"I bet he's skeptical about anthropomorphic climate change too"
That is AnthropoGENIC climate change, you ignorant clod!
Clearly you are completely unprepared to discuss the scientific merits of a Nixonian speechwriter's arguments with regards to the origins of man and the universe if you cannot distinguish between climate change that Comes from man from climate change that Looks like man. Its Obvious!
Perhaps you fail to notice that this is a long term pseudo-random number generator. A subject near and dear to the hearts of every/.er. Not bad considering the hardware they back in the day had was only slide rules and abacuses.
can they make me a sword out of uranium? Now THAT would be sweet.
Sure would, until you meet another guy with ANOTHER Uranium sword and the inevitable fight ensues. One good blade on blade whack and everyone for MILES around will know about it.
(I assume that you are typing about medicine; if you are typing about sex, have you not heard of celibacy?
Most people on this forum are, uh, "intimately" familiar with that term.)
Sex would be nice. I meant companionship. Talking to yourself 100 million miles from the nearest person can be kinda lonely.
Are they really flushing the sediment behind the dam, or just eroding the banks near the floodgates to redeposit it further downstream?
I realize that some sediment will leave the dam. But, really most sediment from upstream drops out of the flow when the water slows as it enters Lake Powell. The sediment near the dam has been there for years, since the dam was new and the lake first filled. If you look at the released water, it is significantly clearer than the muddy stuff entering the lake upstream.
McLane talks about psychology differences of current astronauts vs the US astronauts of the 1960s and the Russian cosmonauts.
Spending time talking about how the old guys had the right stuff and spirit will carry them through and make the difference is just ya-ya silliness in place of real thought. That is the same kind of thinking that convinced the French that light artillery was just the ticket to face the German threat. The French assumed (naturally) that their soldiers could and would overcome any burden with their miraculous Esprit. Worked really well for them.
Real "problems" have real solutions based in the real world. I disagree completely about the Right Stuff fluff, but in any case, today's astronauts are the ones you have. Deal.
But the Truth is VERY damaging! That must be clear to even the most innocent eyes. The Mayor's reputation will be irrevocably damaged if these truths are allowed to go uncontested in the public mind. Wikipedia is obviously liable for any lessening of his reputation in Florence when the people there know what he does behind the scenes.
He has an Iconoclastic view of the world, He pulls obscure facts out of nowhere to make trivial debating points, He thinks ThePowerStructure is out to ruin everything, He knows how everyone else should run their lives, And he's a total Karma Whore.
A C&D letter is no more than a nasty letter from a lawyer asking (no matter how it is worded) you to quit doing something his client doesn't like. In other words, really expensive toilet paper.
A C&D ORDER on the other hand, comes from a court and you'd better do what it says or risk pissing off the judge. Almost always a bad idea.
In any case, a C&D Letter can be responded to by a letter of your own back to the sender requesting "clarification", setting off a torrent (:-) ) of correspondence that could level a forest while consuming time as you continue to do as you please. Or you could just use it to pre-emptively go to court and threaten the sender with attempting to interfere with your business/life/whatever by harassing you. And you will have the letter/evidence in hand, signed by the sender.
And of course, in the greatest of Slashdot Traditions, IANAL.
"4 times the usefulness" is a bit of NASA doublespeak. They plan a mission in terms of Primary Mission and Extended Mission. Primary Mission is based on the bare minimum, critical science measurements that should or must be taken in order to make the mission worthwhile. The same sort of thinking that goes, "if the house were on fire, what things would I grab on my way out the door?". The time of the mission and engineering of the spacecraft is set around guaranteeing this stuff happens. As you might expect, this results in extreme overdesign in some respects, which leads to: The Extended Mission. The Extended Mission is all the things you want to do AFTER the Primary goals have been hit. They get prioritized and executed in phases over an Extended time. This is more like, "a flood will probably hit the house in two to three days. What should I move out, just in case, and what should go first?"
I got caught up in a bidding war once. A collectible item, in great condition and I had the money to buy it. Actually the complete set. The bidding got up to $600 when I realized I was out of my freaking mind!! What in Hell was I thinking??? I can get this for less, it isn't THAT rare!!
For the next several hours I prayed that another fool would come along and rescue me. He finally did, and out bid me. I was happy to let him have his new jewels (Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, hardbound, 1st UK Printing, signed, brand new in wraps). I found them later for half what I had bid on eBay.
Its the same old story, never fall in love. You do stupid things that you may not live to regret.
Nope. Extending the auction raises the uncertainty for the buyer, and that is bad for business.
They never know if their bid will be enough, and they never know when the item will finally be theirs. So the market is less attractive, and fewer people will spend time or money there. The uncertainty is somewhat true even with what eBay has now. But even with Sniping you have finality. You know that at H Hour on D Day, you will or will not be the proud owner of the piece of crap you are trying to buy. If you won, great. If you lost, you move on to the next best one. But if the bidding just goes on and on, you have to defend your position, or be outbid and move on. That might seem to lead to higher fees for the seller, but actually it leads to frustration and fewer bidders, since they can just go to a brick and mortar store and get it for the same price with less headache. And perhaps a better return policy.
Always remember, the vast majority of people shop on eBay looking for a perceived bargain. If the sale price begins to noticeably match physical stores, why would people take on the extra delay and extra risk of online shopping from some little guy running a mail order business?
"and how many analog ones in particular - (the sooner they die the better)"
Analog cable isn't going anywhere. Analog Broadcast TV may be going away (that story isn't finished yet), but analog cable to the home will be around for quite a while. The cable companies and their customers are going to very quickly realize that the cable company can serve as the Digital Converter box. All those old sets just need a cable connection and they will live a new life in the digital TV era. No need for all the subscribers to buy separate converter boxes. The cable company does it for you when they shove the signal down the line.
That will be an interesting time. All broadcast will be digital. The cable company will convert some of it back to analog, ship it plus scrambled digital to you, then charge you (again) for a digital converter box to descramble the digital portion of the cable signal so you can see it all on your TV.
"I've switched to Ubuntu, and haven't looked back since."
That is EXACTLY how it should be. I love the cool techie DIY of computers too. But ultimately it is a tool that is supposed to do something besides occupy my time. It needs to move out of development and into operations and production. The users, the people that can benefit from computer technology, don't want to build a computer or the OS behind it or maintain any of it, they want a magic wand that solves some problem for them. The maintenance is just a (small) price they are willing to pay to get the wand.
Having everyone pulling power willy-nilly from a facility with limited output
You mean people SHOULDN'T draw the power they need, to live the life they think appropriate for themself?
See, this problem was detected many years ago, so we invented this thing called "Engineering" to deal with it. People who practice "Engineering" do things like estimate the expected load, build production and distribution facilities for that load, find back up sources of supply for that load to increase reliability, then maintain and improve that system to stay ahead of the actual demand. This "Engineering" thing was a really remarkable breakthrough. Completely eliminated the need for that rationing thing you seem to be heading for.
So I guess that does make the idea a lot more reasonable, although I would still rather feel that if your power grid can't always deal with the electricity demand, then it's the power grid that needs updating - on the other hand, this probably both cheaper and more enviromentally friendly.
No it makes it LESS reasonable. When people are cold, they can always wrap up in more blankets, quilts, downy covers, whatever. When they are HOT, all they can do is strip to the skin, then broil. There was an Aesop fable about that same topic. The only reason the grid can't deal with the demand is 1) some residual Enron style power manipulation, and 2) deferred maintenance (pocketing repair funds as dividends) that shows up when a transformer or substation blows up.
Anyway, the electric companies here in California already have a voluntary energy cycling program, where they shut down home and commercial Air Conditioning for 15 minutes per hour. The Key word here being Voluntary. The people who feel they can tolerate it sign up for the program, and get a rate discount in return. Meanwhile people who need their cool, like convalescent homes, elderly homeowners, nurseries, and computer geeks with garage data centers, just draw all the power they need.
A rolling blackout of 1 - 2 hours is bad, but being over temperature all days, at the mercy of the power company is going to be worse. I can't believe they want the liability.
The nice thing about Silverlight is that it is a breeze to program and work with.
I think, once the initial knee-jerk anti-MS crud is past, people won't mind.
Is this another grand attempt by MS to "embrace and extend" an existing technology (HTML/XML), and thus to corrupt and extinguish it?
I fully admit to having no idea what Silverlight is. We are pretty much plain vanilla HTML, with Javascript and SQL apps here. No Flash, no ActiveX.
DOD makes extensive use of modeling and simulation. That is clearly no secret. The difference between commercial gaming and useful training simulations is the entertainment aspect, as the article states. Real Life, as we all know, is not Entertaining when it comes to Real Work. Actually carrying a weighted field pack, up and down hills, through brush, up stairs, wading streams, drop to the ground, run and roll for cover, etc. all take effort, and sweat, and physical coordination. See Kinesthetic learning It might be exciting (especially when the other guy is shooting at you), fulfilling, and "fun" in an intellectual way, but not entertaining.
Most importantly, Video games don't do that with any accuracy at all. They can show you what it looks like, they can help you learn the approximate timing, they can maybe remind you to keep looking around for more bad guys and not just focus on the one in front of you. But that is all. At best it shortens the training time needed in the real world training course, much like a football coach has a "chalk talk" in a classroom before you suit up and take the field. Worse, too much application of simulation can induce negative training, in short, teaching them to do the wrong thing in order to win the game.
As for the Industry taking cues from the DOD, I wish they would. For starters the Physics models used in gaming are a joke and have been for years. If police and soldiers and criminals in real life could run like they do in games, shootouts would look like the Superhero Olympics. Every car chase would be the Indy 500 Cross Country Demolition Derby. If the aliens ever show up, they'd have good reason to want humans stomped out, we'd be too dammed dangerous! No, Game designers might get ideas from military scenarios (Call to Duty 1 - N anyone?), but they aren't using real situations. And if anyone could even vaguely show the FPS games were imprinting "Go Army" on any brains, major heads would roll. The fact the school shooters were using the games just shows how "out of it" they were. They didn't know the games weren't useful or accurate for training, so they used them, which somehow means the games were responsible after all.
Thompson is just taking out some ire on innocent bystanders for doing something he already hates. Yet another example of a political control freak.
I just tried it over at Network Solutions (took three words and glued them together). The made up name wasn't registered. They not only offered to register the name for me, but it also offered me common Misspellings that would be a near match, common search term names similar to the one I queried, and Premium names that are already available for sale, all on the same registration page. How much of a stretch is it to assume they track this kind of thing and pass it on to someone to register?
So is your complaint that the laws are about non-tangible things, that there is more than one kind of thing that is non-tangible, or that you have trouble understanding the proliferation of laws? Or maybe this story just needed a better title and all would be well?
None of these has a satisfying solution. But at least with the last you can appeal directly to Taco and maybe get him to hire better editors.
By the way, for tangible property, there are various laws governing the use and rights in property too. The big difference, Personal and Real Property is the most obvious one. Personal property has any number of governing rules (cars vs firearms vs Mercury containing materials vs boom boxes at 11pm, etc.) and Real property does too (estates and appurtenances and easements, etc.)
Since the concept of intellectual property is almost completely meaningless,
There is an amazingly large amount of statute and case law written around this almost meaningless concept. Not to mention the larger amount of popular and professional literature, of which the Wikipedia article you yourself cite is barely the first flyspec.
Face it, Intellectual Property exists and people take it seriously if they want to get along in the real world. All the wishing in the world won't make it go away.
Slashdot Mirror
That is AnthropoGENIC climate change, you ignorant clod!
Clearly you are completely unprepared to discuss the scientific merits of a Nixonian speechwriter's arguments with regards to the origins of man and the universe if you cannot distinguish between climate change that Comes from man from climate change that Looks like man. Its Obvious!
Perhaps you fail to notice that this is a long term pseudo-random number generator. A subject near and dear to the hearts of every /.er. Not bad considering the hardware they back in the day had was only slide rules and abacuses.
Root of a whole STAR system! SWEET!
Sure would, until you meet another guy with ANOTHER Uranium sword and the inevitable fight ensues. One good blade on blade whack and everyone for MILES around will know about it.
Most people on this forum are, uh, "intimately" familiar with that term.)
Sex would be nice. I meant companionship. Talking to yourself 100 million miles from the nearest person can be kinda lonely.
I realize that some sediment will leave the dam. But, really most sediment from upstream drops out of the flow when the water slows as it enters Lake Powell. The sediment near the dam has been there for years, since the dam was new and the lake first filled. If you look at the released water, it is significantly clearer than the muddy stuff entering the lake upstream.
Spending time talking about how the old guys had the right stuff and spirit will carry them through and make the difference is just ya-ya silliness in place of real thought. That is the same kind of thinking that convinced the French that light artillery was just the ticket to face the German threat. The French assumed (naturally) that their soldiers could and would overcome any burden with their miraculous Esprit. Worked really well for them.
Real "problems" have real solutions based in the real world. I disagree completely about the Right Stuff fluff, but in any case, today's astronauts are the ones you have. Deal.
Then it would be a one-way trip for two (or more) wouldn't it?
see also: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062827/
But the Truth is VERY damaging! That must be clear to even the most innocent eyes. The Mayor's reputation will be irrevocably damaged if these truths are allowed to go uncontested in the public mind. Wikipedia is obviously liable for any lessening of his reputation in Florence when the people there know what he does behind the scenes.
He has an Iconoclastic view of the world,
He pulls obscure facts out of nowhere to make trivial debating points,
He thinks ThePowerStructure is out to ruin everything,
He knows how everyone else should run their lives,
And he's a total Karma Whore.
A C&D ORDER on the other hand, comes from a court and you'd better do what it says or risk pissing off the judge. Almost always a bad idea.
In any case, a C&D Letter can be responded to by a letter of your own back to the sender requesting "clarification", setting off a torrent ( :-) ) of correspondence that could level a forest while consuming time as you continue to do as you please. Or you could just use it to pre-emptively go to court and threaten the sender with attempting to interfere with your business/life/whatever by harassing you. And you will have the letter/evidence in hand, signed by the sender.
And of course, in the greatest of Slashdot Traditions, IANAL.
Sometimes you get the Pounds and Ounces and Newtons and Pascals confused.
As the Air Force loudly proclaims, "We live in fame or go down in flame"
Usually they get it right, but when they screw up...
"4 times the usefulness" is a bit of NASA doublespeak. They plan a mission in terms of Primary Mission and Extended Mission. Primary Mission is based on the bare minimum, critical science measurements that should or must be taken in order to make the mission worthwhile. The same sort of thinking that goes, "if the house were on fire, what things would I grab on my way out the door?". The time of the mission and engineering of the spacecraft is set around guaranteeing this stuff happens. As you might expect, this results in extreme overdesign in some respects, which leads to: The Extended Mission. The Extended Mission is all the things you want to do AFTER the Primary goals have been hit. They get prioritized and executed in phases over an Extended time. This is more like, "a flood will probably hit the house in two to three days. What should I move out, just in case, and what should go first?"
For the next several hours I prayed that another fool would come along and rescue me. He finally did, and out bid me. I was happy to let him have his new jewels (Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, hardbound, 1st UK Printing, signed, brand new in wraps). I found them later for half what I had bid on eBay.
Its the same old story, never fall in love. You do stupid things that you may not live to regret.
Nope. Extending the auction raises the uncertainty for the buyer, and that is bad for business.
They never know if their bid will be enough, and they never know when the item will finally be theirs. So the market is less attractive, and fewer people will spend time or money there. The uncertainty is somewhat true even with what eBay has now. But even with Sniping you have finality. You know that at H Hour on D Day, you will or will not be the proud owner of the piece of crap you are trying to buy. If you won, great. If you lost, you move on to the next best one. But if the bidding just goes on and on, you have to defend your position, or be outbid and move on. That might seem to lead to higher fees for the seller, but actually it leads to frustration and fewer bidders, since they can just go to a brick and mortar store and get it for the same price with less headache. And perhaps a better return policy.
Always remember, the vast majority of people shop on eBay looking for a perceived bargain. If the sale price begins to noticeably match physical stores, why would people take on the extra delay and extra risk of online shopping from some little guy running a mail order business?
Analog cable isn't going anywhere. Analog Broadcast TV may be going away (that story isn't finished yet), but analog cable to the home will be around for quite a while. The cable companies and their customers are going to very quickly realize that the cable company can serve as the Digital Converter box. All those old sets just need a cable connection and they will live a new life in the digital TV era. No need for all the subscribers to buy separate converter boxes. The cable company does it for you when they shove the signal down the line.
That will be an interesting time. All broadcast will be digital. The cable company will convert some of it back to analog, ship it plus scrambled digital to you, then charge you (again) for a digital converter box to descramble the digital portion of the cable signal so you can see it all on your TV.
That is EXACTLY how it should be. I love the cool techie DIY of computers too. But ultimately it is a tool that is supposed to do something besides occupy my time. It needs to move out of development and into operations and production. The users, the people that can benefit from computer technology, don't want to build a computer or the OS behind it or maintain any of it, they want a magic wand that solves some problem for them. The maintenance is just a (small) price they are willing to pay to get the wand.
We'll need IPv8 to deal with that!
You mean people SHOULDN'T draw the power they need, to live the life they think appropriate for themself?
See, this problem was detected many years ago, so we invented this thing called "Engineering" to deal with it. People who practice "Engineering" do things like estimate the expected load, build production and distribution facilities for that load, find back up sources of supply for that load to increase reliability, then maintain and improve that system to stay ahead of the actual demand. This "Engineering" thing was a really remarkable breakthrough. Completely eliminated the need for that rationing thing you seem to be heading for.
No it makes it LESS reasonable. When people are cold, they can always wrap up in more blankets, quilts, downy covers, whatever. When they are HOT, all they can do is strip to the skin, then broil. There was an Aesop fable about that same topic. The only reason the grid can't deal with the demand is 1) some residual Enron style power manipulation, and 2) deferred maintenance (pocketing repair funds as dividends) that shows up when a transformer or substation blows up.
Anyway, the electric companies here in California already have a voluntary energy cycling program, where they shut down home and commercial Air Conditioning for 15 minutes per hour. The Key word here being Voluntary. The people who feel they can tolerate it sign up for the program, and get a rate discount in return. Meanwhile people who need their cool, like convalescent homes, elderly homeowners, nurseries, and computer geeks with garage data centers, just draw all the power they need.
A rolling blackout of 1 - 2 hours is bad, but being over temperature all days, at the mercy of the power company is going to be worse. I can't believe they want the liability.
The nice thing about Silverlight is that it is a breeze to program and work with.
I think, once the initial knee-jerk anti-MS crud is past, people won't mind.
Is this another grand attempt by MS to "embrace and extend" an existing technology (HTML/XML), and thus to corrupt and extinguish it? I fully admit to having no idea what Silverlight is. We are pretty much plain vanilla HTML, with Javascript and SQL apps here. No Flash, no ActiveX.Most importantly, Video games don't do that with any accuracy at all. They can show you what it looks like, they can help you learn the approximate timing, they can maybe remind you to keep looking around for more bad guys and not just focus on the one in front of you. But that is all. At best it shortens the training time needed in the real world training course, much like a football coach has a "chalk talk" in a classroom before you suit up and take the field. Worse, too much application of simulation can induce negative training, in short, teaching them to do the wrong thing in order to win the game.
As for the Industry taking cues from the DOD, I wish they would. For starters the Physics models used in gaming are a joke and have been for years. If police and soldiers and criminals in real life could run like they do in games, shootouts would look like the Superhero Olympics. Every car chase would be the Indy 500 Cross Country Demolition Derby. If the aliens ever show up, they'd have good reason to want humans stomped out, we'd be too dammed dangerous! No, Game designers might get ideas from military scenarios (Call to Duty 1 - N anyone?), but they aren't using real situations. And if anyone could even vaguely show the FPS games were imprinting "Go Army" on any brains, major heads would roll. The fact the school shooters were using the games just shows how "out of it" they were. They didn't know the games weren't useful or accurate for training, so they used them, which somehow means the games were responsible after all.
Thompson is just taking out some ire on innocent bystanders for doing something he already hates. Yet another example of a political control freak.
I just tried it over at Network Solutions (took three words and glued them together). The made up name wasn't registered. They not only offered to register the name for me, but it also offered me common Misspellings that would be a near match, common search term names similar to the one I queried, and Premium names that are already available for sale, all on the same registration page. How much of a stretch is it to assume they track this kind of thing and pass it on to someone to register?
None of these has a satisfying solution. But at least with the last you can appeal directly to Taco and maybe get him to hire better editors.
By the way, for tangible property, there are various laws governing the use and rights in property too. The big difference, Personal and Real Property is the most obvious one. Personal property has any number of governing rules (cars vs firearms vs Mercury containing materials vs boom boxes at 11pm, etc.) and Real property does too (estates and appurtenances and easements, etc.)
There is an amazingly large amount of statute and case law written around this almost meaningless concept. Not to mention the larger amount of popular and professional literature, of which the Wikipedia article you yourself cite is barely the first flyspec.
Face it, Intellectual Property exists and people take it seriously if they want to get along in the real world. All the wishing in the world won't make it go away.
"The Moving Finger writes; and Having Writ,
Moves on, nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."