"Since this is the SciFi Channel it will contain one badly CGd monster and an aging cast member of a much better science fiction franchise, and ultimately put me to sleep."
Oh, so you saw A Wizard of Earthsea too? or was it Dune, or or even Grendel ?
I hope theat this show will be great, but given what TV does to complex material to make things "accessible", I know I will be left disappointed.
The only "IP" Ballmer could be referring to is the Interface definition needed to properly talk to a Microsoft box. MS has the right to keep it proprietary, but trade secrets are not protected by copyright or patent. If they publish and patent it, then to the extent that MS keeps that information proprietary, then any attempt to hack and market it (reverse engineer a properly working interface and sell it) is theft of MS IP.
Everything else on the Microsoft side of the interface is part of the Windows OS or some other MS style product. The only way they are owed compensation for that is if that particular copy of the OS is pirated.
The GPL IS a contract. Between the people the provided the code and the people that want to use it. "We give you this software, in return for which you promise to use and distribute it in the following ways..."
Assuming the things exchanged and the actions promised are not illegal, it should be a valid contract. There are some legal cases out there testing whther this kind of license is legal in certain countries, but in common law nations it is all but settlled.
Actually, I think it would be pretty cool if they DID warn the crowd with a general purpose disclaimer.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, we are about to irradiate you. Please remove all glasses, contact lenses, wristwatches, jewelry, rings and any other metal object from your body. We are pretty sure this won't harm you permanently, but it definitely hurts, and you notice we don't get in front of the beam. This is you last chance to leave the area. If you do notice any lasting effects, please write to the Advance Weapons Lab, Area Defense Branch, Los Alamos, New Mexico. Stand by for irradiation. OK, hit 'em Joe."
Just put it on a recording that play the first time you pull the trigger.
I can see why the military would want Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) and UAVs. Long loiter time in hostile territory, high g tolerance, ready at a moment's notice, eyes always clear, reflexes always sharp. And if one crashes or gets shot down, no one you care about gets killed.
But for civilian uses, only a few of those really apply. Quick readiness is good, but how often do you need something like this outside an 8 - 5 day? Hig g loading is rarely an issue. Hardly anyone ever shoots at civilian aircraft. the long loiter time and camera observation ability are nice to have, but the privacy people will eat you for lunch if you use them the wrong way.
I can see how law enforcement might like this kind of thing, to stop smuggling and illegal entry. Or maybe to snoop on Mr Pot Head's next crop up in the hills. But they can borrow some planes from the military if need be. The average Joe Farmer can just buy some satelite imagery from his Co-Op or direct from the satelite photo company if he has the bucks. No need to have a plane ready to go 12 hours on station, watching for corn blight.
Nope, overall, I think civilian UAVs are just a non-starter. And by the way, think of the liability if one hits a passenger plane.
Yes there is. But the answer you get around here is, "we'll send the Community Service Officer over in 3 - 5 hours, after high school lets out this afternoon."
I had a car break-in a few months ago. An actual, no kidding, criminal act. Called the non-emergency number to file a report. I had to convince the guy to send real deputy around. Took 2 hours, and when he got there he said, "well they didn't take very much (radio, toolkit, flashlight), so it doesn't really matter."
Bottom line, what You think the police are supposed to do, and what They think they are supposed to do are very different things. You need to get their attention sometimes.
You insensitive Microsoft promoting, Republican clod! I, for one, welcome our new Diebold denouncing overlords as happy additions to our Slashdot community. We need more right thinking people like them!
Its good they caught this. I'd hate to see Microsoft's reputation for delivering quality software on time be shot to ribbons by a bug riddled delivery.
NBC is in the wrong only in the sense that they dont want to pay "the usual" fees. The writers would be paid for delivering a script that was produced and shown. The problem then comes in, "how do you value it for residuals?"
Most ordinary productions are licensed and metered. Everyone knows (roughly) how many times it was shown, what rates were charged, and where the money should go. Not so for Webisodes. Hit counts don't matter, downloads don't matter much, and the WGA contract doesn't cover it anyway. So what is one individual download, multiplied times 100,000 suppsed viewers, times 10 webisodes, worth to the X to X+5 writers that worked on one or more of the webisodes?
Flat fee or flat rate may not be exactly right, but it is as right as anything can be when you have no metrics. Calling the things strictly promotional materials may not be right, but is it entirely wrong? If Moore could show he had always intended for them all to be strung together into an online episode he might have a leg to stand on. But even then, how do you value it compared to the TV eps that do fit into the predetermined rate structures? This is basic contract management. If if you do something that isn't in the contract, how do you charge for it? CAN you charge for it? And as most people know, negotiating a fee AFTER the service has been delivered is always a bitch.
The Real Beauty of Irix is in its capbilities on the big multiprocessor Onyx systems. It may be slow on the individual and dual processors, but in a 32 or 64 proc array it is truly wonderful. Slow in some ways, but very efficient in resource usage. The fabled Bowulf cluster technologies are good too, but they aren't really a match for ccNUMA as already implemented on IRIX on SGI machines. If you need that kind of power, it is great stuff.
In smaller applications, they are in some trouble, no doubt about it. I don't know if the big stuff is enough business to keep them afloat. The evidence to date is not good.
I'd assume most environmentalists are people with a somewhat benevolent heart that are trying to minimize the negative impacts of humanities dumber ideas. They may whole heartedly embarce new technologies and change, or they may be somewhat to very skeptical about it. But for the most part they are looking towards getting us all to work and play well together.
And then, once in a while, you get the throwbacks. The ones that are the mirror of the creationist whackos. The ones that have somehow come to convince themselves that humanity is not part of the natural order, but set apart from it. Except these guys think humans are some sort of actual plague, and that "nature" is in some kind of contention with it. These folks actually like the idea of wiping out humanity. Of course they would go with the rest of us, but it would be a small price to pay to "heal" Mother Earth. This mentality isn't even tree hugging, it is head-in-the-earth sucking straight from the mother tit. The folks from Earth First grab the headlines, but this is the bat-shit weird thinking that should scare us all.
Granted, humans do some stupid things and ought to know better. But using that as a justification to highlight how much better off the world would be without us is just warped. Maybe this guy never heard of the Anthropic principle, but it is all around us and he can't really avoid it. We are in charge whether he likes it or not. What we do with our stewardship is never going to lead to (deliberately) offing ourselves. We'll leave that to chance, or the next domininant species to come along and take it from us.
"Stealing a credit card to pay your utility bills?"
Somebody around here did almost that. Stole a credit card, bought some home furnishings, and had it delivered. She was still trying to come up with a coherent explainantion as they took her away.
In the five seconds I'm waiting for it to restart, I'll forget why I wanted to turn it on. Modern society functions on IMMEDIATE gratification of desries. Are you trying to kill us all?
A mechanical refrigeration cooik can extract moisture from the air down to less than 1% relative humidity. All you have to do is cool the air to below the local dewpoint, and water (or ice) will condense from the coil. Then you just capture it before a blast of warm air re-evaporates it.
Really this is Thermo 1. It isn't a question of can it be done, it is a question of diminishing returns. It takes a lot of energy to wring a little moisture out of dry air. Similarly, it would take a lot of energy to wring the moisture out of any dessicants or salts that have absorbed any moisture.
This thing looks a lot like some kind of Gas absorption cooler turned inside out somehow. They work, but dammed if I can follow the process. Chances are those same villages could have had one running on propane for years. Now they'll have a different version making water for them.
Yep, all the private investment was doing fine on creating the computers we are banging on here today.
Ooops, no, that was our clumsy monstrous government trying to win the Cold War against the clumsy slow government of the Soviets pumping all that money into electronics research in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. After 30+ plus years of government "waste" making missiles and radars, the consumer market decides it can use these "chip" things for something more than teenager's radios, and next thing you know some hobbyist makes a 4bit, 4K computer. The Libertarian free marketers, 30 years after THAT, put on their rose colored glasses, look back and decide it was all inevitable, if only government hadn't got in the way.
Pretty much like the free market rushed out and adopted seat belts in automobiles as soon as they were proven effective, and like when the cigarette industry adopter filters right away when tar turned out to be a problem, and the way voting machine companies now all want fully audited code in fully auditable machines to suppress vote fraud. Yes, the free market is clearly always leding the way to a better tomorrow.
The trick is to not use conventional bullets. They would have to be some kind of material that would sublimate in space over a very shot period of time. Fire the bullets, the hit the target to slow or deflect it, then the fragments evaporate to relatively harmless gas.
The rounds themselves would have to be either caseless, or the gun would have to capture the spent "brass" to be sure it wasn't a hazard in its own right. Plus the "powder" would have to be extremely non-corrosive, to protect other surfaces as the gas cloud expands and impinges on them.
So, frozen ice bullets shaped into a caseless round with ultra-clean powder and primer to be used in a space gatling gun that shoots down incoming fragments of the last brainstorm the GP came up with. I like it!
There isn't any one way to protect the shuttle or astronauts. As time goes one, there will be an increasing amount of space junk. To the extent it has a high velocity relative to something we care about, the junk will punch holes through that thing.
At best, we have a whole list of things we can do to minimize impacts: 1. minimize the junk new satelites spew out. This has been in work for quite a while now. 2. track the paths of known junk, or old junk producers. Again, being done. 3. toughen critical structures on spacecraft, especially pressurized habitats. Also, provide retreat areas that are secure. 4. plan flights around the worst of the known debris clouds. Again, they already do this, but it is increasingly impossible. 5. provide advanced warning of impending collisions. This could come from ground based and vehicle based radars. But frankly, at best you are only going to get a few seconds warning for the smaller stuff. Maybe enough time to say "Duck and cover!" 6. rest assured in the knowledge that, if it isn't big enough to kill you, chances are you can ignore it. And if it does kill you, your problems are all solved.
By the way, the note about the shuttle radiators being pulled in before the shuttle returned to Earth? They HAVE to be pulled in. The Radiators are inside the cargo bay doors. The only way to not pull them in and get the doors closed would be to jettison them, which I doubt the crew could do on orbit, even if they wanted to.
I had a customer tell one of *his* customers once, "If you want it real bad, you'll get it real bad". His customer was trying to push for an earlier ready date. He was telling him why it wasn't going to happen. I liked this guy as a customer very well. He wanted us to stick to schedule, but testing and functionality were a lot more important to him. (We were building up the hw and sw infrastructure to his new data center)
Just tell the (US) credit card companies they can't do business with a casino unless the transaction is clearly marked GAMBLING in the charges statement. Then tell them to produce a statement every year in January totalling anything that is marked that way, a lot like a 1099-G. The Govt will assess X% witholding on the transactions, through the CC company, and the gambler has to file for it or forfeit the money. If the CC company doesn't comply, they get hit with 10x penalties. Some will cut off the casinoes, the others will start to report.
This is an easy problem. Simply write a predictor algorithm to compare the affinity characteristics of a given film to the affintiy characterisitcs of a given subscriber. Based on the goodness of fit, probabilities of acceptance can be assinged and recommandations made. "You like Romances more than Comedies, and both of them more than Westerns? OK, based on the weights you've given, High Noon isn't for you, but Young Frankenstein might be better."
One problem, how many dimensions ARE there to human affinity (eHarmony thinks they know)? And how do they interact? I like Romances, and Comedies, but NOT Romantic Comedies, unles they ARE in a Western, in which case they are about the same as an Action - War - Drama for me.
And by the way, can you infer these things from my watching habits, or do you have to ask me, and what if I lie (or just don't know/realize I'll like something? Or maybe I just rented Silverado (Western Action Romance Drama) because I happended to know one of the producers, and I can't stand Westerns otherwise?
And of course it all goes out the window when it turns out I like Samurai films, and Magnificent Seven is a remake of the Seven Samurai.
Sir, are you suggesting that I cannot trust my users to provide valid input into a program THEY asked to run? That is the most preposterous thing I've ever heard! Next thing, you'll be saying they'll just try to run their own programs, on MY machines. Maybe even try to get system privs and run as SU. No way! Thats crazy talk.
So explicitly write the law to say, "keep tyhe records, and only disclose them when the search is explicitly for cases of Child Pornography and Child Sexual Exploitation".
When Gonzales complains that the wording is too restrictive, ask in a kindly voice, "What ELSE would you like to use the records for?"
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, so you saw A Wizard of Earthsea too? or was it Dune, or or even Grendel ?
I hope theat this show will be great, but given what TV does to complex material to make things "accessible", I know I will be left disappointed.
The only "IP" Ballmer could be referring to is the Interface definition needed to properly talk to a Microsoft box. MS has the right to keep it proprietary, but trade secrets are not protected by copyright or patent. If they publish and patent it, then to the extent that MS keeps that information proprietary, then any attempt to hack and market it (reverse engineer a properly working interface and sell it) is theft of MS IP.
Everything else on the Microsoft side of the interface is part of the Windows OS or some other MS style product. The only way they are owed compensation for that is if that particular copy of the OS is pirated.
Assuming the things exchanged and the actions promised are not illegal, it should be a valid contract. There are some legal cases out there testing whther this kind of license is legal in certain countries, but in common law nations it is all but settlled.
Actually, I think it would be pretty cool if they DID warn the crowd with a general purpose disclaimer.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, we are about to irradiate you. Please remove all glasses, contact lenses, wristwatches, jewelry, rings and any other metal object from your body. We are pretty sure this won't harm you permanently, but it definitely hurts, and you notice we don't get in front of the beam. This is you last chance to leave the area. If you do notice any lasting effects, please write to the Advance Weapons Lab, Area Defense Branch, Los Alamos, New Mexico. Stand by for irradiation. OK, hit 'em Joe."
Just put it on a recording that play the first time you pull the trigger.
I can see why the military would want Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) and UAVs. Long loiter time in hostile territory, high g tolerance, ready at a moment's notice, eyes always clear, reflexes always sharp. And if one crashes or gets shot down, no one you care about gets killed.
But for civilian uses, only a few of those really apply. Quick readiness is good, but how often do you need something like this outside an 8 - 5 day? Hig g loading is rarely an issue. Hardly anyone ever shoots at civilian aircraft. the long loiter time and camera observation ability are nice to have, but the privacy people will eat you for lunch if you use them the wrong way.
I can see how law enforcement might like this kind of thing, to stop smuggling and illegal entry. Or maybe to snoop on Mr Pot Head's next crop up in the hills. But they can borrow some planes from the military if need be. The average Joe Farmer can just buy some satelite imagery from his Co-Op or direct from the satelite photo company if he has the bucks. No need to have a plane ready to go 12 hours on station, watching for corn blight.
Nope, overall, I think civilian UAVs are just a non-starter. And by the way, think of the liability if one hits a passenger plane.
Yes there is. But the answer you get around here is, "we'll send the Community Service Officer over in 3 - 5 hours, after high school lets out this afternoon."
I had a car break-in a few months ago. An actual, no kidding, criminal act. Called the non-emergency number to file a report. I had to convince the guy to send real deputy around. Took 2 hours, and when he got there he said, "well they didn't take very much (radio, toolkit, flashlight), so it doesn't really matter."
Bottom line, what You think the police are supposed to do, and what They think they are supposed to do are very different things. You need to get their attention sometimes.
You insensitive Microsoft promoting, Republican clod! I, for one, welcome our new Diebold denouncing overlords as happy additions to our Slashdot community. We need more right thinking people like them!
Its good they caught this. I'd hate to see Microsoft's reputation for delivering quality software on time be shot to ribbons by a bug riddled delivery.
NBC is in the wrong only in the sense that they dont want to pay "the usual" fees. The writers would be paid for delivering a script that was produced and shown. The problem then comes in, "how do you value it for residuals?"
Most ordinary productions are licensed and metered. Everyone knows (roughly) how many times it was shown, what rates were charged, and where the money should go. Not so for Webisodes. Hit counts don't matter, downloads don't matter much, and the WGA contract doesn't cover it anyway. So what is one individual download, multiplied times 100,000 suppsed viewers, times 10 webisodes, worth to the X to X+5 writers that worked on one or more of the webisodes?
Flat fee or flat rate may not be exactly right, but it is as right as anything can be when you have no metrics. Calling the things strictly promotional materials may not be right, but is it entirely wrong? If Moore could show he had always intended for them all to be strung together into an online episode he might have a leg to stand on. But even then, how do you value it compared to the TV eps that do fit into the predetermined rate structures? This is basic contract management. If if you do something that isn't in the contract, how do you charge for it? CAN you charge for it? And as most people know, negotiating a fee AFTER the service has been delivered is always a bitch.
The Real Beauty of Irix is in its capbilities on the big multiprocessor Onyx systems. It may be slow on the individual and dual processors, but in a 32 or 64 proc array it is truly wonderful. Slow in some ways, but very efficient in resource usage. The fabled Bowulf cluster technologies are good too, but they aren't really a match for ccNUMA as already implemented on IRIX on SGI machines. If you need that kind of power, it is great stuff.
In smaller applications, they are in some trouble, no doubt about it. I don't know if the big stuff is enough business to keep them afloat. The evidence to date is not good.
I'd assume most environmentalists are people with a somewhat benevolent heart that are trying to minimize the negative impacts of humanities dumber ideas. They may whole heartedly embarce new technologies and change, or they may be somewhat to very skeptical about it. But for the most part they are looking towards getting us all to work and play well together.
And then, once in a while, you get the throwbacks. The ones that are the mirror of the creationist whackos. The ones that have somehow come to convince themselves that humanity is not part of the natural order, but set apart from it. Except these guys think humans are some sort of actual plague, and that "nature" is in some kind of contention with it. These folks actually like the idea of wiping out humanity. Of course they would go with the rest of us, but it would be a small price to pay to "heal" Mother Earth. This mentality isn't even tree hugging, it is head-in-the-earth sucking straight from the mother tit. The folks from Earth First grab the headlines, but this is the bat-shit weird thinking that should scare us all.
Granted, humans do some stupid things and ought to know better. But using that as a justification to highlight how much better off the world would be without us is just warped. Maybe this guy never heard of the Anthropic principle, but it is all around us and he can't really avoid it. We are in charge whether he likes it or not. What we do with our stewardship is never going to lead to (deliberately) offing ourselves. We'll leave that to chance, or the next domininant species to come along and take it from us.
"Stealing a credit card to pay your utility bills?"
Somebody around here did almost that. Stole a credit card, bought some home furnishings, and had it delivered. She was still trying to come up with a coherent explainantion as they took her away.
Don't you? How do you get through your day?
In the five seconds I'm waiting for it to restart, I'll forget why I wanted to turn it on. Modern society functions on IMMEDIATE gratification of desries. Are you trying to kill us all?
A mechanical refrigeration cooik can extract moisture from the air down to less than 1% relative humidity. All you have to do is cool the air to below the local dewpoint, and water (or ice) will condense from the coil. Then you just capture it before a blast of warm air re-evaporates it.
Really this is Thermo 1. It isn't a question of can it be done, it is a question of diminishing returns. It takes a lot of energy to wring a little moisture out of dry air. Similarly, it would take a lot of energy to wring the moisture out of any dessicants or salts that have absorbed any moisture.
This thing looks a lot like some kind of Gas absorption cooler turned inside out somehow. They work, but dammed if I can follow the process. Chances are those same villages could have had one running on propane for years. Now they'll have a different version making water for them.
Yep, all the private investment was doing fine on creating the computers we are banging on here today.
Ooops, no, that was our clumsy monstrous government trying to win the Cold War against the clumsy slow government of the Soviets pumping all that money into electronics research in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. After 30+ plus years of government "waste" making missiles and radars, the consumer market decides it can use these "chip" things for something more than teenager's radios, and next thing you know some hobbyist makes a 4bit, 4K computer. The Libertarian free marketers, 30 years after THAT, put on their rose colored glasses, look back and decide it was all inevitable, if only government hadn't got in the way.
Pretty much like the free market rushed out and adopted seat belts in automobiles as soon as they were proven effective, and like when the cigarette industry adopter filters right away when tar turned out to be a problem, and the way voting machine companies now all want fully audited code in fully auditable machines to suppress vote fraud. Yes, the free market is clearly always leding the way to a better tomorrow.
As DUMB as this idea is, it could be done.
The trick is to not use conventional bullets. They would have to be some kind of material that would sublimate in space over a very shot period of time. Fire the bullets, the hit the target to slow or deflect it, then the fragments evaporate to relatively harmless gas.
The rounds themselves would have to be either caseless, or the gun would have to capture the spent "brass" to be sure it wasn't a hazard in its own right. Plus the "powder" would have to be extremely non-corrosive, to protect other surfaces as the gas cloud expands and impinges on them.
So, frozen ice bullets shaped into a caseless round with ultra-clean powder and primer to be used in a space gatling gun that shoots down incoming fragments of the last brainstorm the GP came up with. I like it!
There isn't any one way to protect the shuttle or astronauts. As time goes one, there will be an increasing amount of space junk. To the extent it has a high velocity relative to something we care about, the junk will punch holes through that thing.
At best, we have a whole list of things we can do to minimize impacts:
1. minimize the junk new satelites spew out. This has been in work for quite a while now.
2. track the paths of known junk, or old junk producers. Again, being done.
3. toughen critical structures on spacecraft, especially pressurized habitats. Also, provide retreat areas that are secure.
4. plan flights around the worst of the known debris clouds. Again, they already do this, but it is increasingly impossible.
5. provide advanced warning of impending collisions. This could come from ground based and vehicle based radars. But frankly, at best you are only going to get a few seconds warning for the smaller stuff. Maybe enough time to say "Duck and cover!"
6. rest assured in the knowledge that, if it isn't big enough to kill you, chances are you can ignore it. And if it does kill you, your problems are all solved.
By the way, the note about the shuttle radiators being pulled in before the shuttle returned to Earth? They HAVE to be pulled in. The Radiators are inside the cargo bay doors. The only way to not pull them in and get the doors closed would be to jettison them, which I doubt the crew could do on orbit, even if they wanted to.
I had a customer tell one of *his* customers once, "If you want it real bad, you'll get it real bad". His customer was trying to push for an earlier ready date. He was telling him why it wasn't going to happen. I liked this guy as a customer very well. He wanted us to stick to schedule, but testing and functionality were a lot more important to him. (We were building up the hw and sw infrastructure to his new data center)
But they could if they wanted to.
Just tell the (US) credit card companies they can't do business with a casino unless the transaction is clearly marked GAMBLING in the charges statement. Then tell them to produce a statement every year in January totalling anything that is marked that way, a lot like a 1099-G. The Govt will assess X% witholding on the transactions, through the CC company, and the gambler has to file for it or forfeit the money. If the CC company doesn't comply, they get hit with 10x penalties. Some will cut off the casinoes, the others will start to report.
This is an easy problem. Simply write a predictor algorithm to compare the affinity characteristics of a given film to the affintiy characterisitcs of a given subscriber. Based on the goodness of fit, probabilities of acceptance can be assinged and recommandations made. "You like Romances more than Comedies, and both of them more than Westerns? OK, based on the weights you've given, High Noon isn't for you, but Young Frankenstein might be better."
One problem, how many dimensions ARE there to human affinity (eHarmony thinks they know)? And how do they interact? I like Romances, and Comedies, but NOT Romantic Comedies, unles they ARE in a Western, in which case they are about the same as an Action - War - Drama for me.
And by the way, can you infer these things from my watching habits, or do you have to ask me, and what if I lie (or just don't know/realize I'll like something? Or maybe I just rented Silverado (Western Action Romance Drama) because I happended to know one of the producers, and I can't stand Westerns otherwise?
And of course it all goes out the window when it turns out I like Samurai films, and Magnificent Seven is a remake of the Seven Samurai.
Piece of cake. How hard can it be?
Its been done. See the film Brainstorm. Can you say "religious experience"?. Hint: Natalie Wood doesn't make it.
Sir, are you suggesting that I cannot trust my users to provide valid input into a program THEY asked to run? That is the most preposterous thing I've ever heard! Next thing, you'll be saying they'll just try to run their own programs, on MY machines. Maybe even try to get system privs and run as SU. No way! Thats crazy talk.
So explicitly write the law to say, "keep tyhe records, and only disclose them when the search is explicitly for cases of Child Pornography and Child Sexual Exploitation".
When Gonzales complains that the wording is too restrictive, ask in a kindly voice, "What ELSE would you like to use the records for?"
Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?
"To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women! "