so unless we have a full picture of physics (TOE) all our theoretical models are useless? we shouldn't bother predicting anything?
also, planting trees (even at a greater rate than we're cutting down the rain forest) is not a practical solution for attenuating global warming when we're releasing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. the only real way to combat climate change is to seek out more a sustainable existence, and that means reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. lifestyle changes like using less plastics, wasting less energy, etc. are just common sense. industrial regulation to reduce pollution and encourage for sustainable development are other ways to tackle the problem directly. i don't know what any of this has to do with taxes.
there's already been plenty of scientific debate on the issue, and for the most part there's a universal consensus within the scientific community. it's only in the U.S. that the issue has been so politicized (which is why there's still a "debate" going on about an established empirical observation). you just have to decide whether or not you want to buy into the sophistry of the largely industry-backed global-warming skeptics movement.
using argumentum ad ignorantiam as an excuse for inaction is just intellectual laziness.
i'm not an electronics geek (i'm more of a web developer/graphic designer by trade), so i'm a little curious; how hard, or easy, is it to repair a damaged cable?
i have a couple A/mini-B USB cables that no longer work or are extremely temperamental. i'd love to be able to fix these with a soldering iron rather than having to replace them. it'd also be nice to be able to repair damaged cellphone charger cables rather than having to fork over another $20-30 for a brand new charger.
do other slashdotters have any experience with fixing damaged USB cables or cellphone chargers? would it be difficult for the average person to repair them with a soldering iron?
Solaris by Stanislav Lem is about contact between a group of human scientists and an alien lifeform that covers the entire surface of a planet.
from the plot summary on Wikipedia:
The novel is about the ultimately futile attempt to communicate with an alien life-form on a distant planet. The planet, called Solaris, is covered with a so-called "ocean" that seems to really be a single organism covering the entire surface. The ocean shows signs of a vast but strange intelligence, which can create physical phenomena in a way that science has difficulty explaining. The alien mind of Solaris is so inconceivably different from human consciousness that all attempts at communication are doomed (the "alienness" of aliens was one of Lem's favourite themes; he was scornful about portrayals of aliens as humanoid).
so if you use an encoding that transfers 1 TB of data per packet versus an encoding that transfers 1 bit of data per packet the Quick Path Interconnect will transfer the same number of packets per second for both? wouldn't that mean the total bandwidth would change depending on the encoding?
the HotHardware article states that:
QPI is a serial point-to-point interconnect that offers up to 25.6GB/s of bandwidth per port over 40 data lanes--20 in each direction.
which makes more sense than being able to magically increase bandwidth by increasing packet sizes.
i see part of the problem as people expecting the suburbs to shelter their kids/families from death, violence, pain, etc. if you live in L.A. or New York, especially the poorer neighborhoods, you see these things on a pretty regular basis. that sort of thing is just a part of life--always has been and always will be.
but whether because of suburban culture, or attitudes reinforced by the media, people who live in the suburbs feel distanced or detached from the harsher realities of life. we don't see poverty on a day to day basis, so we pretend it's not there. we don't expect poverty-related social problems like drug abuse, crime, violence, etc. to affect us. and gradually we start disassociating ourselves from all violence & suffering we see in the news. it's part of the false sense of security that living in the suburbs is designed to impart. but suburban communities aren't immune to social problems or the uglier side of human nature. a psychopath living in the suburbs is still a psychopath. Charles Whitman wasn't a poor minority from the ghetto, he was a white middle-class male who grew up in the suburbs.
underneath the serene facade of every peaceful suburban neighborhood lies the same tumultuous sea of humanity as any other community. there are dysfunctional families & hidden sociopaths anywhere you go. we're just more keen to pretend that they're not there these days.
that's still a pretty big IP address block for the attacker to choose from. and if they wanted to conceal their identity even further, they'd likely just use an anonymous proxy or tunnel through a zombie PC or other compromised hosts.
just as in real life, you cannot eliminate anonymity on the internet completely. you can tag & chip every individual from birth, but someone can still walk up to a wall with a can of spray paint and leave an anonymous message.
so it's not illegal for unauthorized civilians to access or disseminate "top secret" information; it's only illegal for authorized personnel to verify it?
rewrite international law? i mean, it's about as practical/realistic as rewriting the rules of the internet to give yourself the sole advantage in cyberspace.
aside from the impossibility of rewriting the rules of other people's networks and eradicating internet anonymity, what they're asking for is basically to change networking protocols to give them abilities that they want to deny others--how do you create a networking protocol that allows you to trace any packet back to its sender, but allows you to retain the ability to spoof your own attacks?
there's no on the behalf of anyone here. it takes 2 nodes to make a connection--a sender and a receiver. the sender may be on Sprints network while the receiver is on Cogent's network, or vice versa. it doesn't matter. but the connection is already paid for by both parties involved. the sender wants to send data, and the receiver wants to receive data. both Cogent and Sprint share a mutual interest here: to fulfill that request, thus rendering the service they were each paid to render for their respective customers.
if Sprint has a bigger network, then they also have more users initiating connections to Cogent than Cogent has users initiating connections to Sprint. so by that logic, Sprint should be paying Cogent for the "lopsided" balance. but neither Cogent nor Sprint are each other's customers. the users of their networks are their customers. the more users you have, the bigger your network, and the more you get paid. that's how it works. if Sprint is larger than they already get compensated for maintaining a larger network by their customers.
that depends on whether you think public good is more important than corporate profit in this situation.
the internet would be quite useless to everyone if major ISPs are always segmenting the internet just so they can extort more money out of their peers.
ISPs are natural monopolies so there's a lot of potential for large ISPs to abuse their power. the bigger you are the more leverage you have to force smaller networks to pay you for peering, even though it's in everyone's best interest for major ISPs to peer to maintain a single contiguous network and route traffic more efficiently. but if Sprint's actions are tolerated then major ISPs are basically free to jack up the prices for peering (which smaller networks have no choice but to pay), thus inflating the cost of internet access for end users until the smaller networks are driven out of business.
why should Cogent have to pay Sprint for peering instead of the other way around?
the internet is only useful to everyone when it is a single contiguous network. if it's just hundreds of small patches of connected networks it's absolutely useless to everyone.
Sprint and Cogent already have their customers which produce their revenue stream. peering their networks is mutually beneficial since it increases connectivity and allows traffic to be routed between the two networks more efficiently.
seems like Sprint is trying to double dip here. they're already being paid for providing internet access to their customers. Cogent's customers have done the same. website owners have paid for their web hosting. broadband users have paid for their broadband access. now if a Cogent customer wants to access a site on Sprint's network, he should be able to get that data since the connection is paid for. and vice versa for a Sprint customer trying to access a site hosted on Cogent's network.
granted, if you own a larger network, you can extort smaller networks (and all of their customers) for money. but that makes Sprint the asshole, not Cogent. claiming that Cogent is in the wrong just because they've been de-peered in the past without actually examining the details of the conflict to see whether Sprint's claims make any sense is rather naive. this isn't like high school where one's merits are based on their popularity. getting picked on often doesn't automatically make you wrong.
so it's all propaganda unless you have someone to complain to on the phone? you know that customer support reps usually aren't the ones that maintain servers/networks or fix them when they go down, right?
if it makes you feel any better, you can pick up the phone and call your ISP and bitch at them until the problem is fixed. i mean, it's all the same. it's not like complaining to customer server/tech support ever gets a service outage fixed.
this is a service agreement. it states their company policy, and if they break the agreement you can file a lawsuit. what you're asking for is that Google waste resources on useless tech support line operators (which are usually outsourced to overseas call centers anyway) just so you can delude yourself into thinking that complaining to a customer service rep over the phone is going to fix any server problems.
if you need to feel busy when their service is down, why not do something that's actually productive?
hrm, the silicone sealant sounds like a good idea. i don't ever really use the hinges on the funnel since they're just there to allow you to unhinge the funnel when you need to service the CPU or CPU fan/heat sink. right now my temporary solution to the noise problem is just to open up the funnel/ductwork and shut it again, or adjust the hinges so that they're semi-locked, preventing the funnel from vibrating too much. but putting some sealant around or over the hinges (or the contact points around the lip of the funnel) would probably be a better long-term solution. though i was thinking of using something like rubber cement or latex originally.
ah, i see. if it's like playing a game over telnet where each keystroke needs to be echoed back to the player before the client displays the results then it's understandable that one would get frustrated.
Nethack probably hasn't been optimized for online play because, as you said, it's not really a multiplayer game. but maybe an optimized client/server version can be designed specifically for online play such as tournaments.
how could latency be such a big issue for an ASCII-based RPG when people regularly play FPS games online that not only require more bandwidth but also revolve around fast-paced gameplay which happens in real-time, where precision timing/aiming make latency a much bigger factor?
i mean, i've played CS all hours of the night against Chinese/Korean/Japanese players half way around the globe without much of a problem. so i'm having a hard time understanding how latency would affect a game like nethack more so than a conventional online games.
that's true for generalized pain, like back/head aches, or minor discomforts like post-surgery pain. but opiates aren't very useful for localized pain. you can't use morphine to operate on a patient, not unless you put them into an opiate coma at least.
but with dissociatives like DXM, PCP, nitrous, ether, ketamine, etc. you can actually put a cigarette out on their arm and they wouldn't feel it. the amount of opiates you'd have to give someone to do that would pretty much knock them out. you wouldn't be able to stay awake, much less walk or run.
even ordinary people can have extraordinary memories and experiences to share with others. just think about all the old people who lived through World War II, the civil rights movement, the birth of the modern computer, etc. there are a lot of things that we take for granted in our lives that future generations might be interested in but have no way of finding out about. imagine if we had access to the memories of just one person who lived during the height of the Roman Empire. it doesn't matter if he was a lowly slave or Caesar himself, his memories would provide invaluable insight into the culture & history of his period.
even outside of an anthropological context, the memories of ordinary people can still have innate value to others. imagine if everyone's memories are archived in a public database after they die. you could walk into a library and jack into someone's inner experiences and relive them as if they were your own. imagine being able to see through the eyes of someone who attended the original Woodstock in '69, being able to hear the bands playing on stage, and smell the smells that filled the air. imagine being able to relive the memories and experiences of a synesthete, an idiot-savant, or even someone who was mentally insane.
if you think more globally, it's easy to see appeal of being able to walk a day in the shoes of someone living in Japan, Italy, France, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, etc. they could be an elementary school teacher, a veterinarian, a plumber, a librarian, a college student, etc. it doesn't really matter.
just because you can't write a bestselling autobiography doesn't mean your memories are worthless to others. i mean, you can't really reduce an entire life's worth of experiences into a single book, or a million books for that matter. memories preserve things that can't necessarily be verbalized or transcribed in words.
i've got a 4-year-old Dell Dimension desktop. it's not a silent computer per se, but it was extremely quiet when i first got it. however, perhaps due to being frequently moved around, shipped from Chicago to LA, or bumped into too much, the system is now extremely loud and annoying.
at first i mistook the noise for drive thrashing, so i thought that one of my hard drives was just dying on me (it was an old hard drive, and i was having a lot of disk problems). but after replacing the drive with a brand new one and having the noise persist, i examined the computer while it was running to see where the noise was really coming from.
that's when i discovered that the noise was actually coming from the cooling funnel that sits over the CPU. the large (~90mm) exhaust fan that's attached to it was causing the plastic funnel to vibrate. i guess the hinges on the cooling funnel wore down or loosened over time so that the entire funnel unit can vibrate much more.
the fan itself and even the hard drives aren't that loud, so i guess i have to either remove the cooling funnel or do something to dampen the vibration.
you're absolutely right. they're complete cowards for risking their jobs to share information with the public. i mean, how dare they try to preserve their anonymity, not like you of course Mr. glitch23--i assume that's your surname?
btw, why do you have your e-mail address hidden? trying to act like a big shot on/. even though you don't have the guts to let people know how to contact you?
if it's FUD it's all based on Apple's already accrued bad reputation.
first, they lock down the iPhone and prevent 3rd-party apps from being run on it. then when they finally open it up they require all applications to be approved by them and distributed through the App Store. then they reject 3rd-party applications that might compete with their own software. and finally, then they make all developers sign an NDA that prevents developers from speaking about App Store rejections.
but if you want to assume that this is all an elaborate Opera PR stunt designed to spread FUD about Apple then go right on ahead. it's not like this so-called FUD isn't based on what people already think about Apple as a result of their own recent actions.
how would a web browser brick the iPhone when none of the applications on App Store can? does Opera Mini require modifying the iPhone's firmware? just because an application duplicates the functionality of an Apple application it'll cause the iPhone to break down?
that's a rather pathetic attempt to justify anti-competitive practices, don't you think?
i've always wondered how airplanes can just eject their waste during flight. i mean, how exactly is that regulated? is it regulated?
i think there was something in the news a while back about city residents (or maybe their homes/cars) being hit with blue chunks ice, which turned out to be from a commercial jet that flew overhead. seems pretty reckless to me. i mean, would it really be that much of a hassle to just dump that stuff after they land, like while refueling?
i'm guessing the reason they're allowed to do this is so that they can get rid of waste over the ocean, which might save the airliners a little money on waste disposal. but it seems rather irresponsible environmentally. what if everyone just started dumping their trash in the sea, polluting the ocean even more than it already is?
why exactly aren't fictional/creative works allowed to reference real, albeit trademarked, weapons? i mean, you don't have to worry about violating car manufacturers' trademarks when you talk about a crown vic/cadillac/etc. in a novel.
i just don't see the point in such trademark protections. it doesn't serve society in any way. it doesn't even really serve the trademark holders in any way (aside from being able to ask for a "licensing fee" to use their trademarked names). it's not like Fallout is releasing a game called H&K MP5 or something that would actually negatively affect weapon makers.
Slashdot Mirror
so unless we have a full picture of physics (TOE) all our theoretical models are useless? we shouldn't bother predicting anything?
also, planting trees (even at a greater rate than we're cutting down the rain forest) is not a practical solution for attenuating global warming when we're releasing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. the only real way to combat climate change is to seek out more a sustainable existence, and that means reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. lifestyle changes like using less plastics, wasting less energy, etc. are just common sense. industrial regulation to reduce pollution and encourage for sustainable development are other ways to tackle the problem directly. i don't know what any of this has to do with taxes.
there's already been plenty of scientific debate on the issue, and for the most part there's a universal consensus within the scientific community. it's only in the U.S. that the issue has been so politicized (which is why there's still a "debate" going on about an established empirical observation). you just have to decide whether or not you want to buy into the sophistry of the largely industry-backed global-warming skeptics movement.
using argumentum ad ignorantiam as an excuse for inaction is just intellectual laziness.
i'm not an electronics geek (i'm more of a web developer/graphic designer by trade), so i'm a little curious; how hard, or easy, is it to repair a damaged cable?
i have a couple A/mini-B USB cables that no longer work or are extremely temperamental. i'd love to be able to fix these with a soldering iron rather than having to replace them. it'd also be nice to be able to repair damaged cellphone charger cables rather than having to fork over another $20-30 for a brand new charger.
do other slashdotters have any experience with fixing damaged USB cables or cellphone chargers? would it be difficult for the average person to repair them with a soldering iron?
Solaris by Stanislav Lem is about contact between a group of human scientists and an alien lifeform that covers the entire surface of a planet.
from the plot summary on Wikipedia:
so if you use an encoding that transfers 1 TB of data per packet versus an encoding that transfers 1 bit of data per packet the Quick Path Interconnect will transfer the same number of packets per second for both? wouldn't that mean the total bandwidth would change depending on the encoding?
the HotHardware article states that:
which makes more sense than being able to magically increase bandwidth by increasing packet sizes.
i see part of the problem as people expecting the suburbs to shelter their kids/families from death, violence, pain, etc. if you live in L.A. or New York, especially the poorer neighborhoods, you see these things on a pretty regular basis. that sort of thing is just a part of life--always has been and always will be.
but whether because of suburban culture, or attitudes reinforced by the media, people who live in the suburbs feel distanced or detached from the harsher realities of life. we don't see poverty on a day to day basis, so we pretend it's not there. we don't expect poverty-related social problems like drug abuse, crime, violence, etc. to affect us. and gradually we start disassociating ourselves from all violence & suffering we see in the news. it's part of the false sense of security that living in the suburbs is designed to impart. but suburban communities aren't immune to social problems or the uglier side of human nature. a psychopath living in the suburbs is still a psychopath. Charles Whitman wasn't a poor minority from the ghetto, he was a white middle-class male who grew up in the suburbs.
underneath the serene facade of every peaceful suburban neighborhood lies the same tumultuous sea of humanity as any other community. there are dysfunctional families & hidden sociopaths anywhere you go. we're just more keen to pretend that they're not there these days.
that's still a pretty big IP address block for the attacker to choose from. and if they wanted to conceal their identity even further, they'd likely just use an anonymous proxy or tunnel through a zombie PC or other compromised hosts.
just as in real life, you cannot eliminate anonymity on the internet completely. you can tag & chip every individual from birth, but someone can still walk up to a wall with a can of spray paint and leave an anonymous message.
so it's not illegal for unauthorized civilians to access or disseminate "top secret" information; it's only illegal for authorized personnel to verify it?
rewrite international law? i mean, it's about as practical/realistic as rewriting the rules of the internet to give yourself the sole advantage in cyberspace.
aside from the impossibility of rewriting the rules of other people's networks and eradicating internet anonymity, what they're asking for is basically to change networking protocols to give them abilities that they want to deny others--how do you create a networking protocol that allows you to trace any packet back to its sender, but allows you to retain the ability to spoof your own attacks?
um, no.
there's no on the behalf of anyone here. it takes 2 nodes to make a connection--a sender and a receiver. the sender may be on Sprints network while the receiver is on Cogent's network, or vice versa. it doesn't matter. but the connection is already paid for by both parties involved. the sender wants to send data, and the receiver wants to receive data. both Cogent and Sprint share a mutual interest here: to fulfill that request, thus rendering the service they were each paid to render for their respective customers.
if Sprint has a bigger network, then they also have more users initiating connections to Cogent than Cogent has users initiating connections to Sprint. so by that logic, Sprint should be paying Cogent for the "lopsided" balance. but neither Cogent nor Sprint are each other's customers. the users of their networks are their customers. the more users you have, the bigger your network, and the more you get paid. that's how it works. if Sprint is larger than they already get compensated for maintaining a larger network by their customers.
that depends on whether you think public good is more important than corporate profit in this situation.
the internet would be quite useless to everyone if major ISPs are always segmenting the internet just so they can extort more money out of their peers.
ISPs are natural monopolies so there's a lot of potential for large ISPs to abuse their power. the bigger you are the more leverage you have to force smaller networks to pay you for peering, even though it's in everyone's best interest for major ISPs to peer to maintain a single contiguous network and route traffic more efficiently. but if Sprint's actions are tolerated then major ISPs are basically free to jack up the prices for peering (which smaller networks have no choice but to pay), thus inflating the cost of internet access for end users until the smaller networks are driven out of business.
why should Cogent have to pay Sprint for peering instead of the other way around?
the internet is only useful to everyone when it is a single contiguous network. if it's just hundreds of small patches of connected networks it's absolutely useless to everyone.
Sprint and Cogent already have their customers which produce their revenue stream. peering their networks is mutually beneficial since it increases connectivity and allows traffic to be routed between the two networks more efficiently.
seems like Sprint is trying to double dip here. they're already being paid for providing internet access to their customers. Cogent's customers have done the same. website owners have paid for their web hosting. broadband users have paid for their broadband access. now if a Cogent customer wants to access a site on Sprint's network, he should be able to get that data since the connection is paid for. and vice versa for a Sprint customer trying to access a site hosted on Cogent's network.
granted, if you own a larger network, you can extort smaller networks (and all of their customers) for money. but that makes Sprint the asshole, not Cogent. claiming that Cogent is in the wrong just because they've been de-peered in the past without actually examining the details of the conflict to see whether Sprint's claims make any sense is rather naive. this isn't like high school where one's merits are based on their popularity. getting picked on often doesn't automatically make you wrong.
so it's all propaganda unless you have someone to complain to on the phone? you know that customer support reps usually aren't the ones that maintain servers/networks or fix them when they go down, right?
if it makes you feel any better, you can pick up the phone and call your ISP and bitch at them until the problem is fixed. i mean, it's all the same. it's not like complaining to customer server/tech support ever gets a service outage fixed.
this is a service agreement. it states their company policy, and if they break the agreement you can file a lawsuit. what you're asking for is that Google waste resources on useless tech support line operators (which are usually outsourced to overseas call centers anyway) just so you can delude yourself into thinking that complaining to a customer service rep over the phone is going to fix any server problems.
if you need to feel busy when their service is down, why not do something that's actually productive?
hrm, the silicone sealant sounds like a good idea. i don't ever really use the hinges on the funnel since they're just there to allow you to unhinge the funnel when you need to service the CPU or CPU fan/heat sink. right now my temporary solution to the noise problem is just to open up the funnel/ductwork and shut it again, or adjust the hinges so that they're semi-locked, preventing the funnel from vibrating too much. but putting some sealant around or over the hinges (or the contact points around the lip of the funnel) would probably be a better long-term solution. though i was thinking of using something like rubber cement or latex originally.
ah, i see. if it's like playing a game over telnet where each keystroke needs to be echoed back to the player before the client displays the results then it's understandable that one would get frustrated.
Nethack probably hasn't been optimized for online play because, as you said, it's not really a multiplayer game. but maybe an optimized client/server version can be designed specifically for online play such as tournaments.
how could latency be such a big issue for an ASCII-based RPG when people regularly play FPS games online that not only require more bandwidth but also revolve around fast-paced gameplay which happens in real-time, where precision timing/aiming make latency a much bigger factor?
i mean, i've played CS all hours of the night against Chinese/Korean/Japanese players half way around the globe without much of a problem. so i'm having a hard time understanding how latency would affect a game like nethack more so than a conventional online games.
wizard, monk, Valkyrie, and... archaeologist? are you serious? so i can be Indiana Jones?
that's true for generalized pain, like back/head aches, or minor discomforts like post-surgery pain. but opiates aren't very useful for localized pain. you can't use morphine to operate on a patient, not unless you put them into an opiate coma at least.
but with dissociatives like DXM, PCP, nitrous, ether, ketamine, etc. you can actually put a cigarette out on their arm and they wouldn't feel it. the amount of opiates you'd have to give someone to do that would pretty much knock them out. you wouldn't be able to stay awake, much less walk or run.
i'm guessing you're not over 50 years old.
even ordinary people can have extraordinary memories and experiences to share with others. just think about all the old people who lived through World War II, the civil rights movement, the birth of the modern computer, etc. there are a lot of things that we take for granted in our lives that future generations might be interested in but have no way of finding out about. imagine if we had access to the memories of just one person who lived during the height of the Roman Empire. it doesn't matter if he was a lowly slave or Caesar himself, his memories would provide invaluable insight into the culture & history of his period.
even outside of an anthropological context, the memories of ordinary people can still have innate value to others. imagine if everyone's memories are archived in a public database after they die. you could walk into a library and jack into someone's inner experiences and relive them as if they were your own. imagine being able to see through the eyes of someone who attended the original Woodstock in '69, being able to hear the bands playing on stage, and smell the smells that filled the air. imagine being able to relive the memories and experiences of a synesthete, an idiot-savant, or even someone who was mentally insane.
if you think more globally, it's easy to see appeal of being able to walk a day in the shoes of someone living in Japan, Italy, France, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, etc. they could be an elementary school teacher, a veterinarian, a plumber, a librarian, a college student, etc. it doesn't really matter.
just because you can't write a bestselling autobiography doesn't mean your memories are worthless to others. i mean, you can't really reduce an entire life's worth of experiences into a single book, or a million books for that matter. memories preserve things that can't necessarily be verbalized or transcribed in words.
um, maybe you need to brush up on your geography. the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami didn't even touch China.
i've got a 4-year-old Dell Dimension desktop. it's not a silent computer per se, but it was extremely quiet when i first got it. however, perhaps due to being frequently moved around, shipped from Chicago to LA, or bumped into too much, the system is now extremely loud and annoying.
at first i mistook the noise for drive thrashing, so i thought that one of my hard drives was just dying on me (it was an old hard drive, and i was having a lot of disk problems). but after replacing the drive with a brand new one and having the noise persist, i examined the computer while it was running to see where the noise was really coming from.
that's when i discovered that the noise was actually coming from the cooling funnel that sits over the CPU. the large (~90mm) exhaust fan that's attached to it was causing the plastic funnel to vibrate. i guess the hinges on the cooling funnel wore down or loosened over time so that the entire funnel unit can vibrate much more.
the fan itself and even the hard drives aren't that loud, so i guess i have to either remove the cooling funnel or do something to dampen the vibration.
you're absolutely right. they're complete cowards for risking their jobs to share information with the public. i mean, how dare they try to preserve their anonymity, not like you of course Mr. glitch23--i assume that's your surname?
btw, why do you have your e-mail address hidden? trying to act like a big shot on /. even though you don't have the guts to let people know how to contact you?
if it's FUD it's all based on Apple's already accrued bad reputation.
first, they lock down the iPhone and prevent 3rd-party apps from being run on it. then when they finally open it up they require all applications to be approved by them and distributed through the App Store. then they reject 3rd-party applications that might compete with their own software. and finally, then they make all developers sign an NDA that prevents developers from speaking about App Store rejections.
but if you want to assume that this is all an elaborate Opera PR stunt designed to spread FUD about Apple then go right on ahead. it's not like this so-called FUD isn't based on what people already think about Apple as a result of their own recent actions.
how would a web browser brick the iPhone when none of the applications on App Store can? does Opera Mini require modifying the iPhone's firmware? just because an application duplicates the functionality of an Apple application it'll cause the iPhone to break down?
that's a rather pathetic attempt to justify anti-competitive practices, don't you think?
i've always wondered how airplanes can just eject their waste during flight. i mean, how exactly is that regulated? is it regulated?
i think there was something in the news a while back about city residents (or maybe their homes/cars) being hit with blue chunks ice, which turned out to be from a commercial jet that flew overhead. seems pretty reckless to me. i mean, would it really be that much of a hassle to just dump that stuff after they land, like while refueling?
i'm guessing the reason they're allowed to do this is so that they can get rid of waste over the ocean, which might save the airliners a little money on waste disposal. but it seems rather irresponsible environmentally. what if everyone just started dumping their trash in the sea, polluting the ocean even more than it already is?
why exactly aren't fictional/creative works allowed to reference real, albeit trademarked, weapons? i mean, you don't have to worry about violating car manufacturers' trademarks when you talk about a crown vic/cadillac/etc. in a novel.
i just don't see the point in such trademark protections. it doesn't serve society in any way. it doesn't even really serve the trademark holders in any way (aside from being able to ask for a "licensing fee" to use their trademarked names). it's not like Fallout is releasing a game called H&K MP5 or something that would actually negatively affect weapon makers.