They can't be that dumb. And most high-end color printers are sold to businesses and often have service contracts.
Problem is, high-end color printers aren't the only ones capable of producing counterfeit any more. There are now quite a few sub-$500 color lasers with print quality equal to the best laser printers. Most of the printers that EFF has found with the hidden codes are these.
And many networked printers "phone home" to the manufacturer via email or web. My Xerox phaser 7750 (great printer, btw) tries to send an email every month to Xerox. They're blocked now.
Yikes, that's scary. Does the printer send anything other than, "I'm here"? Someone should start a site listing these rogue devices. Unless there's one already...
The GP said:
Just realize that 99.9% of the world doesn't give a shit about anything you do, and all that paranoia just slips away.
Right, it's that 0.1% that justifies the paranoia.
TFA (or a page linked from it) says that when they find counterfeit, they go to the printer manufacturer which tells them which store sold it, then they go to the store which tells them which credit card was used or where it was shipped. And then they come to you.
There is no technical reason people cant simply download their favorite programs and watch them with commericals for free or commerical free for an additional fee.
While that sounds like a good idea, it also sounded like a good idea back when people said the same thing about cable TV and satellite radio. Boatloads of people eventually signed on and paid money so they could watch/listen to a wider variety of programming and because they didn't want to watch/listen to commercials... many cable TV channels now have more commercials than the broadcast channels and satellite radio stations are gradually introducing commercials as well.
What do you think the odds are that the same won't happen to downloadable paid-for TV programs once there's enough demand?
It's been my understanding that X11 has been working on OSX since day one or earlier. No, it might not come with the default OSX installation, but it is available.
The switch to x86 doesn't change the API of MacOS X and hence won't magically give you Intel PC software. And if that software had been cross-API-compatible (via Qt, wxwidgets etc.), it could have been released for PPC-MacOS already.
True.
The only thing that is likely to happen with Intel-Mac is that Windows Emulators - and hence Windows software - will run at nearly native speed.
Not strictly true. Everybody is concentrating so hard on the whole Windows emulator possibility that they're completely missing another benefit to x86 Macs that I'm personally looking forward to: Linux binary compatibility.
FreeBSD has had rock-solid Linux binary compatibility for years. Almost any executable compiled on and for Linux will run perfectly well on FreeBSD. Porting the Linux compatibility layer to Darwin is probably something that a skilled dev can do on a rainy weekend. And that's if it hasn't been done already. For x86 Mac users, this immediately opens the door to almost all programs built for Linux, both open and closed.
I say to the fellow who wants his CAD software on Mac: You'll probably waste your time pestering the vendor to release a native OSX version of the application. And WINE is unreliable at best, which x86 OSX won't change. What you want is to be able to run the Unix version of the app natively on your Mac and that's what Linux binary compatibility will do.
I can guarantee that if Linux were on 95% of computers in the world, it would be having the same malware and security issues as MS, mainly do to (inexperienced) users.
Um, no.
The major open source operating systems (Linux and the BSDs) actually take security seriously. The kernel and most userland software is specifically designed with security in mind and they deliberately try to make it quite hard (ideally, impossible) to get unauthorized root access remotely. When bugs are found, they are patched quickly and the world knows about them instantly via various security-related mailing lists. As long as his or her systems are kept up to date (which is easy to automate), a Linux/BSD user would have zero need for anti-spyware and anti-virus software, even if it were the most popular platform of the day.
Now, contrast with the Windows security model. I could never dream to guess at what goes on inside the minds of Microsoft developers, but I'm pretty sure security isn't (or wasn't until recently) something that pops up too often. New security-related bugs are found in Windows and Windows software every day. Not entirely surprising, because the same is true of the OSS world. However, the bugs that are discovered in Windows are much more often those that allow a person or program to gain administrative access to the OS. (Partly due to the fact that almost every program that runs as the administrator.) Meanwhile, we admins and users have no way of patching these new daily vulnerabilities. Our only hope is to rely on (third-party) firewalls, anti-spyware apps, and anti-virus apps, all of which treat the symptoms rather than the illness.
So, while OSS and Windows vulnerabilities might be roughly equal in number, it would be difficult to argue that they are anywhere near equal in severity. The statistic that Windows has 95% of the desktop market but attracts 99.9% of malware has always seemed a little odd to me. (By that logic, 99.9% of all software should exclusively run on Windows, which clearly isn't the case.) Even assuming that very nearly all viruses are written for Windows just because it's more popular (unlikely), if Windows market share does decline, we would still see Windows with the majority of the malware because it's a lot less challenging to slip a virus or spyware program onto a Windows machine than an open source one. As an example, if you penetrate the defenses of the Microsoft web server, you get full reign over the machine. If you do the same on Linux running Apache, you get full reign over/var/www/localhost/htdocs.
The moral of the story here is that Windows has the lion's share of malware perhaps not so much because it's a bigger target, but because it's simply an easier target.
Counter-example: on Fedora, yum performs the same functions as emerge on Gentoo, including dependency solving, automatic downloads of software, package updates, etc.
No, _this_ is uninformed. Yum and the Gentoo ebuild system are worlds apart. They may perform the same ultimate end function (installing software), but otherwise their implementations are at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Sorry, but I stand by my original claim. I used Fedora for about 6 months on my laptop and switched away from it for most of the same reasons that I switched away from Mandrake. Namely: consistent use of third-party RPMs will break the system eventually (whether or not they're installed by yum), and that packages never get updated or added to after release except to fix security vulnerabilities.
I'm not going to get into an argument over the tiny little details of why I prefer FreeBSD and Gentoo to an RPM-based system because this is neither the time nor the place. Suffice to say that in literally years of administration, I've never seen either FreeBSD or Gentoo screw up a system as thoroughly as when battling with the deficiencies of RPM in Mandrake and Fedora.
But, I seem never to be able to upgrade gaim, at least not easily. I always have to do an rpm upgrade with the Force option because of "conflicts" with other gaim packages. And the last couple of new releases of gaim won't even install with "Force".
While there is plenty wrong with Gaim, this particular issue is a problem with your operating system, not Gaim. First, upgrading apps on an RPM-based distro has always sucked. Using an OS with sane package management (Gentoo, FreeBSD, Debian) will eliminate this issue entirely.
Second, if you're running into conflicts and dependency problems, then you're not (or haven't been) using RPMs designed for your specific distro and version. When I was using Mandrake 8.0, I never could keep it stable for very long when I started installing RPMs created by third parties, Mandrake 7.2, or Cooker, etc. As long as I stuck to the Mandrake 8.0 RPMs, everything was fine. Problem is, they never upgrade them (except to fix security bugs) and they never create new ones after the release. As far as I know, this problem still afflicts all RPM-based distros today.
Third, if you're using --force, then you should be expecting things to break, not acting surprised when they finally do.
What happens when the corporation anybody seems to love to hate, namely Microsoft, release a killer app and of makes it free (as in dollars), but, of course, keeps its source jealously closed? And worse than that, use it to maintain a strong lock-in to the Windows platform?
Okay, one day we have a Slashdot article claiming that video gaming is on its way out the door. The next, an article celebrating its sure growth in the future. Then after that, another one saying that it's going away again. And so on.
For fuck's sake, can't we just make up our minds whether the gaming industry is dying or thriving? This is idiotic.
Whenever I run into an ad online, I'm compelled to view the source, close down my browser session, and tweak my userContent.css/hostperm.1 to block it.
Yikes, that's a lot of work. If you're using Firefox or Mozilla (sounds like you are), get the adblock extension. It does what you're doing above, only far easier. Find an adserver host you can't stand? Click on the adblock icon, pick the URL that looks most like the ad, optionally modify it, and drop it into adblock's list. No looking at the page source, no closing the browser, no editing a file. You don't even have to reload the page to clear the ads.
Something I've gotten into recently when installing Firefox on a friend/family member's machine is installing adblock and then using vim to munge this hosts file into a form that can be directly imported into AdBlock. Ends up looking something like:
[Adlock] adhost1.com ad.host2.com (etc, etc)
Import it into adblock and that takes care of 90% or more of web ads including banners, flash, cover-ads, and those newfangled underlined hover adlinks.
When KDE 3.5 is out, Konqueror is supposedly going to have some facility identical to adblock. Looking forward to that.
Long contracts are how cell companies manage to offer you "free" or low-cost phones, "free" minutes, etc. If contracts are limited to one year, you'll see those sorts of offers disappear or go up in cost.
I'd be more than happy to pay for the phone if there was a provider without the lopsided contracts. The way it is now, every provider locks you into a contract where they change the terms, price, penalties, etc without having to notify the customer. I want to be able to cancel my service at any time and change providers without paying an arm and a leg first. I want to buy a phone and use it with any provider. I don't mind paying a little more for minutes than I do on my land line ($0.025 or so), but getting robbed after accidentally going over n number of minutes per month should be illegal. Free local calls would be nice.
Lastly, I want some kind of quality with the service. It seems like the audio quality of cell phones has been getting worse rather than better. About once a week, a family member or friend calls me up on a dodgy signal and I can't understand a word they're saying. Rather than repeat every sentence three times, I usually just ask them to call me later on a land line and hang right up. I've been getting fewer and fewer of those calls, but probably because of my own efforts rather than those of the cell phone companies.
It is really just totally unprofitable to offer a service that is both reliable and fair?
Mainly, Python is powerful but has a deliberately shallow learning-curve. The most often-cited reasons are the following Python mantras:
- Everything is an object - Syntax is simple and predictable (but feels a little odd if you're coming from C, C++, Perl, Java, etc) - There's one obvious way to do it. (Contrast with Perl's, "There's more than one way to do it.") - Batteries included (comes with a large library of modules)
Pretty sure there are more, but these are the biggies that I can recall. These are the same reasons that many quote for using Ruby as well, but I got around to trying it yet.
I used to be a big fan of Tcl for it's insanely shallow learning curve. (Even more so than Python.) I wrote a usuable Tk (GUI) app within the first hour of even hearing about it. Too bad it didn't really catch on and mature as well as Python and Perl did over the same time-frame because it really is a nifty language.
Okay, I re-read my post and one thing stuck out at me: the eBay and DDoS example was perhaps a poor one. DDoSing a site *is* unfair and I think they would have a legitimate complaint against the attacker in this case, even though the money that they would probably claim to lose would still be an outlandish amount. More appropriate examples would be a network outage, trivial or unintentional attack on an insecure system (firewall fell over due to a port scan), or natural disaster.
I was thinking about just this issue the other day. It's become the unwavering norm for businesses to talk about "losing money" whenever something goes wrong with their business model. For example, if some large online commercial website (say, eBay) gets DDoS'd for a few hours, it is norm and even expected that they start clamoring about how much money they lost by the site being down. But the truth is that they didn't lose money, they were simply unable to make money during that time period. Just because you run a site that makes 5 million dollars a week doesn't mean you sudeenly have a God- or legal-given right to make that money each and every week. It has to be earned. Using the phrase "losing money" implies that it was in the bank account to begin with, which is clearly not the case. Not only that, but with the use of the word "lost," there's the strong implication that it was somehow taken unfairly.
This is one of the things that bugs me the most about the music and movie industry. When they do their "money lost to piracy" numbers, they take the (inflated) number of copies pirated, make the egotistical and wrong assumption that each of those copies would have been a legit purchase, multiply it by some arbitrary cost (many times higher than the retail price of the item), and start spouting about the billions of dollars that were wrongfully taken from them.
I dunno, I seem to remember a couple Slashdot stories about this quite awhile ago...
The RIAA (or MPAA? both?) tried to pass a law to make it legal for them to hack into the computers of copyright violators in order to delete the copyrighted content. I don't think this passed, but maybe I'm wrong. Would you seriously believe, however, that deleing a few files would be all the RIAA would do if they had control of your computer and suspected you (or not) of illegally possessing their copyrighted material?
It surely does reveal that their current modus operandi had been in planning since even way back then. They probably realized that the whole hacking into people's computers bit was the weak link and tried to strengthen it by getting a law that would make the music industry more powerful than the CIA.
Yes, we could send robots to the other planets. But we can send robots pretty much anywhere. The whole point to sending people to the farthest reaches of the solar system isn't for gathering scientific evidence, it's because sending people to these kinds of places is a hard task that takes lots of planning, engineering genius, and the invention of technologies that don't even exist yet. It's much harder than sending robots that is what makes it worthwhile. The moon program in decades past should have been proof enough of that.
"My opinion is that it was... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the point of space exploration as a whole? That it's really hard, fraught with danger, and constantly pushes the envelope of what's possible with our technology and ingenuity?
We stunned the world by putting men on the moon, but for chrissakes, that was decades ago. With advancements in technology since then, we should have half the solar system under our belt by now.
Where I work, our rule of thumb is that heavier power supplies are higher quality than lighter ones. While I'm sure this isn't going to be true in every single case, it makes a certain amount of sense. A manufacturer of cheap power supplies is going to try to put the least amount of material and labor into their units as possible. Quality PSU manufacturers tend to put in better components and beefier heatsinks. (Hence the fan(s) can spin slower, resulting in a quieter PSU as well.)
Slashdot Mirror
If anyone says "population density" one more time in these comments, the baby seal gets it.
They can't be that dumb. And most high-end color printers are sold to businesses and often have service contracts.
Problem is, high-end color printers aren't the only ones capable of producing counterfeit any more. There are now quite a few sub-$500 color lasers with print quality equal to the best laser printers. Most of the printers that EFF has found with the hidden codes are these.
And many networked printers "phone home" to the manufacturer via email or web. My Xerox phaser 7750 (great printer, btw) tries to send an email every month to Xerox. They're blocked now.
Yikes, that's scary. Does the printer send anything other than, "I'm here"? Someone should start a site listing these rogue devices. Unless there's one already...
The GP said:
Just realize that 99.9% of the world doesn't give a shit about anything you do, and all that paranoia just slips away.
Right, it's that 0.1% that justifies the paranoia.
TFA (or a page linked from it) says that when they find counterfeit, they go to the printer manufacturer which tells them which store sold it, then they go to the store which tells them which credit card was used or where it was shipped. And then they come to you.
No need for a database.
There is no technical reason people cant simply download their favorite programs and watch them with commericals for free or commerical free for an additional fee.
While that sounds like a good idea, it also sounded like a good idea back when people said the same thing about cable TV and satellite radio. Boatloads of people eventually signed on and paid money so they could watch/listen to a wider variety of programming and because they didn't want to watch/listen to commercials... many cable TV channels now have more commercials than the broadcast channels and satellite radio stations are gradually introducing commercials as well.
What do you think the odds are that the same won't happen to downloadable paid-for TV programs once there's enough demand?
It's been my understanding that X11 has been working on OSX since day one or earlier. No, it might not come with the default OSX installation, but it is available.
The switch to x86 doesn't change the API of MacOS X and hence won't magically give you Intel PC software. And if that software had been cross-API-compatible (via Qt, wxwidgets etc.), it could have been released for PPC-MacOS already.
True.
The only thing that is likely to happen with Intel-Mac is that Windows Emulators - and hence Windows software - will run at nearly native speed.
Not strictly true. Everybody is concentrating so hard on the whole Windows emulator possibility that they're completely missing another benefit to x86 Macs that I'm personally looking forward to: Linux binary compatibility.
FreeBSD has had rock-solid Linux binary compatibility for years. Almost any executable compiled on and for Linux will run perfectly well on FreeBSD. Porting the Linux compatibility layer to Darwin is probably something that a skilled dev can do on a rainy weekend. And that's if it hasn't been done already. For x86 Mac users, this immediately opens the door to almost all programs built for Linux, both open and closed.
I say to the fellow who wants his CAD software on Mac: You'll probably waste your time pestering the vendor to release a native OSX version of the application. And WINE is unreliable at best, which x86 OSX won't change. What you want is to be able to run the Unix version of the app natively on your Mac and that's what Linux binary compatibility will do.
I can guarantee that if Linux were on 95% of computers in the world, it would be having the same malware and security issues as MS, mainly do to (inexperienced) users.
Um, no.
The major open source operating systems (Linux and the BSDs) actually take security seriously. The kernel and most userland software is specifically designed with security in mind and they deliberately try to make it quite hard (ideally, impossible) to get unauthorized root access remotely. When bugs are found, they are patched quickly and the world knows about them instantly via various security-related mailing lists. As long as his or her systems are kept up to date (which is easy to automate), a Linux/BSD user would have zero need for anti-spyware and anti-virus software, even if it were the most popular platform of the day.
Now, contrast with the Windows security model. I could never dream to guess at what goes on inside the minds of Microsoft developers, but I'm pretty sure security isn't (or wasn't until recently) something that pops up too often. New security-related bugs are found in Windows and Windows software every day. Not entirely surprising, because the same is true of the OSS world. However, the bugs that are discovered in Windows are much more often those that allow a person or program to gain administrative access to the OS. (Partly due to the fact that almost every program that runs as the administrator.) Meanwhile, we admins and users have no way of patching these new daily vulnerabilities. Our only hope is to rely on (third-party) firewalls, anti-spyware apps, and anti-virus apps, all of which treat the symptoms rather than the illness.
So, while OSS and Windows vulnerabilities might be roughly equal in number, it would be difficult to argue that they are anywhere near equal in severity. The statistic that Windows has 95% of the desktop market but attracts 99.9% of malware has always seemed a little odd to me. (By that logic, 99.9% of all software should exclusively run on Windows, which clearly isn't the case.) Even assuming that very nearly all viruses are written for Windows just because it's more popular (unlikely), if Windows market share does decline, we would still see Windows with the majority of the malware because it's a lot less challenging to slip a virus or spyware program onto a Windows machine than an open source one. As an example, if you penetrate the defenses of the Microsoft web server, you get full reign over the machine. If you do the same on Linux running Apache, you get full reign over
The moral of the story here is that Windows has the lion's share of malware perhaps not so much because it's a bigger target, but because it's simply an easier target.
It's really easy for you as a white person to say that color doesn't matter
Notice that the parent never stated his color or race but you presumed it?
That's exactly the point he was trying to make.
Counter-example: on Fedora, yum performs the same functions as emerge on Gentoo, including dependency solving, automatic downloads of software, package updates, etc.
No, _this_ is uninformed. Yum and the Gentoo ebuild system are worlds apart. They may perform the same ultimate end function (installing software), but otherwise their implementations are at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Sorry, but I stand by my original claim. I used Fedora for about 6 months on my laptop and switched away from it for most of the same reasons that I switched away from Mandrake. Namely: consistent use of third-party RPMs will break the system eventually (whether or not they're installed by yum), and that packages never get updated or added to after release except to fix security vulnerabilities.
I'm not going to get into an argument over the tiny little details of why I prefer FreeBSD and Gentoo to an RPM-based system because this is neither the time nor the place. Suffice to say that in literally years of administration, I've never seen either FreeBSD or Gentoo screw up a system as thoroughly as when battling with the deficiencies of RPM in Mandrake and Fedora.
But, I seem never to be able to upgrade gaim, at least not easily. I always have to do an rpm upgrade with the Force option because of "conflicts" with other gaim packages. And the last couple of new releases of gaim won't even install with "Force".
While there is plenty wrong with Gaim, this particular issue is a problem with your operating system, not Gaim. First, upgrading apps on an RPM-based distro has always sucked. Using an OS with sane package management (Gentoo, FreeBSD, Debian) will eliminate this issue entirely.
Second, if you're running into conflicts and dependency problems, then you're not (or haven't been) using RPMs designed for your specific distro and version. When I was using Mandrake 8.0, I never could keep it stable for very long when I started installing RPMs created by third parties, Mandrake 7.2, or Cooker, etc. As long as I stuck to the Mandrake 8.0 RPMs, everything was fine. Problem is, they never upgrade them (except to fix security bugs) and they never create new ones after the release. As far as I know, this problem still afflicts all RPM-based distros today.
Third, if you're using --force, then you should be expecting things to break, not acting surprised when they finally do.
From TFA:
What happens when the corporation anybody seems to love to hate, namely Microsoft, release a killer app and of makes it free (as in dollars), but, of course, keeps its source jealously closed? And worse than that, use it to maintain a strong lock-in to the Windows platform?
OSNews: We don't need no stinkin' editors!
Okay, one day we have a Slashdot article claiming that video gaming is on its way out the door. The next, an article celebrating its sure growth in the future. Then after that, another one saying that it's going away again. And so on.
For fuck's sake, can't we just make up our minds whether the gaming industry is dying or thriving? This is idiotic.
Dangit, typo. "[Adlock]" should read "[Adblock]". Makes a bit of difference.
Yikes, that's a lot of work. If you're using Firefox or Mozilla (sounds like you are), get the adblock extension. It does what you're doing above, only far easier. Find an adserver host you can't stand? Click on the adblock icon, pick the URL that looks most like the ad, optionally modify it, and drop it into adblock's list. No looking at the page source, no closing the browser, no editing a file. You don't even have to reload the page to clear the ads.
Something I've gotten into recently when installing Firefox on a friend/family member's machine is installing adblock and then using vim to munge this hosts file into a form that can be directly imported into AdBlock. Ends up looking something like:Import it into adblock and that takes care of 90% or more of web ads including banners, flash, cover-ads, and those newfangled underlined hover adlinks.
When KDE 3.5 is out, Konqueror is supposedly going to have some facility identical to adblock. Looking forward to that.
Long contracts are how cell companies manage to offer you "free" or low-cost phones, "free" minutes, etc. If contracts are limited to one year, you'll see those sorts of offers disappear or go up in cost.
I'd be more than happy to pay for the phone if there was a provider without the lopsided contracts. The way it is now, every provider locks you into a contract where they change the terms, price, penalties, etc without having to notify the customer. I want to be able to cancel my service at any time and change providers without paying an arm and a leg first. I want to buy a phone and use it with any provider. I don't mind paying a little more for minutes than I do on my land line ($0.025 or so), but getting robbed after accidentally going over n number of minutes per month should be illegal. Free local calls would be nice.
Lastly, I want some kind of quality with the service. It seems like the audio quality of cell phones has been getting worse rather than better. About once a week, a family member or friend calls me up on a dodgy signal and I can't understand a word they're saying. Rather than repeat every sentence three times, I usually just ask them to call me later on a land line and hang right up. I've been getting fewer and fewer of those calls, but probably because of my own efforts rather than those of the cell phone companies.
It is really just totally unprofitable to offer a service that is both reliable and fair?
<rant mode="off">
Mainly, Python is powerful but has a deliberately shallow learning-curve. The most often-cited reasons are the following Python mantras:
- Everything is an object
- Syntax is simple and predictable (but feels a little odd if you're coming from C, C++, Perl, Java, etc)
- There's one obvious way to do it. (Contrast with Perl's, "There's more than one way to do it.")
- Batteries included (comes with a large library of modules)
Pretty sure there are more, but these are the biggies that I can recall. These are the same reasons that many quote for using Ruby as well, but I got around to trying it yet.
I used to be a big fan of Tcl for it's insanely shallow learning curve. (Even more so than Python.) I wrote a usuable Tk (GUI) app within the first hour of even hearing about it. Too bad it didn't really catch on and mature as well as Python and Perl did over the same time-frame because it really is a nifty language.
Okay, I re-read my post and one thing stuck out at me: the eBay and DDoS example was perhaps a poor one. DDoSing a site *is* unfair and I think they would have a legitimate complaint against the attacker in this case, even though the money that they would probably claim to lose would still be an outlandish amount. More appropriate examples would be a network outage, trivial or unintentional attack on an insecure system (firewall fell over due to a port scan), or natural disaster.
I was thinking about just this issue the other day. It's become the unwavering norm for businesses to talk about "losing money" whenever something goes wrong with their business model. For example, if some large online commercial website (say, eBay) gets DDoS'd for a few hours, it is norm and even expected that they start clamoring about how much money they lost by the site being down. But the truth is that they didn't lose money, they were simply unable to make money during that time period. Just because you run a site that makes 5 million dollars a week doesn't mean you sudeenly have a God- or legal-given right to make that money each and every week. It has to be earned. Using the phrase "losing money" implies that it was in the bank account to begin with, which is clearly not the case. Not only that, but with the use of the word "lost," there's the strong implication that it was somehow taken unfairly.
This is one of the things that bugs me the most about the music and movie industry. When they do their "money lost to piracy" numbers, they take the (inflated) number of copies pirated, make the egotistical and wrong assumption that each of those copies would have been a legit purchase, multiply it by some arbitrary cost (many times higher than the retail price of the item), and start spouting about the billions of dollars that were wrongfully taken from them.
Religion doesn't make people happy, it makes people feel safe. (The happiness comes more from the social aspects of religion than from faith itself.)
I dunno, I seem to remember a couple Slashdot stories about this quite awhile ago...
The RIAA (or MPAA? both?) tried to pass a law to make it legal for them to hack into the computers of copyright violators in order to delete the copyrighted content. I don't think this passed, but maybe I'm wrong. Would you seriously believe, however, that deleing a few files would be all the RIAA would do if they had control of your computer and suspected you (or not) of illegally possessing their copyrighted material?
It surely does reveal that their current modus operandi had been in planning since even way back then. They probably realized that the whole hacking into people's computers bit was the weak link and tried to strengthen it by getting a law that would make the music industry more powerful than the CIA.
Don't reply to the first post when you mean to start a new thread.
Yes, we could send robots to the other planets. But we can send robots pretty much anywhere. The whole point to sending people to the farthest reaches of the solar system isn't for gathering scientific evidence, it's because sending people to these kinds of places is a hard task that takes lots of planning, engineering genius, and the invention of technologies that don't even exist yet. It's much harder than sending robots that is what makes it worthwhile. The moon program in decades past should have been proof enough of that.
"My opinion is that it was... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the point of space exploration as a whole? That it's really hard, fraught with danger, and constantly pushes the envelope of what's possible with our technology and ingenuity?
We stunned the world by putting men on the moon, but for chrissakes, that was decades ago. With advancements in technology since then, we should have half the solar system under our belt by now.
Where I work, our rule of thumb is that heavier power supplies are higher quality than lighter ones. While I'm sure this isn't going to be true in every single case, it makes a certain amount of sense. A manufacturer of cheap power supplies is going to try to put the least amount of material and labor into their units as possible. Quality PSU manufacturers tend to put in better components and beefier heatsinks. (Hence the fan(s) can spin slower, resulting in a quieter PSU as well.)
pystically
"physically", rather. Need to use that Google toolbar spellcheck thingy more often.