Smells like a big coincidence that a mechanism that stabilises the attitude of the spacecraft happens to exactly balance out, in every case, the effect of some unknown error in the laws of gravity (or whatever). And, given that the cause of the effect on Pioneer is unknown, why pick on spin stabilisation as the thing that is preventing it from happening to other craft?
In other words: no, the voyager probes don't show the same effect. Spinning or not spinning is hardly going to make it hard to detect being off course by hundreds of thousands of miles.
On the original IBM PC with a CGA adapter, you had to wait until the vertical flyback interval before updating the video memory. Otherwise the hardware couldn't keep up with sending data to the monitor (or something), and the monitor displayed snow.
I can't even find animated wallpaper anymore, which I don't really understand...
Many of the programs in/usr/X11R6/libexec/xscreensaver will run nicely on the root window if started with the "-root" option.
Or try "mplayer -rootwin -loop 0 <filename>"
I've never heard of Royal Assent being withheld, so this is a purely theoretical check or balance.
Actually, Wikipedia says that it was withheld in the case of the "Military Action Against Iraq (Parliamentary Approval) Bill" in 1999; since the purpose of that legislation was to stop the government going to war without parlimentary approval, it's not a hopeful precedent.
The House of Lords is slowly being destroyed by the government: a few days ago they had a scheme to change the voting rules in parliament, which would have prevented MPs from rejecting government proposals for House of Lords reform.
And the opposition party in parliament is totally ineffective; I would bet money that within 20 years we will have a single-party state here in the UK.
They don't sit behind the screens watching thousands of people walking to their jobs
Actually, they do. Haven't you noticed all those cameras in the street? Didn't you realize that thousands of people are employed to watch the images from those cameras, all the time?
Traditionally, the first thing you do when you invade is to bomb the television station. This is becoming less effective now that people have access to alternative sources of information: shutting down everyone's computers will be a valuable tool for invading armies, along with anti-satellite weapons for taking out satellite TV.
There is, as of yet, no laws prohibiting thinking about commiting a crime.
Only because thinking cannot (yet) be detected. There most certainly are laws against discussing the idea of committing a crime with someone else (i.e. conspiracy). If private thoughts could be detected, it would be a logical extension of this idea to criminalize thinking about a crime even if you planned to do it on your own.
In fact, this has been proposed already: in the UK I've read a suggestion that mentally ill people should be imprisoned, if their illness is such that they are likely to commit some crime in the future.
Actually, the security of signatures is in some ways better than chip-and-pin, from your point of view.
If someone steals your card and uses it, you simply repudiate the transactions. You can easily prove that they are not genuine, because the thief will not have been able to forge your signature.
If someone steals my chip-and-pin card and manages to use it, the bank will charge me for the transactions, and will simple laugh at me if I complain. Without a signature on the sales slip, I have got no proof that the transactions are fraudulent.
The security is certainly better for the bank: they can say "fraud has been reduced to zero". But this just means that the loss has been borne by me, not by them.
The point is that John Reid's department has been shown over and over in the last few months to be incompetent. Only yesterday there were headlines about "this country has the worse crime in Europe". So now the minister has to be seen to be doing something. It really doesn't matter what: he just wants some publicity.
Since these programs are transmitted in the UK without any DRM, there's no point in bothering to try to break the DRM on these downloads. People will just record the transmissions instead.
So non-UK residents will have to get their Dr Who episodes off bittorrent, just like they do now.
Come to think of it, that will work for us in the UK too. So what's the point of the DRM?
In South Africa the 3.5 inch disks were nicknamed "stiffies". This led to a certain amount of hilarity when some South African people talked to us in the UK about them.
Java7 will only get faster
Yes, and Java 53 will be really good, and everyone will like it.
In the meanwhile, we've still got customers stuck on 1.3, because our "write once, run anywhere" code doesn't run on 1.4, and it's too much effort to puzzle out why because Sun's runtime is just such a mess.
It's certainly possible for Java code to run fast, once it's been through the just-in-time compiler, i.e. once it has been compiled to native code. That would surely be true for any language. But that means that you have to load up the whole of the compiler into memory in order to run your program. This is fine on a server, so long as you don't care about the cost of memory. It's a disaster on a client machine.
If there's an investigation needed, why would Paypal guarantee to release the money after 180 days? An investigation might take much longer than that, or be much quicker. And at the end of the investigation, it might become clear that the money is laundered (or whatever) and should not be released at all.
The only reason that I can think of for the fixed 180 day term is that Paypal has got a list of "standard excuses" for holding on to other people's money for a fixed period of time, so that it can bank it and earn interest for itself.
Actually that's true of Tesco: they have a policy of "the cashier always takes the card from the customer and swipes it", and they've actually crippled the pin-pads that they present to the customer so that if you insert you card into them, it doesn't work.
Sainsburys have the same policy, but haven't crippled their pin-pads, so if you just ignore the cashier trying to grab your card, and put into the pin-pad instead, it works fine.
Same in the UK. They have a limited amount of time (6 months IIRC) to collect the goods at their own expense: after that they become yours.
The company I work for got a nice IBM server like this, because someone sent it to us by mistake.
The law was introduced because companies would send out expensive goods (such as sets of encyclopedias) and then demand that people either pay for them, or send them back immediately.
Slashdot Mirror
i.e. it also corrects the course.
Smells like a big coincidence that a mechanism that stabilises the attitude of the spacecraft happens to exactly balance out, in every case, the effect of some unknown error in the laws of gravity (or whatever). And, given that the cause of the effect on Pioneer is unknown, why pick on spin stabilisation as the thing that is preventing it from happening to other craft?
In other words: no, the voyager probes don't show the same effect. Spinning or not spinning is hardly going to make it hard to detect being off course by hundreds of thousands of miles.
Since when is XML a new usage model requiring advances in processor design?
Since it became bloatware that is capable of wasting 90% of the processing power of a modern computer.
</sarcasm>
On the original IBM PC with a CGA adapter, you had to wait until the vertical flyback interval before updating the video memory. Otherwise the hardware couldn't keep up with sending data to the monitor (or something), and the monitor displayed snow.
I can't even find animated wallpaper anymore, which I don't really understand... /usr/X11R6/libexec/xscreensaver will run nicely on the root window if started with the "-root" option.
Many of the programs in
Or try "mplayer -rootwin -loop 0 <filename>"
Anyone else here remember MP/M ?
I've never heard of Royal Assent being withheld, so this is a purely theoretical check or balance.
Actually, Wikipedia says that it was withheld in the case of the "Military Action Against Iraq (Parliamentary Approval) Bill" in 1999; since the purpose of that legislation was to stop the government going to war without parlimentary approval, it's not a hopeful precedent.
The House of Lords is slowly being destroyed by the government: a few days ago they had a scheme to change the voting rules in parliament, which would have prevented MPs from rejecting government proposals for House of Lords reform.
And the opposition party in parliament is totally ineffective; I would bet money that within 20 years we will have a single-party state here in the UK.
They don't sit behind the screens watching thousands of people walking to their jobs
Actually, they do. Haven't you noticed all those cameras in the street? Didn't you realize that thousands of people are employed to watch the images from those cameras, all the time?
Traditionally, the first thing you do when you invade is to bomb the television station.
This is becoming less effective now that people have access to alternative sources of information: shutting down everyone's computers will be a valuable tool for invading armies, along with anti-satellite weapons for taking out satellite TV.
Those people should have gone to the vets. We got our cat microchipped for less that one tenth of that price.
And what colour background do you see while upgrading to Java 5?
It's a good general rule of thumb with Java that, whatever you want to do, it can be done once you've upgraded to the next version.
There is, as of yet, no laws prohibiting thinking about commiting a crime.
Only because thinking cannot (yet) be detected. There most certainly are laws against discussing the idea of committing a crime with someone else (i.e. conspiracy). If private thoughts could be detected, it would be a logical extension of this idea to criminalize thinking about a crime even if you planned to do it on your own.
In fact, this has been proposed already: in the UK I've read a suggestion that mentally ill people should be imprisoned, if their illness is such that they are likely to commit some crime in the future.
Actually, the security of signatures is in some ways better than chip-and-pin, from your point of view.
If someone steals your card and uses it, you simply repudiate the transactions. You can easily prove that they are not genuine, because the thief will not have been able to forge your signature.
If someone steals my chip-and-pin card and manages to use it, the bank will charge me for the transactions, and will simple laugh at me if I complain. Without a signature on the sales slip, I have got no proof that the transactions are fraudulent.
The security is certainly better for the bank: they can say "fraud has been reduced to zero". But this just means that the loss has been borne by me, not by them.
No, that's not the point.
The point is that John Reid's department has been shown over and over in the last few months to be incompetent. Only yesterday there were headlines about "this country has the worse crime in Europe". So now the minister has to be seen to be doing something. It really doesn't matter what: he just wants some publicity.
Since these programs are transmitted in the UK without any DRM, there's no point in bothering to try to break the DRM on these downloads. People will just record the transmissions instead.
So non-UK residents will have to get their Dr Who episodes off bittorrent, just like they do now.
Come to think of it, that will work for us in the UK too. So what's the point of the DRM?
In South Africa the 3.5 inch disks were nicknamed "stiffies". This led to a certain amount of hilarity when some South African people talked to us in the UK about them.
Java7 will only get faster
Yes, and Java 53 will be really good, and everyone will like it.
In the meanwhile, we've still got customers stuck on 1.3, because our "write once, run anywhere" code doesn't run on 1.4, and it's too much effort to puzzle out why because Sun's runtime is just such a mess.
It's certainly possible for Java code to run fast, once it's been through the just-in-time compiler, i.e. once it has been compiled to native code. That would surely be true for any language. But that means that you have to load up the whole of the compiler into memory in order to run your program. This is fine on a server, so long as you don't care about the cost of memory. It's a disaster on a client machine.
In other words, as ever with Java, Sun has hyped up interest with promises that it has yet to deliver.
Or 1366 K for those of us who actually use SI units and can add.
If there's an investigation needed, why would Paypal guarantee to release the money after 180 days? An investigation might take much longer than that, or be much quicker. And at the end of the investigation, it might become clear that the money is laundered (or whatever) and should not be released at all.
The only reason that I can think of for the fixed 180 day term is that Paypal has got a list of "standard excuses" for holding on to other people's money for a fixed period of time, so that it can bank it and earn interest for itself.
Actually that's true of Tesco: they have a policy of "the cashier always takes the card from the customer and swipes it", and they've actually crippled the pin-pads that they present to the customer so that if you insert you card into them, it doesn't work.
Sainsburys have the same policy, but haven't crippled their pin-pads, so if you just ignore the cashier trying to grab your card, and put into the pin-pad instead, it works fine.
Seems reasonable. After all, 2 + 2 = 5 for sufficiently large values of 2.
Server virtualization? Innovative??
Yes, back in 1972 it was.
Same in the UK. They have a limited amount of time (6 months IIRC) to collect the goods at their own expense: after that they become yours.
The company I work for got a nice IBM server like this, because someone sent it to us by mistake.
The law was introduced because companies would send out expensive goods (such as sets of encyclopedias) and then demand that people either pay for them, or send them back immediately.