at fifth.
If we instead use the scentifically inaccurate but traditional division of the Huron-Michigan into two bodies, then the order is the Caspian Sea, Lake Superior, Lake Victoria, the (old) Aral Sea at fourth, then Huron and Michigan as fifth and sixth, respectively.
So, starting from that four or five (after we remove the Aral Sea), the next seven are Tanganyika, Baykal, Great Bear, Nyasa, Great Slave, Erie, and Winnipeg.
(NB: If you want to be scientifically accurate but still want there to be five Great Lakes, count Lake Nipigon. It's the 32nd-largest lake in the world, and a part of the GL basin, with its waters flowing down into Superior.)
China might be marginally stronger than any Asian power, but not enough to go on the offensive.
China has 700,000 fewer males reach military age each year than India does, the border terrain vastly favors defense, and India's military equipment is as latest-Russian as China's.
Invading Taiwan requires the ability to invade an island. China can't get its troops across the Straits; its amphibious lift capability is so meager it couldn't land a force 10% the size of the active-duty Taiwanese army. You can't fight a war of attrition that way, no matter how hard you try.
Neither China nor Japan posess any aircraft carriers; zero minus zero is zero, so they obviously have parity. China does have more subs, but most of those are old Romeo-class (i.e., late 1950s Soviet) designs, which might as well be oil drums with "Shoot Me" signs on them for all the good they'd do against the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces. Additionally, the Chinese lack of amphibious lift capability makes an invasion of Japan impossible.
Of course they all support gzip. Zip and gzip use the same "deflate" algorithm. In fact, it's likely that whatever zip software you're using uses a derivative of the BSD-style-licensed Info-Zip code -- the same code gzip is derived from.
The interesting bit is that PKWare has done both. Because Phil Katz documented both his algorithm and file format, the open-source Info-Zip project was able to get off the ground. The Info-Zip code was later incorporated into such open source products as gzip and zlib, and in such shareware products as WinZip.
It'd be interesting to see exactly what the scope of the claims are in the patent, since this is a potential threat to encrypted gzip as well.
.zip support is another direct derivative of this Info-Zip code.
How?
Zip and gzip use the same 'deflate' compression alogrithm. In fact, zlib was based on the Info-Zip code, a free software/open source alternative to pkzip, and the GZip homepage specifically credits Info-Zip as where "all this started", and mentions that the decompression code was based on the code of the major author of Info-Zip. And WinZip's
So, gzip, zlib, Info-Zip, and WinZip all share common code from common authors implementing the same algorithm. As a result, it would take a very narrowly-tailored patent to allow gzip-and-encryption without allowing Winzip's zip-and-encryption.
4 (00000 00100) or 128 (00100 00000) would just be the middle finger on one of a person's two hands. 132 (00100 00100) obviously would be it on both hands.
If I am productive enough to justify my salary and am not reducing the productivity of others, I shouldn't be fired even if I'm taking 30 minutes of bathroom breaks every hour for the six hours a day Monday-Thursday I show up for work. If I am not productive enough to justify my salary, I should be fired even though I work fourteen uninterrupted hours a day, seven days a week.
"You did your best" is for kindergarten, not the real world. Results, not effort, count.
I guess my thought process runs like this: Anyone who really wants to run OSX (and thinks about it for a while) and is buying a new machine will run it on a dual-proc G5 instead of running MOL.
Right, because nobody is going to be tempted to run OS X on a quad-970 machine. I mean, having twice as many of the same processors as the top-end Mac G5 isn't something that would attract anybody to the idea of running OS X on non-Apple hardware.
TW is erratic city-to-city. For example, here in El Paso I think it's been down once. But I hear horror stories coming out of Austin.
But Arianne doesn't operate outside of France. French Guiana is part of France's territory and is represented in the French Parliament. French laws and regulations apply as much in French Guiana as they do in Paris.
Your posit is like using U.S. oil companies that drill in Alaska as an example of an American company operating outside the U.S. to avoid U.S. regulations. It's ludicrous to anybody who actually knows political geography, not a subtle point that those more knowlegdeable than you have missed.
If they weren't selling decently, why would they not only still have them available, but have updated the line at least twice? Trust me, Wal-Mart always includes escape clauses in its contracts for products that lets it abandon a struggling line.
However, it's not enough for a product to be profitable to sell to justify giving it floor space in a retail store: it must be at least as profitable per unit of physical volume per unit of time as the product it replaces, given that the physical volume of a retail store is fixed.
Computers running anything generally don't meet that criterion for getting space on a Wal-Mart floor; a George Foreman grill will whip it any time.
The business decision should be: will my sales be superior to my costs, if the answer is yes, then it should be worthwhile to make the product.
Nope, and the reason why is that Adobe doesn't have infinite money to spend.
Let's say you have $1 to invest, and you are presented with five buisness opportunities, each requiring an investment of $1.
#1 gives you a 10% shot at a $500 return, and an 90% shot of losing the money.
#2 gives you a 50% chance of a $50 return, and a 50% chance of losing the money.
#3 gives you a 90% chance of a $5 return, and a 10% chance of losing the money
#4 gives you a 100% chance of a $2.50 return
#5 gives you a 100% chance of a $1.25 return
Should you invest your buck in #5? Of course not!
Even if you limit yourself to the sure things, you'd only make $0.25 profit with #5, vs. $1.50 with #4. Even though you would make a profit over your investment with #5, you'd wind up $1.25 pooer than you could have been.
That's why the higher ROI for larger market share matters.
Actually, you're the one operating under the misconception. The article is about international copyright, not U.S. copyright here, and the intent of the U.S.'s Founding Fathers when they wrote the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution is irrelevant.
European copyright laws are about authors' rights, not the rights of the public, especially on the Contient itself. In fact,the laws often do not speak of "copyright", but the "rights of the author". And the Berne Convention was an evolution of European copyright law; the United States did not join it until 1987, sixteen years after it was finalized.
Yes, Mao did say that. Then, a few short years later, after people had used the freedom to take positions other than orthodox Maoist ones, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution and killed them or put them in labor camps. It had all been a ploy to draw secret dissenters out into the open.
So the phrase nowadays is only used unironically by people who aren't aware of Communist Chinese history.
First, that was never true; it was always a local option whether to grant a monopoly or not, never a requirement.
And now it is explicitly not true. Since the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, municipalities must give nondiscriminatory access to utility right-of-ways to competing cable firms.
Even then, undercutting your competition is a very poor business decision in many cases; ask K-Mart and other deep-discounters, or perhaps the airline industry, how price warfare worked for them.
It worked quite well for the companies that actually did the price undercutting, Wal-Mart and Southwest Airlines.
Er, don't worry about Laotian "biz people" selling out their countrymen. Worry about the Laotian government's of torture and repression.
I hope the Laos Government is getting totally screwed. Laos's government is one of the sixteen Most Repressive Regimes on Earth.
In ISO format, when omitting the year, 9-11 is clearly September 11th. Admittedly, the U.S. customarily adds the year in the wrong place, but at least we get the month-day in the right order. "11-9" for September 11th is like writing forty two "24".
Yes, there's a very serious problem. Diamonds are not stable at STP, only metastable; over time, it turns to graphite. That would make the diamond even less reliable than platinum-iridium, which at least does not with time spontaneously change to another form that flakes off.
A diamond is *not* forever.
Is this of enough importance to enough people that you can organize a single-issue lobby like the Brady Campaign, NRA, Right-to-Life, or ProChoice America?
If not, then in the long run you can't compete. Because the MPAA will maintain a concerted effort to push their views, because it means money to them. If it takes fifteen years of annual campaigning and bills, it takes fifteen years.
The "temperance" movement took decades, but it won a Constitutional amendment over the generalized opposition of most of the American people, because they didn't organize to oppose it long-term. (The consequences were severe enough to create a backlash that repealed it a decade later, but it happened).
In Detroit, casino gambling was voted down four times in ten years. Guess what? There are casinos in Detroit now.
Government power, no matter how beneficiently intended, will always fall under the control with those who have a financial interest in bending it to their ends. Regulatory capture.
The best protection ever devised is a combination of constitutional limits on government power and a broad social belief that government shouldn't interfere. But the belief, inevitably followed the constitutional limit, falls to the "the government ought to do something about [foo]" syndrome.
Witness, for example, the fact there is a Supreme Court-recognized Federal power to bar you from growing your own vegetables for your own consumption, brought to you by "the government ought to do something about the Great Depression."
Right, "We didn't mean to do it, we just kept doing it for two months after we knew we were doing it by, er, accident!"
Which works -- right up to the moment that IBM knows and does nothing to stop its distribution. After that, they are knowingly distrbuting their code under the GPL, and they are intentionally distributing their code under the GPL.
The troubles here are two:
1) We have no experimental evidence as to how antimatter reacts to gravity (beond a couple of small ones where the externally-caused experimental error bars render the results statistically meaningless)
2) We don't know how gravity works. In GR, yes, antimatter has normal mass and reacts normally to gravity. But GR is not the last and final word on how gravity works, and several models otherwise fully consistent with known experimental data allow for anitmatter to be affected to a greater or lesser extent than normal matter by gravity, even to the point of sign reversal.
Since we have no experimental evidence and several potentially correct theories that give different answers, the only conclusion is that we don't know. The general opinion is that animatter is affected by gravity as normal matter, but we don't know that it is.