"The main processing unit in a computer has Millions of transistors, which are like little switches, turning on and off. These switches flip automatically Billions of times a second. Every second Quadrillions of switches flip, and if a single one goes wrong the computer 'crashes'. That's not even counting the Memory, or the Graphics card, or all the extra devices from Hard Drives to Tempurature sensors that are hooked in. All of these switches are controlled by programs that were written by the combined efforts of thousands of people, most of whom have never met each other. I'm continually amazed every second that a modern computer keeps running."
It the US at least, it's the age at the time of offense that matters for sentancing.
I suppose that the UK is like what I heard (possibly incorrectly) about Canada, in that Minors have legal privacy protection from the press, and that the naming of the defendant in this case was not a restriction upon the court, but rather a restriction on the press (being that a Reporter could easily enough find out the name of an underage defendant, but it would be criminal for him to Publish it)
If you put a laser on an rotating mount on an artifical satillite halfway between the earth and the moon, and pointed it such that the dot it generates appears on the earthward side of the moon at one point of it's cycle, and on the surface of the earth at the opposing point of the cycle, and the cycle took less than 2.5 seconds, the dot would be 'moving' faster than the speed of light.
That's why you can play with a cat and a hand-held laser pointer and the dot can move faster then the cat, but smack a cat on the head, and your hand can't escape fast enough to avoid injury.
Keanu Reeves as Grey Fox. (acting skills of a robot) Edward James Olmos as Ocelot. (just because) Ben Stiller as Psycho Mantis. (think Zoolander) Owen Wilson as Solid Snake. (with Ben)
I may be naturally more resistant to cancer than most people, because my Immune system is extra aggressive, with some minor side effects:
My immune system thinks my skin and sinovial(sp?) membranes are cancerous; so they attack, causing psioriasis and arthritis; other possible areas it can attack are, my eyes causing blindness, serotonin (causing migraines, but my doctor thinks it's blood sugar related), my liver (causing death), nerve sheaths (my pain scale goes to 11)...
But, I probably won't die of Cancer... that is, unless my immune suppressent drugs weaken my immune system so much that it can't fight back at all. I've already had two life-threatening infections, and I've gone into shock twice.
other pluses: when I get a cold or flu, I feel better, because my immune system is fighting a real threat (I think), and if I'm not able to work because of it, I get $1500 a month from the government!, unfortunetly, it took the SSA 5 years to process my claim, by which time I've returned to work.
I hear Sharks don't get cancer; probably because their genes are stable.
"Today we stike a blow against those who would allow our children to expose themselves to pornography. By requiring labotomys for all children at the age of 2, we can finally prevent them from being victims of the exploitation industry known as Media, not only will this step prevent them from being able to access pornography via brain implants or on the Internet, it will prevent them from content that describes nudity or violence, or comprehending adult language. While the previous eyeball removing and castration programs proved insufficent, we believe this is the ultimate solution to the problem of child exploitation."
"Children, we are not doing this 'to' you, we are doing it 'for' you."
"Also, there are 100 million PS2s out there... and all of their games are compatible with the PS3. That's 100 million people that won't mind upgrading."
But only 25 million of them still work.
I'm on my 4th PS2 due to hardware failures. I only buy new ones because of my software library.
I know how someone with 1000 movies on Betamax must have felt.
I don't smoke, I keep the PS2's on a hard level surface, I don't move them around too much, but they die faster than hamsters.
(not having owned an XBox, I don't know how they last, but my NES just needs gentle cleaning once in a while)
Kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation...
Microsoft is obviously the most likely able to repair and protect Windows itself.
Should you complain that Honda dosn't allow you to buy an unpainted car, and take it to the paint shop of your choice? and they make it so hard to remove the paint they put on it, you can't just wash it off with water, what a pain. Then, when you get the paint off, it RUSTS! what kind of defective crap is that?
The majority of computer users don't know the differance between a hard drive and a modem.
as for the idea of MS being a monopoly, the only sense in which that is true is the same as any other Trademark/Patent/Copyright holder, being granted a monopoly on what they made. As opposed to the monopolies which the anti-extension law was designed for, such as providers of Telephone, Gas, Cable TV, Sewage, Garbage, Water, Electricity... back when Ma Bell forced people to buy telehones at 10x 'retail' price, Edison only allowing his light bulbs, Stoves made by the gas company...
The government keeps extending IP monopolies, by extending Copyright and Patent durations while the pace of development has increased.
In my mind, Micky Mouse, Windows 95, the older Beatles songs, and MPEG compression should all be public domain at this point.
Considering the general situation of higher quality/smaller market share that Nintendo and Apple share, along with great, innovative user interface design.
Nintendo and Apple both make hardware and software, but don't compete directly, I can't see any anti-trust issues.
They could leverage shared IP/licenses, the next Nintendo console and Apple computer could use the same video chipsets, CPU's, etc. making easy ports for games between the two platforms; a nintendo console could act as an iPod dock, or like an Xbox 360 home media thing (buying iTunes misic from your game console?), or both.
Nintendo could be in charge in Japan, while Apple would be in charge in the US. With Steve Jobs encouraging Disney as a content partner, they could have major exclusives.
If you want to recieve free information over a system that costs money/effort to operate, you'll mostly get what people are willing to pay/work to have you look at.
Which is the best reason for a 'micropayment' or subscription system.
personally, I'd like a system where sites to cluster into overlapping groups for a mass subscription fee to advertisment free pages, where each group is administrated, and profits shared by humans, instead of an automated system.
One small fee would cover all of OSTG, or all of Google, or all of Livejournal... I guess something like MSN's 'Passport' or AOL's 'Screen Name' would have to link a user to a payment, but as long as those systems remain exclusive, instead of overlapping, it can't happen properly.
Properly being like my ATM card, on the back it has logos for "Plus" "Star" and "Interlink" banking networks, and individual ATM's have networks like "Quest" "Paynet" and "Star"; as long as one network matches the transaction can work.
So, Ideally, a User gets an account with Verizon DSL; currently they partner with MSN I think. If instead of just MSN they also linked with AOL and Yahoo for user authentication; and a site accepted authentication from AOL, Google, and Ask.com; the link could work since at least one network matches up. I'm kinda picking companies randomly here, but basically any company you have an existing online billing relationship with could be a provider; iTunes, eBay, Amazon, your ISP, Blizzard, Steam... Not that the user would even care which specific back-end networks are used, I have never had to deal with bank card networks directly, I just deal with my bank.
As long as those partnerships are Exclusive it'll suck for everybody, no single provider would be effective in the marketplace; as a bloated monopoly they would become inefficent and expensive. But many small isolated providers would be useless at making arbitrary connections. what would be useful is several mid sized overlapping providers.
Obviously, like the bank card industry there will have to be some standards; just like Visa account numbers start with '4' and Mastercard with '5' and are all 16 digits, basic things like e-mail addresses being name@site already exist; password requirements would be nice to standardize (as an example, one of my online bank accounts only allows 4-8 characters in a password which must include numbers AND letters, while the other requires 7-15 characters which can ONLY be letters(I use the same password for both, like "Dog17" and "DogSeventeen"))
well, enough ranting; my point is the technology for a spam-free internet exists, it's just too difficult to get people to work together enough for it to happen yet.
My thought is the process itself should be set up to urge openness, such as the GPL requiring derivitive works have source code provided if distributed, and the public being automatically allowed to watch court proceedings.
Require all parties to sign a document stating that and patents held on technology 'X' disclosed in the group shall be licensed at a cost of not more than 'N' per defined unit. (Unit being one of Media, Creation Device, Consuming Device, Broadcast rights...)
The problem with that being, that often large corporations have communication barriers. take for example Sony Playstations not using Sony memory sticks; just because the person from Microsoft's DirectX group at the the meeting fully intends to stick to the developed specification dosn't mean that another developer in the Netshow group will implement it the same way. One big problem Microsoft has is keeping backwards compatibility with their own Betas.
Imagine some company develops a peice of software to run on Vista Beta, using an interface based on a open standard that's still in development, but then the standard is finalized in a slightly different way, so for Vista Release, the API changes to the new standard, at the same time Company X's product is launched. End result the user can't use the software.
Actual cases:
in 1995 AOL's software took a 32 bit pointer from Windows, and scrambled the upper 16 bits, so that on Windows 3.1 it worked, but on Windows 95 it would not, since MSN was just being launched, breaking the competition's product would have looked very bad, so MS added a hack to un-mangle those pointers.
SimCity would use memory after de-allocating it, so MS changed the way memory is allocated to that in newer OS's so SimCity would still work.
Some registry keys are added by optional windows components, keys that point to important directories like "C:\windows\system32", some developers read the names of the directory from the registry, instead of calling the API functions for that purpose, the result being that if that optional component is not installed, the 3rd party software doesn't work.
Personally, I think MS needs to release another version of Windows, being an Idealized windows. a version with all the backwards compatibility junk cut out, all depreciated API's removed, and no optional features. The target market being Developers, and the requirement that to release a new product with the works-with-Windows logo attached it MUST work on that version. That would really help prune out the bad obselete code out there.
It isn't safe to use LAMP. GNU's fiscal future is certain. They've based their entire organization around giving software away for free. It would be a bad idea to use LAMP for a production system only to have the developers get 'real jobs'.
Sure, you could convert your LAMP-based application to SCAMP if that happens, but doing that on a production system is very costly due to all the manpower to document the old system and all the conversions from unsupported formats.
You should ask yourself, what advantages does LAMP offer over SCAMP that warrants the risk of using a platform from a bunch of communist hippies? Are there even any such advantages at all?
Slashdot Mirror
Do both.
"The main processing unit in a computer has Millions of transistors, which are like little switches, turning on and off. These switches flip automatically Billions of times a second. Every second Quadrillions of switches flip, and if a single one goes wrong the computer 'crashes'. That's not even counting the Memory, or the Graphics card, or all the extra devices from Hard Drives to Tempurature sensors that are hooked in. All of these switches are controlled by programs that were written by the combined efforts of thousands of people, most of whom have never met each other. I'm continually amazed every second that a modern computer keeps running."
It the US at least, it's the age at the time of offense that matters for sentancing.
I suppose that the UK is like what I heard (possibly incorrectly) about Canada, in that Minors have legal privacy protection from the press, and that the naming of the defendant in this case was not a restriction upon the court, but rather a restriction on the press (being that a Reporter could easily enough find out the name of an underage defendant, but it would be criminal for him to Publish it)
If you put a laser on an rotating mount on an artifical satillite halfway between the earth and the moon, and pointed it such that the dot it generates appears on the earthward side of the moon at one point of it's cycle, and on the surface of the earth at the opposing point of the cycle, and the cycle took less than 2.5 seconds, the dot would be 'moving' faster than the speed of light.
That's why you can play with a cat and a hand-held laser pointer and the dot can move faster then the cat, but smack a cat on the head, and your hand can't escape fast enough to avoid injury.
Why can they now name him?
I thought the general principle under which juvinile records are sealed is to protect someone from being punished for life for a childhood mistake.
Or the driver disc.
(man Slashdot's software blows, can't type fast, or it deletes your message)
Keanu Reeves as Grey Fox. (acting skills of a robot)
Edward James Olmos as Ocelot. (just because)
Ben Stiller as Psycho Mantis. (think Zoolander)
Owen Wilson as Solid Snake. (with Ben)
I'll stick to just watching Stargate SG-1, not actually trying to become a Go'uld.
I may be naturally more resistant to cancer than most people, because my Immune system is extra aggressive, with some minor side effects:
My immune system thinks my skin and sinovial(sp?) membranes are cancerous; so they attack, causing psioriasis and arthritis; other possible areas it can attack are, my eyes causing blindness, serotonin (causing migraines, but my doctor thinks it's blood sugar related), my liver (causing death), nerve sheaths (my pain scale goes to 11)...
But, I probably won't die of Cancer... that is, unless my immune suppressent drugs weaken my immune system so much that it can't fight back at all. I've already had two life-threatening infections, and I've gone into shock twice.
other pluses: when I get a cold or flu, I feel better, because my immune system is fighting a real threat (I think), and if I'm not able to work because of it, I get $1500 a month from the government!, unfortunetly, it took the SSA 5 years to process my claim, by which time I've returned to work.
I hear Sharks don't get cancer; probably because their genes are stable.
(CAPTCHA: biopsies)
Because now, thanks to this publicity, I'm interested in the game, and I'm going to buy a copy, and I don't want the plot spoiled.
"Today we stike a blow against those who would allow our children to expose themselves to pornography. By requiring labotomys for all children at the age of 2, we can finally prevent them from being victims of the exploitation industry known as Media, not only will this step prevent them from being able to access pornography via brain implants or on the Internet, it will prevent them from content that describes nudity or violence, or comprehending adult language. While the previous eyeball removing and castration programs proved insufficent, we believe this is the ultimate solution to the problem of child exploitation."
"Children, we are not doing this 'to' you, we are doing it 'for' you."
"Also, there are 100 million PS2s out there... and all of their games are compatible with the PS3. That's 100 million people that won't mind upgrading."
But only 25 million of them still work.
I'm on my 4th PS2 due to hardware failures. I only buy new ones because of my software library.
I know how someone with 1000 movies on Betamax must have felt.
I don't smoke, I keep the PS2's on a hard level surface, I don't move them around too much, but they die faster than hamsters.
(not having owned an XBox, I don't know how they last, but my NES just needs gentle cleaning once in a while)
I'm looking forward to a Wii.
Migratory:
adj: used of animals that move seasonally; "migratory birds"
This is why noone imports the Japanese games I really want to play.
Godzilla vs Russian-Wolfzilla?
scary part is, migratory animals; imagine a goose with bird flu getting a few random extra mutations.
Kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation...
Microsoft is obviously the most likely able to repair and protect Windows itself.
Should you complain that Honda dosn't allow you to buy an unpainted car, and take it to the paint shop of your choice? and they make it so hard to remove the paint they put on it, you can't just wash it off with water, what a pain. Then, when you get the paint off, it RUSTS! what kind of defective crap is that?
The majority of computer users don't know the differance between a hard drive and a modem.
as for the idea of MS being a monopoly, the only sense in which that is true is the same as any other Trademark/Patent/Copyright holder, being granted a monopoly on what they made. As opposed to the monopolies which the anti-extension law was designed for, such as providers of Telephone, Gas, Cable TV, Sewage, Garbage, Water, Electricity... back when Ma Bell forced people to buy telehones at 10x 'retail' price, Edison only allowing his light bulbs, Stoves made by the gas company...
The government keeps extending IP monopolies, by extending Copyright and Patent durations while the pace of development has increased.
In my mind, Micky Mouse, Windows 95, the older Beatles songs, and MPEG compression should all be public domain at this point.
Apple/Nintendo.
Considering the general situation of higher quality/smaller market share that Nintendo and Apple share, along with great, innovative user interface design.
Nintendo and Apple both make hardware and software, but don't compete directly, I can't see any anti-trust issues.
They could leverage shared IP/licenses, the next Nintendo console and Apple computer could use the same video chipsets, CPU's, etc. making easy ports for games between the two platforms; a nintendo console could act as an iPod dock, or like an Xbox 360 home media thing (buying iTunes misic from your game console?), or both.
Nintendo could be in charge in Japan, while Apple would be in charge in the US. With Steve Jobs encouraging Disney as a content partner, they could have major exclusives.
If you want to recieve free information over a system that costs money/effort to operate, you'll mostly get what people are willing to pay/work to have you look at.
Which is the best reason for a 'micropayment' or subscription system.
personally, I'd like a system where sites to cluster into overlapping groups for a mass subscription fee to advertisment free pages, where each group is administrated, and profits shared by humans, instead of an automated system.
One small fee would cover all of OSTG, or all of Google, or all of Livejournal... I guess something like MSN's 'Passport' or AOL's 'Screen Name' would have to link a user to a payment, but as long as those systems remain exclusive, instead of overlapping, it can't happen properly.
Properly being like my ATM card, on the back it has logos for "Plus" "Star" and "Interlink" banking networks, and individual ATM's have networks like "Quest" "Paynet" and "Star"; as long as one network matches the transaction can work.
So, Ideally, a User gets an account with Verizon DSL; currently they partner with MSN I think. If instead of just MSN they also linked with AOL and Yahoo for user authentication; and a site accepted authentication from AOL, Google, and Ask.com; the link could work since at least one network matches up. I'm kinda picking companies randomly here, but basically any company you have an existing online billing relationship with could be a provider; iTunes, eBay, Amazon, your ISP, Blizzard, Steam... Not that the user would even care which specific back-end networks are used, I have never had to deal with bank card networks directly, I just deal with my bank.
As long as those partnerships are Exclusive it'll suck for everybody, no single provider would be effective in the marketplace; as a bloated monopoly they would become inefficent and expensive. But many small isolated providers would be useless at making arbitrary connections. what would be useful is several mid sized overlapping providers.
Obviously, like the bank card industry there will have to be some standards; just like Visa account numbers start with '4' and Mastercard with '5' and are all 16 digits, basic things like e-mail addresses being name@site already exist; password requirements would be nice to standardize (as an example, one of my online bank accounts only allows 4-8 characters in a password which must include numbers AND letters, while the other requires 7-15 characters which can ONLY be letters(I use the same password for both, like "Dog17" and "DogSeventeen"))
well, enough ranting; my point is the technology for a spam-free internet exists, it's just too difficult to get people to work together enough for it to happen yet.
Not as treasonous as a Nazi soldier that broke the chain of command and let some Jews escape.
Officials have the reponsibility to disobey illegal orders.
My thought is the process itself should be set up to urge openness, such as the GPL requiring derivitive works have source code provided if distributed, and the public being automatically allowed to watch court proceedings.
Require all parties to sign a document stating that and patents held on technology 'X' disclosed in the group shall be licensed at a cost of not more than 'N' per defined unit. (Unit being one of Media, Creation Device, Consuming Device, Broadcast rights...)
The problem with that being, that often large corporations have communication barriers. take for example Sony Playstations not using Sony memory sticks; just because the person from Microsoft's DirectX group at the the meeting fully intends to stick to the developed specification dosn't mean that another developer in the Netshow group will implement it the same way. One big problem Microsoft has is keeping backwards compatibility with their own Betas.
Imagine some company develops a peice of software to run on Vista Beta, using an interface based on a open standard that's still in development, but then the standard is finalized in a slightly different way, so for Vista Release, the API changes to the new standard, at the same time Company X's product is launched. End result the user can't use the software.
Actual cases:
in 1995 AOL's software took a 32 bit pointer from Windows, and scrambled the upper 16 bits, so that on Windows 3.1 it worked, but on Windows 95 it would not, since MSN was just being launched, breaking the competition's product would have looked very bad, so MS added a hack to un-mangle those pointers.
SimCity would use memory after de-allocating it, so MS changed the way memory is allocated to that in newer OS's so SimCity would still work.
Some registry keys are added by optional windows components, keys that point to important directories like "C:\windows\system32", some developers read the names of the directory from the registry, instead of calling the API functions for that purpose, the result being that if that optional component is not installed, the 3rd party software doesn't work.
Personally, I think MS needs to release another version of Windows, being an Idealized windows. a version with all the backwards compatibility junk cut out, all depreciated API's removed, and no optional features. The target market being Developers, and the requirement that to release a new product with the works-with-Windows logo attached it MUST work on that version. That would really help prune out the bad obselete code out there.
If a group starts excluding others, is it really 'Open'?
Apples Corps used to sell Music, SCO used to sell Software, aside from that, what's the difference?
Any sufficently advanced physics engine is indistinguisible from scripted events.
Should have used 912.
It isn't safe to use LAMP. GNU's fiscal future is certain. They've based their entire organization around giving software away for free. It would be a bad idea to use LAMP for a production system only to have the developers get 'real jobs'.
Sure, you could convert your LAMP-based application to SCAMP if that happens, but doing that on a production system is very costly due to all the manpower to document the old system and all the conversions from unsupported formats.
You should ask yourself, what advantages does LAMP offer over SCAMP that warrants the risk of using a platform from a bunch of communist hippies? Are there even any such advantages at all?