While I do understand the desire to see the night sky better, I'm not sure that this is "pollution" per se. Pollution (at least as defined by Merriam-Webster) implies contamination - light does not contaminate. Where we to just turn off all the lights and wait a few femtoseconds the night sky would be as dark as pitch. This isn't about pollution (which is something that does actually need fighting), but rather someone saying "Gee, I wish I could see the night sky better." Fair enough, and so do I, but I'm not willing to give up street lights to get it.
Of course, when it comes to someone opening up their cell phone during a movie... roll out the tanks, let the war begin!:)
In general, people are more sympathetic to minority causes, and in the US (where Facebook and Slashdot enjoy their greatest popularity) Islam is still a minority. Add to that the fact that regardless of ideals, Islam isn't exactly known for tolerance nowadays (a minority opinion of course, but the loudest voices always prevail), the slant the story arrived with isn't all that surprising. In general, the idea is that Christianity doesn't need the kind of attention that more minority faith's need for the protection of their rights - Christianity is a big boy and can handle himself, so to speak. But Islam is a bit more sensitive right now, a bit of a hot topic, and so could use a little more publicity to ensure things get handled properly (however that is).
It's all about audience - the group had to target a large enough audience that people actually bothered to take note of it, but a small enough group that they still come across as "the little guy". For example, as unlikely as a similar article about Christianity would be, so would an article about a group against Zoroastrianism.
Everything is about audience and current political temperature - out and out bias and slant is rarely to blame in stories such as this.
Your Facebook group would be your business... if your name was Mark Zuckerberg. This isn't about opinions, it's about whether or not such groups are appropriate on that sort of site. If the group remains up, then the leadership feels that they are - if it comes down, then they must feel it's not. There's no censorship going on here, nobody calling anybody "turds" as you put it, just a question of appropriateness. Zuckerberg et al are trying to pitch the site to a certain audience with certain goals in mind - if this sort of group works against those goals then it will come down. The headline (for once!) hit the issue on the head - this is about Facebook intermixing political hot topics (think of the fallout from the Muhammad cartoons) and their cash cows: advertisers.
This isn't about whether or not Facebook is letting you bitch adequately. After all, there's always Myspace for you people;)
Providing a copyrighted file for uploading by a third party and writing a Bittorrent protocol client are very different. What this couple did is not equivalent to leaving your back door unlocked - they were actively sitting on the back stoop giving other people's stuff away. Whether or not you feel the copyright law is valid as written, they did break it, so the fact they were sued shouldn't be some big surprise.
Also, for a community of people that goes to great pains to point out the difference between "stealing" music and breaking copyright law, the headline of this article doesn't do us much good. Come to think of it, that's quite a sarcastic and vitriolic summary - and seeing as this story doesn't bring anything new to the table with respect to the whole file-sharing issue, why is this even news?
Very unobtrusive - diverts the eye briefly as it appears, then is small enough to not bother you once you look back to the video.
No sound - very important! Nothing is more annoying than those new TV overlay ads that incorporate sound, especially when meaningful dialog is taking place.
It has an X button - I was worried about this one, but as soon as the ad appears you can click the "x" to make it vanish permanently. The "x" is easy to hit with the mouse, and since the video has just started 15 seconds previous, you haven't sat back in your chair to watch yet. Very easy to use.
Targetted ads are better than untargetted ads! The less bright-eyed white-clad models I see hopping around the screen waving tampons and telling me about whatever brand they happen to be using at the time the better.
Also, the fact that the "x" button appears in the same place every time makes you wonder - how hard would it be to write a Firefox plugin that fakes a mouse click at the proper position 15 seconds into the video? Doesn't sound too tough, but that's not my field.
See, that's the problem - he does, even though the check he's writing is to his lawyer.
That's a good point, and one that's hard to work around. If you have the plaintiff pay for the respondent's attorney fees, you make it almost impossible for a small (as in less wealthy) plaintiff to risk suing a big (more wealthy) respondent - attorney fees and punitive damages meant to assuage them vary widely. One thing you don't want to do is stop valid lawsuits.
Perhaps very early in the process the judge can inform the plaintiff that he or she feels that punitive damages to the respondent would be warranted if the plaintiff continues with the claim but loses in court - this would be kind of a "point of no return"... "I think your lawsuit is bunk, but it's not such extreme bunk that I can throw it out. Instead, if you continue and lose, I'm going to make you pay for his attorney's fees - but if you back out now we'll just call it quits". I'm just pulling ideas out of a hat here, but you get the idea.
There are two problems with that: 1) it's non-specific, and 2) it's true.;)
Oh, it's very specific - I believe that "crackpot" is a medical term that describes the original author quite well:)
I realize we're getting off-topic here, but this is something I've always wondered about. I think it's fair to say that Hubbard was not "into" Scientology - but what about the modern leaders? They weren't founders; they rose to their positions by buying into the whole deal (and buying is exactly the correct word!) and staying prominent within the organization for a long time.
I wonder if when they get together out of the eyes of the cash cows they slap backs and laugh among themselves at the profit they're turning... or whether they run it like a business, closing the doors and examining quarterly earnings and futures with charts and Powerpoint presentations... or whether they actually believe it, having been drawn in like all the "younger" members, and debate Scientology theology among themselves.
Interesting stuff, and rather unique among both organized religions and cults. Of course, the odds of one of these top-level Scientologists leaving the group and revealing the details (and living to tell the tale!) are very unlikely - but that just makes it all the more secretive and interesting.
In true Slashdot fashion, I did not read the review, but I wanted to make the general point that the fact that it's a nutjob filing the lawsuit doesn't mean it's not a valid lawsuit. Libel and other such laws are often valid, and sometimes when discussing a particulary outlandish author's particularly outlandish claims it's easy to slip from lambasting the claims to lambasting the author. If this crosses the line to libel then a lawsuit might, under some circumstances, be warranted.
I doubt that's the case here - but the answer to "Can calling someone a 'classic crackpot' in the face of such incorrect data have any chance at making it to court, or even winning the suit?" is in my opinion, "Yes, and it can sometimes be valid". I mean after all, that's what the court is for, to sort that sort of thing out and determine what's a valid complaint and what's not.
That said, I don't think the reviewer needs to get out his checkbook just yet:)
Bad form to reply to my own comment, but I had to add this. As an engineering student with an eye on one day being an engineering teacher, I want to be thought of as "the engineer who worked to advance knowledge of ________", not "the engineer who refused to share his knowledge of _______ with people not born within the same thick lines on a map". We're working with SCIENCE, we deal with PHYSICS, the laws of the natural world - we shouldn't bicker over semantics and rules. We already have a description for people who do that: (Slashdot posters?:D) politicians - and nobody likes them.
You know, it's not a competition - we shouldn't be trying to see who can come up with the most advances in technology first. A true scientist or engineer is working for the betterment of mankind, not for the betterment of a group of people associated by birthplace. Besides, those countries (India and China in particular, since you mentioned them) are at the point where they could really explode and grow into first-world nations - why shouldn't we encourage this, even at the potential cost of a few lost jobs? A little international competition on the engineering front never hurt anybody - and would be an enormous help to those nations.
This isn't a competition - we should be less concerned about making sure "our" students are smarter and better educated and have better jobs than "their" students, and work to improve *our* education system. If that means "their" students will come over here, good for them, and we should be proud that our colleges and universities are providing opportunities that will advance and work for the prosperity of other nations.
I always enjoy interviews with Jon Von Tetzchner
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A Talk With Opera CEO
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I always enjoy interviews with Jon Von Tetzchner - he comes across as a very forthright, positive, motivated CEO - and he's pretty good natured to boot. Contrast that with recent interviews with Linus, who's opinion on certain matters everyone respects but comes across a bit too sassy to make an enjoyable read, or major company CEOs, who sound more like company brochures than people.
I used to use Firefox over Opera because I could install Firefox with one command under Linux. Now that Opera is available in the same way, I find that I still choose Firefox, mostly because it's what I'm used to. I feel like Opera is just a tad too late to the party to really take off in a big way - had they made their product as easy to get and as visible as Firefox way back when (what with a website that auto-detects the correct package and provides a big easy-to-click button, prepackaged binaries for Linux, advertising, etc.) the bite marks in IE could be twice as big as they are now. Of course this doesn't mean that Opera has no chance - the world is plenty big enough for three or four major browsers - and they're certainly making a dent in the off-PC market.
Good luck to them, and the next time Firefox fails to download quite as promptly as I like maybe I'll give Opera another go! In the meantime, just keep getting interviews like this one out there and visible and Opera will keep growing.
I'm not so sure why AT&T would want to do this. Even though I wouldn't think that the iPhone and the Blackberry compete directly, at least prior to this decision AT&T sold one popular device with GPS functionality. Why they would change so that they now sell no devices (at the iPhone/Blackberry level) with GPS capabilities?
I could understand if Apple wanted this to happen... but how does this help AT&T? AT&T doesn't/shouldn't care if people are buying Blackberries over iPhones on the basis of GPS, so long as the Blackberry comes from AT&T. If they believed that GPS was the tipping point, those customers are now buying nothing from AT&T.
Doesn't seem so smart to me.
Re:Liberal tinfoil fiesta
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Fox Hacks Fark
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· Score: 1
Ignoring the article is an option? I thought it was required!
How depressing that most of the comments (with a few notable exceptions) have consisted of "Too little, too late" or "I won't buy music until they [fill in the blank]". The thing is, until today, [fill in the blank] was "sell DRM free music". But now that they're actually opening up and giving it a shot again, we're coming up with another reason why we won't spend our cash on music.
When it comes down to it, we download music because it's EASY and FREE. Don't get me wrong, most of us hold strong opinions about the state of the music industry and the rights of musicians, and the behavior of the RIAA - but that's not why we download music. We're not trying to make some point by downloading another album, as if we're fighting for our rights. If we were we would jump all over this oppurtunity to show that we appreciate DRM-free music, instead of simply coming up with more requirements for our money.
If DRM-free music doesn't sell, then Universal is going to say "Look, we addressed the number one complaint of music 'pirates'", and piracy is just as bad as always. Clearly the pirates are just interested in getting something for nothing". And you know what? They'll be RIGHT.
You can't have all your wishes fulfilled at once. You don't keep bopping the dog with the newspaper after he's housetrained, just because he doesn't use the toilet - reward small successes as they come, and you're more likely to see more of them. Buy Universal's music instead of downloading it and they might address the rest of our complaints.
I dunno.. it could have been a big plate of spaghetti, or as my boss likes to say "a tornado hitting a spaghetti factory".
Most code is beautiful at one point in time
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Beautiful Code Interview
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Most code is beautiful at one point in time - namely, when it's first written. A decent programmer can produce some decent code that performs the task at hand elegantly. With a little work this can become beautiful. Most applications I write start out very elegant, beautiful, commented, clever, etc. - It's only after the project grows and I'm working on a file named "main4.3.a.iii.bak2.worksithink.c" that the comments turn into "// why is this here?" and the variables go from "nDBEntryCount" to "temp" and the code becomes an ugly mess.
The real trick is DESIGNING the application in such a way that it can grow gracefully, and STAY beautiful. And that's really tough - knowing what sorts of features and requirements the future will hold is difficult. A big part of this is the language itself - I love assembly languages, and I could write some really clever and beautiful assembly code. But when the requirements change and the code needs a new feature? There goes all the carefully timed loops and cycle counts!
Beautiful code is as much beautiful, expandable, future-proof design as it is beautiful implementation.
If I recall, the physicists weren't that concerned, but the nearby townsfolk were, and asked for a study to be done. There were a number of possible "doomsday" situations considered... the most likely was the creation of a micro black hole that was somehow dense enough to avoid instant evaporation via Hawking radiation. The conclusions were a bit stronger than "quite unlikely" as well, with the odds of the extremely hypothetical situation required to yield the micro black hole also generating enough mass to overcome Hawking radiation being virtually nonexistant.
The same argument was used then too, that cosmic rays of far higher energies interact in the atmosphere daily, with no apparent major effects.
What I've always found interesting was the research performed for the original atomic bomb. Before a lot of modern quantum physics was known a bunch of guys were smashing particles together willy-nilly (well... perhaps not quite willy-nilly). Apparently they knew what they were doing, but I'm not sure I would have accepted "it happens every day in the sky" as valid reasoning when the *purpose* of the experiments was to yield a very big bomb:)
While you're correct that blood would/could/might boil in a near vaccuum at the temperature of space, in actual space there wouldn't be a problem. Human skin is a very good pressure suit, so the pressure inside your veins doesn't really change much. Also your blood does not instantly drop to the temperature of space... in fact the human body would lose heat very slowly in space, due to the lack of convection.
I recall reading that one problem your blood might face is "the bends", like divers get when surfacing too quickly, if you returned to the pressure of the spaceship without adequately slow repressurizing.
Also, on the subject of temperature in space, I read an article on this sort of thing once that said that we really shouldn't even be speaking of localized temperature in space. Temperature comes from the average energy of particles (don't jump all over me, it's been a while since thermo!) - in space these particles are few and far between, so speaking of temperature in any sort of close range is not very practicle, as there aren't that many particles there to begin with.
I would be less concerned with the chill and more concerned with the radiation pelting my body... I'll take an atmosphere over a coat in space any day!
Re:A basic article about a 2-year-old OS is news?
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Mac Systems Management
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· Score: 1, Funny
It's not like the information isn't already out there... like in the product documentation.
FMs are less read than FAs!
Did the editor think it was about 10.5 or something?
I'm sorry, I don't understand... what is this "editor" you speak of?:)
It always bothers me when laypeople decide what is worth researching. Any time there's an article in which scientists are studying something without the obvious global impact of an AIDS cure, there is always a handful of posters criticizing their focus. Would we really be any closer to a cure if every person with a scientific background was required to study AIDS, and only AIDS?
Scientific breakthroughs aren't needles in haystacks, waiting to be found through tedious searching, and if only we made everyone look for them we'd find them sooner. Instead we let scientists research as they wish, the exact requirements for usefulness being decided by sources of funding, and eventually enough seemingly-unrelated, small conclusions come together to yield the breakthrough.
The US patent system may be the best in the world - I'm no expert on foreign patent law, but I do know that not many people other than software folks are complaining about the current state of the US patent system. Software is still relatively young (compared to the age of the concept of patents) and it's not surprising that it is causing a lot of frustration... square pegs and round holes and so on; the patent system hasn't evolved to handle software yet.
I'll go one step farther - I don't think the patent system is necessarily broken. The current patent system is unable to handle the issue of software patents - but this doesn't mean the system itself is broken. The system wasn't designed for software! "This hammer won't screw in this screw, the hammer is broken and must be purged from the hardware store and replaced with a new device!"
You must use the right tool for the job. I think it's fair to say that the patent system is not the right tool for protecting the interests of software developers, but that doesn't mean that the patent system is broken.
Well, at a certain level, that's what the kernel is. The problem is that providing the bare minimum of hardware access to userspace means that anybody can do naughty things to the hardware. Remember drivers in Windows 98?
Linux has the "best" of both worlds. For the desktop, the kernel can contain lots of APIs and kernel-land drivers, providing fast hardware access and high level interfacing with security from crashes... and for embedded systems you just compile your own kernel and link in whatever you want.
Distributing Linux is pretty easy as is. Most of the time you don't want the ability to load and unload core kernel components on the fly, just like you wouldn't want to swap out the ALU from the silicon inside your processor while your computer is running. And if you wanted to customize at that level, just download the source and compile away!
Linux is like a car...:) A tail light or the license plate might be mostly modular, but the drive train isn't. The scheduler is very fundamental to the kernel, and must be running at all times. No doubt a system could be devised to make it work, but the pointer that Linus and others have been trying to make is that the most important reason for selecting one scheduler other another at this time is the dedication of the scheduler's maintainer and developer, not whether 3D games experience a slight decrease in performance. Even if they *could* both be used, Linus would still stick to his guns, because he believes that the developer behind the project is more important than the project itself.
I tend to agree - open source is driven by developers (developers developers developers!) - if the selected scheduler happens to be a bit slow for 3D games, someone will patch it, and the maintainer will integrate the patch. However if there aren't many active developers working on the project, and the maintainer doesn't seem dedicated, then it doesn't matter how great the code is right now; some time down the road work will be needed, and then the project runs into trouble.
In the open source world it's easier to patch up a slower design in a well-supported project than have to fork or reorganize an entire project because of lacking support.
RIAA: May we present exhibit 12, your honor... JUDGE: Go ahead. RIAA: Here we have a screenshot of the respondent's computer. And here you can see some filenames that we believe describe files that we believe contain copyrighted material. And if I can direct your attention over here... JUDGE, et al: *GASP* RIAA: This is DIRTY FILTHY PORNOGRAPHY, your honor! This is lewd sexual behavior! This is nudity and eroticism in a completely obscene fashion! JUDGE: Oh my. RIAA: Oh... sorry about that, I didn't realize that was there. Let's just put that away as a matter of professional courtesy and forget allll about that disgusting collection of filth. That this disgusting criminal collects. Alongside his disgustingly illegal STOLEN MUSIC COLLECTION.
Slashdot Mirror
While I do understand the desire to see the night sky better, I'm not sure that this is "pollution" per se. Pollution (at least as defined by Merriam-Webster) implies contamination - light does not contaminate. Where we to just turn off all the lights and wait a few femtoseconds the night sky would be as dark as pitch. This isn't about pollution (which is something that does actually need fighting), but rather someone saying "Gee, I wish I could see the night sky better." Fair enough, and so do I, but I'm not willing to give up street lights to get it.
:)
Of course, when it comes to someone opening up their cell phone during a movie... roll out the tanks, let the war begin!
In general, people are more sympathetic to minority causes, and in the US (where Facebook and Slashdot enjoy their greatest popularity) Islam is still a minority. Add to that the fact that regardless of ideals, Islam isn't exactly known for tolerance nowadays (a minority opinion of course, but the loudest voices always prevail), the slant the story arrived with isn't all that surprising. In general, the idea is that Christianity doesn't need the kind of attention that more minority faith's need for the protection of their rights - Christianity is a big boy and can handle himself, so to speak. But Islam is a bit more sensitive right now, a bit of a hot topic, and so could use a little more publicity to ensure things get handled properly (however that is). It's all about audience - the group had to target a large enough audience that people actually bothered to take note of it, but a small enough group that they still come across as "the little guy". For example, as unlikely as a similar article about Christianity would be, so would an article about a group against Zoroastrianism. Everything is about audience and current political temperature - out and out bias and slant is rarely to blame in stories such as this.
Your Facebook group would be your business... if your name was Mark Zuckerberg. This isn't about opinions, it's about whether or not such groups are appropriate on that sort of site. If the group remains up, then the leadership feels that they are - if it comes down, then they must feel it's not. There's no censorship going on here, nobody calling anybody "turds" as you put it, just a question of appropriateness. Zuckerberg et al are trying to pitch the site to a certain audience with certain goals in mind - if this sort of group works against those goals then it will come down. The headline (for once!) hit the issue on the head - this is about Facebook intermixing political hot topics (think of the fallout from the Muhammad cartoons) and their cash cows: advertisers.
;)
This isn't about whether or not Facebook is letting you bitch adequately. After all, there's always Myspace for you people
Providing a copyrighted file for uploading by a third party and writing a Bittorrent protocol client are very different. What this couple did is not equivalent to leaving your back door unlocked - they were actively sitting on the back stoop giving other people's stuff away. Whether or not you feel the copyright law is valid as written, they did break it, so the fact they were sued shouldn't be some big surprise.
Also, for a community of people that goes to great pains to point out the difference between "stealing" music and breaking copyright law, the headline of this article doesn't do us much good. Come to think of it, that's quite a sarcastic and vitriolic summary - and seeing as this story doesn't bring anything new to the table with respect to the whole file-sharing issue, why is this even news?
I know, I know, I must be new here!
Yep.. just checked it now.
My impressions:
- Very unobtrusive - diverts the eye briefly as it appears, then is small enough to not bother you once you look back to the video.
- No sound - very important! Nothing is more annoying than those new TV overlay ads that incorporate sound, especially when meaningful dialog is taking place.
- It has an X button - I was worried about this one, but as soon as the ad appears you can click the "x" to make it vanish permanently. The "x" is easy to hit with the mouse, and since the video has just started 15 seconds previous, you haven't sat back in your chair to watch yet. Very easy to use.
- Targetted ads are better than untargetted ads! The less bright-eyed white-clad models I see hopping around the screen waving tampons and telling me about whatever brand they happen to be using at the time the better.
Also, the fact that the "x" button appears in the same place every time makes you wonder - how hard would it be to write a Firefox plugin that fakes a mouse click at the proper position 15 seconds into the video? Doesn't sound too tough, but that's not my field.See, that's the problem - he does, even though the check he's writing is to his lawyer.
;)
:)
That's a good point, and one that's hard to work around. If you have the plaintiff pay for the respondent's attorney fees, you make it almost impossible for a small (as in less wealthy) plaintiff to risk suing a big (more wealthy) respondent - attorney fees and punitive damages meant to assuage them vary widely. One thing you don't want to do is stop valid lawsuits.
Perhaps very early in the process the judge can inform the plaintiff that he or she feels that punitive damages to the respondent would be warranted if the plaintiff continues with the claim but loses in court - this would be kind of a "point of no return"... "I think your lawsuit is bunk, but it's not such extreme bunk that I can throw it out. Instead, if you continue and lose, I'm going to make you pay for his attorney's fees - but if you back out now we'll just call it quits". I'm just pulling ideas out of a hat here, but you get the idea.
There are two problems with that: 1) it's non-specific, and 2) it's true.
Oh, it's very specific - I believe that "crackpot" is a medical term that describes the original author quite well
I realize we're getting off-topic here, but this is something I've always wondered about. I think it's fair to say that Hubbard was not "into" Scientology - but what about the modern leaders? They weren't founders; they rose to their positions by buying into the whole deal (and buying is exactly the correct word!) and staying prominent within the organization for a long time.
I wonder if when they get together out of the eyes of the cash cows they slap backs and laugh among themselves at the profit they're turning... or whether they run it like a business, closing the doors and examining quarterly earnings and futures with charts and Powerpoint presentations... or whether they actually believe it, having been drawn in like all the "younger" members, and debate Scientology theology among themselves.
Interesting stuff, and rather unique among both organized religions and cults. Of course, the odds of one of these top-level Scientologists leaving the group and revealing the details (and living to tell the tale!) are very unlikely - but that just makes it all the more secretive and interesting.
In true Slashdot fashion, I did not read the review, but I wanted to make the general point that the fact that it's a nutjob filing the lawsuit doesn't mean it's not a valid lawsuit. Libel and other such laws are often valid, and sometimes when discussing a particulary outlandish author's particularly outlandish claims it's easy to slip from lambasting the claims to lambasting the author. If this crosses the line to libel then a lawsuit might, under some circumstances, be warranted.
:)
I doubt that's the case here - but the answer to "Can calling someone a 'classic crackpot' in the face of such incorrect data have any chance at making it to court, or even winning the suit?" is in my opinion, "Yes, and it can sometimes be valid". I mean after all, that's what the court is for, to sort that sort of thing out and determine what's a valid complaint and what's not.
That said, I don't think the reviewer needs to get out his checkbook just yet
Bad form to reply to my own comment, but I had to add this. As an engineering student with an eye on one day being an engineering teacher, I want to be thought of as "the engineer who worked to advance knowledge of ________", not "the engineer who refused to share his knowledge of _______ with people not born within the same thick lines on a map". We're working with SCIENCE, we deal with PHYSICS, the laws of the natural world - we shouldn't bicker over semantics and rules. We already have a description for people who do that: (Slashdot posters? :D) politicians - and nobody likes them.
You know, it's not a competition - we shouldn't be trying to see who can come up with the most advances in technology first. A true scientist or engineer is working for the betterment of mankind, not for the betterment of a group of people associated by birthplace. Besides, those countries (India and China in particular, since you mentioned them) are at the point where they could really explode and grow into first-world nations - why shouldn't we encourage this, even at the potential cost of a few lost jobs? A little international competition on the engineering front never hurt anybody - and would be an enormous help to those nations.
This isn't a competition - we should be less concerned about making sure "our" students are smarter and better educated and have better jobs than "their" students, and work to improve *our* education system. If that means "their" students will come over here, good for them, and we should be proud that our colleges and universities are providing opportunities that will advance and work for the prosperity of other nations.
I always enjoy interviews with Jon Von Tetzchner - he comes across as a very forthright, positive, motivated CEO - and he's pretty good natured to boot. Contrast that with recent interviews with Linus, who's opinion on certain matters everyone respects but comes across a bit too sassy to make an enjoyable read, or major company CEOs, who sound more like company brochures than people.
I used to use Firefox over Opera because I could install Firefox with one command under Linux. Now that Opera is available in the same way, I find that I still choose Firefox, mostly because it's what I'm used to. I feel like Opera is just a tad too late to the party to really take off in a big way - had they made their product as easy to get and as visible as Firefox way back when (what with a website that auto-detects the correct package and provides a big easy-to-click button, prepackaged binaries for Linux, advertising, etc.) the bite marks in IE could be twice as big as they are now. Of course this doesn't mean that Opera has no chance - the world is plenty big enough for three or four major browsers - and they're certainly making a dent in the off-PC market.
Good luck to them, and the next time Firefox fails to download quite as promptly as I like maybe I'll give Opera another go! In the meantime, just keep getting interviews like this one out there and visible and Opera will keep growing.
I'm not so sure why AT&T would want to do this. Even though I wouldn't think that the iPhone and the Blackberry compete directly, at least prior to this decision AT&T sold one popular device with GPS functionality. Why they would change so that they now sell no devices (at the iPhone/Blackberry level) with GPS capabilities?
I could understand if Apple wanted this to happen... but how does this help AT&T? AT&T doesn't/shouldn't care if people are buying Blackberries over iPhones on the basis of GPS, so long as the Blackberry comes from AT&T. If they believed that GPS was the tipping point, those customers are now buying nothing from AT&T.
Doesn't seem so smart to me.
Ignoring the article is an option? I thought it was required!
How depressing that most of the comments (with a few notable exceptions) have consisted of "Too little, too late" or "I won't buy music until they [fill in the blank]". The thing is, until today, [fill in the blank] was "sell DRM free music". But now that they're actually opening up and giving it a shot again, we're coming up with another reason why we won't spend our cash on music.
When it comes down to it, we download music because it's EASY and FREE. Don't get me wrong, most of us hold strong opinions about the state of the music industry and the rights of musicians, and the behavior of the RIAA - but that's not why we download music. We're not trying to make some point by downloading another album, as if we're fighting for our rights. If we were we would jump all over this oppurtunity to show that we appreciate DRM-free music, instead of simply coming up with more requirements for our money.
If DRM-free music doesn't sell, then Universal is going to say "Look, we addressed the number one complaint of music 'pirates'", and piracy is just as bad as always. Clearly the pirates are just interested in getting something for nothing". And you know what? They'll be RIGHT.
You can't have all your wishes fulfilled at once. You don't keep bopping the dog with the newspaper after he's housetrained, just because he doesn't use the toilet - reward small successes as they come, and you're more likely to see more of them. Buy Universal's music instead of downloading it and they might address the rest of our complaints.
I dunno.. it could have been a big plate of spaghetti, or as my boss likes to say "a tornado hitting a spaghetti factory".
Most code is beautiful at one point in time - namely, when it's first written. A decent programmer can produce some decent code that performs the task at hand elegantly. With a little work this can become beautiful. Most applications I write start out very elegant, beautiful, commented, clever, etc. - It's only after the project grows and I'm working on a file named "main4.3.a.iii.bak2.worksithink.c" that the comments turn into "// why is this here?" and the variables go from "nDBEntryCount" to "temp" and the code becomes an ugly mess.
The real trick is DESIGNING the application in such a way that it can grow gracefully, and STAY beautiful. And that's really tough - knowing what sorts of features and requirements the future will hold is difficult. A big part of this is the language itself - I love assembly languages, and I could write some really clever and beautiful assembly code. But when the requirements change and the code needs a new feature? There goes all the carefully timed loops and cycle counts!
Beautiful code is as much beautiful, expandable, future-proof design as it is beautiful implementation.
If I recall, the physicists weren't that concerned, but the nearby townsfolk were, and asked for a study to be done. There were a number of possible "doomsday" situations considered... the most likely was the creation of a micro black hole that was somehow dense enough to avoid instant evaporation via Hawking radiation. The conclusions were a bit stronger than "quite unlikely" as well, with the odds of the extremely hypothetical situation required to yield the micro black hole also generating enough mass to overcome Hawking radiation being virtually nonexistant.
:)
The same argument was used then too, that cosmic rays of far higher energies interact in the atmosphere daily, with no apparent major effects.
What I've always found interesting was the research performed for the original atomic bomb. Before a lot of modern quantum physics was known a bunch of guys were smashing particles together willy-nilly (well... perhaps not quite willy-nilly). Apparently they knew what they were doing, but I'm not sure I would have accepted "it happens every day in the sky" as valid reasoning when the *purpose* of the experiments was to yield a very big bomb
While you're correct that blood would/could/might boil in a near vaccuum at the temperature of space, in actual space there wouldn't be a problem. Human skin is a very good pressure suit, so the pressure inside your veins doesn't really change much. Also your blood does not instantly drop to the temperature of space... in fact the human body would lose heat very slowly in space, due to the lack of convection.
I recall reading that one problem your blood might face is "the bends", like divers get when surfacing too quickly, if you returned to the pressure of the spaceship without adequately slow repressurizing.
Also, on the subject of temperature in space, I read an article on this sort of thing once that said that we really shouldn't even be speaking of localized temperature in space. Temperature comes from the average energy of particles (don't jump all over me, it's been a while since thermo!) - in space these particles are few and far between, so speaking of temperature in any sort of close range is not very practicle, as there aren't that many particles there to begin with.
I would be less concerned with the chill and more concerned with the radiation pelting my body... I'll take an atmosphere over a coat in space any day!
FMs are less read than FAs!
Did the editor think it was about 10.5 or something?
I'm sorry, I don't understand... what is this "editor" you speak of?
It always bothers me when laypeople decide what is worth researching. Any time there's an article in which scientists are studying something without the obvious global impact of an AIDS cure, there is always a handful of posters criticizing their focus. Would we really be any closer to a cure if every person with a scientific background was required to study AIDS, and only AIDS?
Scientific breakthroughs aren't needles in haystacks, waiting to be found through tedious searching, and if only we made everyone look for them we'd find them sooner. Instead we let scientists research as they wish, the exact requirements for usefulness being decided by sources of funding, and eventually enough seemingly-unrelated, small conclusions come together to yield the breakthrough.
The US patent system may be the best in the world - I'm no expert on foreign patent law, but I do know that not many people other than software folks are complaining about the current state of the US patent system. Software is still relatively young (compared to the age of the concept of patents) and it's not surprising that it is causing a lot of frustration... square pegs and round holes and so on; the patent system hasn't evolved to handle software yet.
I'll go one step farther - I don't think the patent system is necessarily broken. The current patent system is unable to handle the issue of software patents - but this doesn't mean the system itself is broken. The system wasn't designed for software! "This hammer won't screw in this screw, the hammer is broken and must be purged from the hardware store and replaced with a new device!"
You must use the right tool for the job. I think it's fair to say that the patent system is not the right tool for protecting the interests of software developers, but that doesn't mean that the patent system is broken.
Well, at a certain level, that's what the kernel is. The problem is that providing the bare minimum of hardware access to userspace means that anybody can do naughty things to the hardware. Remember drivers in Windows 98? Linux has the "best" of both worlds. For the desktop, the kernel can contain lots of APIs and kernel-land drivers, providing fast hardware access and high level interfacing with security from crashes... and for embedded systems you just compile your own kernel and link in whatever you want. Distributing Linux is pretty easy as is. Most of the time you don't want the ability to load and unload core kernel components on the fly, just like you wouldn't want to swap out the ALU from the silicon inside your processor while your computer is running. And if you wanted to customize at that level, just download the source and compile away!
Linux is like a car... :) A tail light or the license plate might be mostly modular, but the drive train isn't. The scheduler is very fundamental to the kernel, and must be running at all times. No doubt a system could be devised to make it work, but the pointer that Linus and others have been trying to make is that the most important reason for selecting one scheduler other another at this time is the dedication of the scheduler's maintainer and developer, not whether 3D games experience a slight decrease in performance. Even if they *could* both be used, Linus would still stick to his guns, because he believes that the developer behind the project is more important than the project itself.
I tend to agree - open source is driven by developers (developers developers developers!) - if the selected scheduler happens to be a bit slow for 3D games, someone will patch it, and the maintainer will integrate the patch. However if there aren't many active developers working on the project, and the maintainer doesn't seem dedicated, then it doesn't matter how great the code is right now; some time down the road work will be needed, and then the project runs into trouble.
In the open source world it's easier to patch up a slower design in a well-supported project than have to fork or reorganize an entire project because of lacking support.
RIAA: May we present exhibit 12, your honor...
JUDGE: Go ahead.
RIAA: Here we have a screenshot of the respondent's computer. And here you can see some filenames that we believe describe files that we believe contain copyrighted material. And if I can direct your attention over here...
JUDGE, et al: *GASP*
RIAA: This is DIRTY FILTHY PORNOGRAPHY, your honor! This is lewd sexual behavior! This is nudity and eroticism in a completely obscene fashion!
JUDGE: Oh my.
RIAA: Oh... sorry about that, I didn't realize that was there. Let's just put that away as a matter of professional courtesy and forget allll about that disgusting collection of filth. That this disgusting criminal collects. Alongside his disgustingly illegal STOLEN MUSIC COLLECTION.
Yeah... sound real professional to me!