What I want to know is whether a ring in that kind of magnetic field has a strong polarity. And I hope nobody tries sending out metal-based probes to find out.
Funny thing; I knew about the twitter blog before the twitter troll, and figured someone was using the twitter service to spam slashdot instead of uploading posts to the blog. Took me a while to figure out it was two different things.
Then again, I guess someone could set up a twitter-like slashdot posting service....
From the website:
The big news about our awards program this year is that we've decided to allow nominations for any open source project, not just those on SourceForge.net. We know that the success of open source is bigger than one repository can contain, so nominate your favorite Codeplex projects, Google Code projects, ASF projects, and everything else right now! I don't think websites (especially non-wiki websites) would qualify. CmdrTaco should have made it more explicit in the summary.
Ever seen that TV commercial from a few years back where the guy walks up to what looks like an old beater parked in an alley, and then proceeds to pull the dust cover off his fancy sports car?
3. DVD came out with a video disc format AND a data storage format -- and right away, end users could burn their own video to DVD and duplicate video to DVD -- just like they were used to doing with VHS, but without the data degradation. Blu-Ray takes that away to a certain degree; suddenly you have a format that can hold a lot of data, but actual recording and playback schemes are segragated, and not all people/corporations are equal when using them.
When someone comes up with a format that allows people to easily read video/audio/data from a disc, modify it, and write it back so that it will play in standard devices, THEN people might be interested in upgrading from DVD.
Slow news day? I think any story about a major threat to our food supply to be a major one, plus it mentions "Banana Scientists"! What is there not to love? Not to mention that bananas wouldn't go extinct if they'd had a space program ! How much more technical can you get ? I think you've hit on it... dolphins don't tend to eat bananas, and rats will eat anything.
The problem here is that with a network, someone ultimately has to control the hardware; all ISPs just peer on that hardware. This bill is following the blowup followed on/. where Bell Canada (who owns the physical lines) was shaping the traffic going to their peering partners and client ISPs.
If you have no regulations, the company holding the physical goods will always be able to squeeze the competition out of the data moving business. That means that in the end, competition boils down to Telco owner vs Cable owner vs Satellite owner. Everyone else has to peer with one of these networks at some point. Satellite actually depends on Telco for the upstream, so it's really just two companies competing: in eastern Canada, that's Bell and Rogers, both of whom have been outed for their traffic shaping/restricting policies recently.
Since both companies realize that they can be more profitable by coming to the unspoken understanding that they will shape traffic to maximize their return (no collusion necessary), regulation is needed to prevent this.
I certainly don't want to make light of Microsoft's blatant manipulation of the processes, but in some sense the Microsoft Office formats are `already in use and mature'. If Microsoft had submitted Office 95 formats to the fast track, that would make sense; the formats are widely used and fixed in one format. There are issues with the format that would have to be addressed, and Microsoft would have to make those changes to its Office suite to conform to the new standard, but it would be doable.
In this case however, they submitted a format via EMCA that was bloated, broken, has undisclosed parts that are not documented, and which isn't even compatable with the single product, offered by them, that purports to support the format.
Of course, conflations like you've made above are part of the issue here as well: because Microsoft has a legacy Office set of formats, people might be surprised that others are so against this specific and distinctly seperate format because they think they're the same thing.
However, people on *technical* standards committees are (supposed to be) there because they know the details and the technology. They are by definition experts in the field, otherwise they wouldn't be part of that specific standards committee; they'd be in the one covering technology in their own field of expertise.
The problem here is that a lot of people "from the community" joined because Microsoft paid/pressured them to, with the instruction to push OOXML through. From what I've heard, none of these members actually have a clue about OOXML or office document standards.
This is the problem that ISO is purportedly trying to fix.
As mentioned earlier this week on Groklaw, we don't really know one way or the other, as the ISO group working on this is doing it in secret. Maybe a list of the members of the group and their affiliations would help.
Just so you know, Opendoc is a format created by Apple computer, not to be confused with ODF (Open Document Format) which I think you were talking about.
ODF went through the regular vetting procedure; it might have been rushed, but it passed all of the standards checks. OOXML, on the other hand, went through the fast track process normally reserved for formats that are already in use and mature but not yet official standards. Rushing a fast-track procedure on a format that should never have been submitted to it in the first place is miles away from keeping the regular process moving along as fast as possible. At least the end result for ODF was a usable standard, even if it still contained a few flaws that needed to be fixed. OOXML still doesn't even have a published final draft of the standard.
I think you misread the summary. The situation is like this:
In Brazil, there is a working group made up of representatives of government, trade, and public organizations. Some of the trade reps to the working group are pro-MS and pro-OOXML. The group majority was ready to protest, but the OOXML-supporting minority asked them to wait so they could organize their side of the story. The working group, being made up of thoughtful and respectful people, gave them their chance to come up with counter-arguments. When nothing convincing was presented in time before the formal protest had to be lodged, they went and lodged the protest.
This doesn't have to do with the Brazilian government vs. Microsoft Corp. (at least, not on the surface). This was a group of people who represent Brazil at the ISO, some of whom happen to support MS and their views on the world.
For instance, some skin pigments are better at protecting the skin against radiation that can cause cancer. Do we discourage people with "defective" skin pigments from having children because the pigment defect is preventable and avoidable?
There's the issue... a lot of people have a problem saying that a specific person should not be born because they have a defect -- oftentimes it is the genetic outliers that cause the most interesting contributions to society.
One of the biggest issues would be "who gets to decide what's a defect".
See post http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=565767&cid=23567367 - mitochondrial DNA only tracks maternal heritage. Think about most exploring parties: they're traditionally mostly men. Only large migrations like the Bering land bridge ones would include a sizeable group of female immigrants.
The stupid thing is, that works great for the US, but that's not how you get things done in Canada. In Canada, "Make everyone criminal" just makes people either a) ignore the laws until they get overturned, or b) kick the people out of office who are making/enforcing the laws and replace them with someone else.
Canadians don't need guilt and fear to conform; they just need trendiness and friendliness. Canadians don't mind standing out; the entire culture is based on standing out from the US. Canadians are used to being harassed, and tend to ignore it, until it is time for turnabout.
You must live in the USA. Canada has a much more robust backbone-bandwidth-per-user ratio. For areas who have broadband, the limiting factor is usually software controlled more than infrastructure restricted. The lines are already all buried (thanks to government subsidies) and network equipment went through a major overhaul for most of the carriers a few years back. We aren't talking private US company competition here: Bell was a crown telco in Ontario for decades. Now that they have the infrastructure in place to support it, they're expanding into side markets.
...but in this case, the swarm is created by search queries. I can see a return to member-only trackers that traffic in secret search queries....
In order for the RIAA, for example, to get around this, they'd have to infiltrate the tracker, submit a search query, start to download the resulting file and hope it truly is one of their works. Otherwise, they've just infringed on someone else's copyrights. They'd no longer be able to send IP-based grid takedown notices based on filenames alone, as the filenames would themselves be encrypted/obscured as would the search queries.
Yes; my point is that the US of today is not the US of 1961. The current government has damaged foreign relations and the internal economy, and other countries and the EU are now holding stronger global positions.
Unlike in 1961 with the cold war looming overhead and the US dominating the world militarily and economically, nowadays the approached nations can just say "no".
This treaty doesn't really benefit anyone to any great extent except for a few corporate interests in the US. It is fighting against public opinion world-wide (unlike the drug convention) and is a further erosion of sovereign laws at a time when other countries are starting to get annoyed at the US government and the corporations they are representing.
I think this comes under the "fool me once..." category.
The post and thread here appear to be very US-centric -- they assume that any trade agreement that the US decides to offer to the world will be immediately accepted by other sovereign states.
The proposed bill tramples the constitutions and bills of rights held by a number of the proposed signatories.
Think for a moment: not only would the treaty be illegal in, for example, Canada, but can you imagine the government touching this treaty with a 10' pole? After NAFTA? With a minority government? With the public and media attention currently on the unfair and heavy-handed tactics being used to pressure Canada into adopting US copyright laws right now?
Now try applying this to all the other proposed signatories who have fewer ties with the US. I truely doubt this treaty will ever survive the proposal stage.
Of course, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be protested against; most likely the US will try to slip these conditions into some unrelated treaty amendment in the not-too-distant future.
Slashdot Mirror
What I want to know is whether a ring in that kind of magnetic field has a strong polarity. And I hope nobody tries sending out metal-based probes to find out.
Funny thing; I knew about the twitter blog before the twitter troll, and figured someone was using the twitter service to spam slashdot instead of uploading posts to the blog. Took me a while to figure out it was two different things.
Then again, I guess someone could set up a twitter-like slashdot posting service....
I can see it now:
"Survivor: WoW"
Or how about "MMORPG Idol"?
"So you think you can frag?"
Seems to me it should be trivial to merge MMORPGs with reality TV -- especially if the script writers control the server.
You have some interesting ideas in there... it makes me think: what could they do if they teamed up with something like MUME?
Ever seen that TV commercial from a few years back where the guy walks up to what looks like an old beater parked in an alley, and then proceeds to pull the dust cover off his fancy sports car?
;)
Well, that's nothing like steganography
3. DVD came out with a video disc format AND a data storage format -- and right away, end users could burn their own video to DVD and duplicate video to DVD -- just like they were used to doing with VHS, but without the data degradation. Blu-Ray takes that away to a certain degree; suddenly you have a format that can hold a lot of data, but actual recording and playback schemes are segragated, and not all people/corporations are equal when using them.
When someone comes up with a format that allows people to easily read video/audio/data from a disc, modify it, and write it back so that it will play in standard devices, THEN people might be interested in upgrading from DVD.
The problem here is that with a network, someone ultimately has to control the hardware; all ISPs just peer on that hardware. This bill is following the blowup followed on /. where Bell Canada (who owns the physical lines) was shaping the traffic going to their peering partners and client ISPs.
If you have no regulations, the company holding the physical goods will always be able to squeeze the competition out of the data moving business. That means that in the end, competition boils down to Telco owner vs Cable owner vs Satellite owner. Everyone else has to peer with one of these networks at some point. Satellite actually depends on Telco for the upstream, so it's really just two companies competing: in eastern Canada, that's Bell and Rogers, both of whom have been outed for their traffic shaping/restricting policies recently.
Since both companies realize that they can be more profitable by coming to the unspoken understanding that they will shape traffic to maximize their return (no collusion necessary), regulation is needed to prevent this.
In this case however, they submitted a format via EMCA that was bloated, broken, has undisclosed parts that are not documented, and which isn't even compatable with the single product, offered by them, that purports to support the format.
Of course, conflations like you've made above are part of the issue here as well: because Microsoft has a legacy Office set of formats, people might be surprised that others are so against this specific and distinctly seperate format because they think they're the same thing.
However, people on *technical* standards committees are (supposed to be) there because they know the details and the technology. They are by definition experts in the field, otherwise they wouldn't be part of that specific standards committee; they'd be in the one covering technology in their own field of expertise.
The problem here is that a lot of people "from the community" joined because Microsoft paid/pressured them to, with the instruction to push OOXML through. From what I've heard, none of these members actually have a clue about OOXML or office document standards.
This is the problem that ISO is purportedly trying to fix.
I take it you didn't RTFA; the FBI is currently investigating the issue with R3's assistance.
As mentioned earlier this week on Groklaw, we don't really know one way or the other, as the ISO group working on this is doing it in secret. Maybe a list of the members of the group and their affiliations would help.
Just so you know, Opendoc is a format created by Apple computer, not to be confused with ODF (Open Document Format) which I think you were talking about.
ODF went through the regular vetting procedure; it might have been rushed, but it passed all of the standards checks. OOXML, on the other hand, went through the fast track process normally reserved for formats that are already in use and mature but not yet official standards. Rushing a fast-track procedure on a format that should never have been submitted to it in the first place is miles away from keeping the regular process moving along as fast as possible. At least the end result for ODF was a usable standard, even if it still contained a few flaws that needed to be fixed. OOXML still doesn't even have a published final draft of the standard.
I think you misread the summary. The situation is like this:
In Brazil, there is a working group made up of representatives of government, trade, and public organizations. Some of the trade reps to the working group are pro-MS and pro-OOXML. The group majority was ready to protest, but the OOXML-supporting minority asked them to wait so they could organize their side of the story. The working group, being made up of thoughtful and respectful people, gave them their chance to come up with counter-arguments. When nothing convincing was presented in time before the formal protest had to be lodged, they went and lodged the protest.
This doesn't have to do with the Brazilian government vs. Microsoft Corp. (at least, not on the surface). This was a group of people who represent Brazil at the ISO, some of whom happen to support MS and their views on the world.
For instance, some skin pigments are better at protecting the skin against radiation that can cause cancer. Do we discourage people with "defective" skin pigments from having children because the pigment defect is preventable and avoidable?
There's the issue... a lot of people have a problem saying that a specific person should not be born because they have a defect -- oftentimes it is the genetic outliers that cause the most interesting contributions to society.
One of the biggest issues would be "who gets to decide what's a defect".
See post http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=565767&cid=23567367 - mitochondrial DNA only tracks maternal heritage. Think about most exploring parties: they're traditionally mostly men. Only large migrations like the Bering land bridge ones would include a sizeable group of female immigrants.
I haven't been able to get two words to be more than 4 links apart so far... can anyone come up with words that can beat 4 degrees?
The stupid thing is, that works great for the US, but that's not how you get things done in Canada. In Canada, "Make everyone criminal" just makes people either a) ignore the laws until they get overturned, or b) kick the people out of office who are making/enforcing the laws and replace them with someone else.
Canadians don't need guilt and fear to conform; they just need trendiness and friendliness. Canadians don't mind standing out; the entire culture is based on standing out from the US. Canadians are used to being harassed, and tend to ignore it, until it is time for turnabout.
Didn't Jules Verne use a high powered cannon?
You must live in the USA. Canada has a much more robust backbone-bandwidth-per-user ratio. For areas who have broadband, the limiting factor is usually software controlled more than infrastructure restricted. The lines are already all buried (thanks to government subsidies) and network equipment went through a major overhaul for most of the carriers a few years back. We aren't talking private US company competition here: Bell was a crown telco in Ontario for decades. Now that they have the infrastructure in place to support it, they're expanding into side markets.
...but in this case, the swarm is created by search queries. I can see a return to member-only trackers that traffic in secret search queries....
In order for the RIAA, for example, to get around this, they'd have to infiltrate the tracker, submit a search query, start to download the resulting file and hope it truly is one of their works. Otherwise, they've just infringed on someone else's copyrights. They'd no longer be able to send IP-based grid takedown notices based on filenames alone, as the filenames would themselves be encrypted/obscured as would the search queries.
Yes; my point is that the US of today is not the US of 1961. The current government has damaged foreign relations and the internal economy, and other countries and the EU are now holding stronger global positions.
Unlike in 1961 with the cold war looming overhead and the US dominating the world militarily and economically, nowadays the approached nations can just say "no".
This treaty doesn't really benefit anyone to any great extent except for a few corporate interests in the US. It is fighting against public opinion world-wide (unlike the drug convention) and is a further erosion of sovereign laws at a time when other countries are starting to get annoyed at the US government and the corporations they are representing.
I think this comes under the "fool me once..." category.
The post and thread here appear to be very US-centric -- they assume that any trade agreement that the US decides to offer to the world will be immediately accepted by other sovereign states.
The proposed bill tramples the constitutions and bills of rights held by a number of the proposed signatories.
Think for a moment: not only would the treaty be illegal in, for example, Canada, but can you imagine the government touching this treaty with a 10' pole? After NAFTA? With a minority government? With the public and media attention currently on the unfair and heavy-handed tactics being used to pressure Canada into adopting US copyright laws right now?
Now try applying this to all the other proposed signatories who have fewer ties with the US. I truely doubt this treaty will ever survive the proposal stage.
Of course, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be protested against; most likely the US will try to slip these conditions into some unrelated treaty amendment in the not-too-distant future.