If you put Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith in a room with some of the local secret police thugs, I'm pretty confident that he'd have an affidavit signed in under five minutes indicating that any particular NGO or journalist doesn't meet the blanket license requirements on some technicality. Local Microsoft officials (i.e. those with local families) would best that time by at least four minutes.
> Had the wholesalers violated the license, any copies sold to > the defendants subsequent to the violation would have been infringing, > and the first-sale doctrine would not have applied.
I have a bit of trouble with this one... You're talking about copies being sold when, in fact, neither the wholesalers nor the retailers were selling anything other than the physical things delivered unaltered by the publisher (who, for sake of argument, we'll assume was providing authorized copies). I fail to see where copyright could have been infringed. If you s/wholesalers/printers/, sure, I'd buy the argument, since the printer would be the ones making copies under license, but it's a completely different scenario when you talk about those who just act as conduits for physical goods.
> It is a sad fact that the ONLY rehabilitation that works > on criminals is a bullet through the brain. Not a single > other system has any noticable effect.
Well, not entirely true. Getting people out of the environments that lead them towards a criminal lifestyle tends to be pretty effective (aside from the seriously mentally ill, of course).
Prison, unfortunately, is the exact opposite of doing that.
A bullet through the brain, on the other hand, gets points for a cheap and effective after-the-fact approach.
> At the moment the technology we have is expensive > and suitable in most cases only for one-way flights > and of a crew of no more than seven people.
So, really, the expense is the only real problem; if we can do it cheaply, I'm sure we can find plenty of groups of seven people to send on a one-way trip into space.
Making space habitable might be a bigger problem, but I see no reason why that should stop the rest of the project.
> I've noticed that as I get older I can relate > more and more to people who just want things to work.
So can I.
The difference, I think, is that neither of us started that way, and if push comes to shove and we really need something to work, our brains are wired in such a way that we'll get the damn thing working ourselves if we have to. Be it software, hardware, cars, tools, plumbing, etc.
It's very different to have learned a way of life (tinkering) and then slack off than to have never picked up the habit.
And the problem, I'd add, isn't limited to current or even recent generations. I've met 80-90 year olds who've never done work on their own house or car in spite of having grown up in times where you'd think it would have been necessary...
> Genes that spread from GM-crops to wild canola > might spread to other species as well?
Probably, but the genes don't even need to spread... just take advantage of the benefits of the gene for long enough and Mother Nature will take care of the rest.
What they're now finding is that the GM-crops like Roundup Ready seeds have been used so heavily and exclusively for long enough that the agriculture industry has created a whole line of glyphosate resistant weeds like giant hogweed. No genetic contamination required, just good 'ol natural selection.
> I've always wondered why the Segway wasn't > adapted for wheelchair-bound people.
Because it can't really do much that a power wheelchair can't already do for less money, and requires doing stuff like balancing on top of those function-impaired sticks.
Or, possible, wheelchair-bound people just don't want to look like dorks.
> Genetically modified foods are just foods. There's > nothing "natural" about selectively bred crops.
For many things like flavour, size, colour, pest/pesticide resistance and whatnot, I'd have to agree that direct genetic manipulation is just a shortcut for selective breeding. Of course, taking shortcuts does mean less time to analyze side-effects like cross-pollination with other crops, but that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the safety and quality of the crop as a food.
However, it is profoundly unnatural to selectively breed crops which are intended to be reproductive dead-ends, which pretty much covers anything with Monsanto's terminator genes. That's just a flat out opposite of how life works. The viability of life is largely defined by its ability to reproduce, and in that sense Monsanto is deliberately producing non-viable lifeforms.
Now all they need to do is come up with a drink which protects against death by starvation and torture and the North Korean people will have something to celebrate.
> Repeat offenders should be fined in the billions of > dollars as a warning to other companies.
Why? Bigger fines are either going to be shrugged off, or are going to basically wreck the company and seriously hurt shareholders, customers and employees and NOT the assholes responsible for the problem in the first place.
Fuck fines. PUT PEOPLE IN JAIL. I'm pretty confident that if they put the CEO's and CFO's from those nine companies in jail for three years you'd never again see a DRAM price fixing scheme of that scale anytime in the next decade or two.
They might want to scan at such a high resolution that someone can study the makeup of the manuscript paper and things like brush and pen strokes...
If you assume 1200DPI non-lossy and uncompressed at 32bpp, an 8.5x11 piece of paper might be 500MB or so (depending on how they encode it), and old manuscripts aren't necessarily going to be as small as regular paper. They're probably also scanning things like maps.
> If I own a company and sell a product to another company, I > don't have any realistic expectation to control what that company does.
You do, however, have the ability to control whether than company gets any future products from you. That's quite a bit of leverage if your products are in sufficiently high demand.
It also wouldn't surprise me if Apple has contracts with retailers covering that sort of thing, along with stuff like not shipping before an actual release date and whatnot,
> For example, statcounter is currently showing four straight weeks of > flat usage share for windows 7 in north america. If this is really a > trend or if statcounter is flubbing their surveys remains to be seen.
Okay... that's a bit scary. What happened four weeks ago? iPad release.
> Regardless of how lax their security measures are you might > misplace a phone while drinking so don't bring it drinking! > If you want to or accidentally take it drinking, you're > accepting the risks.
Unless one of the reasons you have the thing is to test it under "realistic conditions".
If that's the reason Apple let him off their campus with the iPhone prototype (and, given how they camouflaged it as a 3G, I's say it was meant to be used where random non-Apple people would see it) then I'd say he did exactly what he was supposed to do... tested the remote disabling function by getting shitfaced and losing "his" phone.
Can't speak for other countries, but in Ontario, milk producers are under a quota system. So a higher yield means less cattle to reach that quota. Less cattle is pretty much always a good thing.
Whether milk overproduction is a problem in the grand scheme of things... yeah, probably. But the entire agriculture industry is a largely artificial market these days anyways, so I wouldn't be singling this one out. Particularly since it's one of the few where small family operations are still viable.
> I thought you weren't supposed to exercise the meat you eat
Milk cows. People don't eat them too often.
That being said, a farmer's daughter I know told me that they actually increased milk yields when they reduced access to the exercise yard for their cows. I would imagine the reduction in costs due to power use would more than offet a reduction in yield, though.
At work, I get accounts assigned to me all the time. My rule of thumb is that if I don't log onto to a system inside the password expiry period, I let the account lapse. I figure it's less hassle to have the account resurrected the next time I need it than to remember another password I'm obviously not using...
No, Apple usually does major cosmetic tweaks. Even if they didn't, they have the marketing savvy to actually get people excited in a way that Palm just doesn't. WebOS is the first major thing to come out of Palm in ages, and it arrived about 3 years too late.
Slashdot Mirror
If you put Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith in a room with some of the local secret police thugs, I'm pretty confident that he'd have an affidavit signed in under five minutes indicating that any particular NGO or journalist doesn't meet the blanket license requirements on some technicality. Local Microsoft officials (i.e. those with local families) would best that time by at least four minutes.
Paranormal Angel Web Designz: http://overcompensating.com/posts/20090113.html
> Had the wholesalers violated the license, any copies sold to
> the defendants subsequent to the violation would have been infringing,
> and the first-sale doctrine would not have applied.
I have a bit of trouble with this one... You're talking about copies being sold when, in fact, neither the wholesalers nor the retailers were selling anything other than the physical things delivered unaltered by the publisher (who, for sake of argument, we'll assume was providing authorized copies). I fail to see where copyright could have been infringed. If you s/wholesalers/printers/, sure, I'd buy the argument, since the printer would be the ones making copies under license, but it's a completely different scenario when you talk about those who just act as conduits for physical goods.
> It is a sad fact that the ONLY rehabilitation that works
> on criminals is a bullet through the brain. Not a single
> other system has any noticable effect.
Well, not entirely true. Getting people out of the environments that lead them towards a criminal lifestyle tends to be pretty effective (aside from the seriously mentally ill, of course).
Prison, unfortunately, is the exact opposite of doing that.
A bullet through the brain, on the other hand, gets points for a cheap and effective after-the-fact approach.
I strongly suspect that murderous, abusive rapists have little trouble with bras...
You're making the assumption that she's alive, conscious, willing and able. This is slashdot, remember...
> At the moment the technology we have is expensive
> and suitable in most cases only for one-way flights
> and of a crew of no more than seven people.
So, really, the expense is the only real problem; if we can do it cheaply, I'm sure we can find plenty of groups of seven people to send on a one-way trip into space.
Making space habitable might be a bigger problem, but I see no reason why that should stop the rest of the project.
> I've noticed that as I get older I can relate
> more and more to people who just want things to work.
So can I.
The difference, I think, is that neither of us started that way, and if push comes to shove and we really need something to work, our brains are wired in such a way that we'll get the damn thing working ourselves if we have to. Be it software, hardware, cars, tools, plumbing, etc.
It's very different to have learned a way of life (tinkering) and then slack off than to have never picked up the habit.
And the problem, I'd add, isn't limited to current or even recent generations. I've met 80-90 year olds who've never done work on their own house or car in spite of having grown up in times where you'd think it would have been necessary...
c.
> Genes that spread from GM-crops to wild canola
> might spread to other species as well?
Probably, but the genes don't even need to spread... just take advantage of the benefits of the gene for long enough and Mother Nature will take care of the rest.
What they're now finding is that the GM-crops like Roundup Ready seeds have been used so heavily and exclusively for long enough that the agriculture industry has created a whole line of glyphosate resistant weeds like giant hogweed. No genetic contamination required, just good 'ol natural selection.
> I've always wondered why the Segway wasn't
> adapted for wheelchair-bound people.
Because it can't really do much that a power wheelchair can't already do for less money, and requires doing stuff like balancing on top of those function-impaired sticks.
Or, possible, wheelchair-bound people just don't want to look like dorks.
> Genetically modified foods are just foods. There's
> nothing "natural" about selectively bred crops.
For many things like flavour, size, colour, pest/pesticide resistance and whatnot, I'd have to agree that direct genetic manipulation is just a shortcut for selective breeding. Of course, taking shortcuts does mean less time to analyze side-effects like cross-pollination with other crops, but that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the safety and quality of the crop as a food.
However, it is profoundly unnatural to selectively breed crops which are intended to be reproductive dead-ends, which pretty much covers anything with Monsanto's terminator genes. That's just a flat out opposite of how life works. The viability of life is largely defined by its ability to reproduce, and in that sense Monsanto is deliberately producing non-viable lifeforms.
I can't imagine how you'd see that as "natural".
>> Every Kin cell phone buyer is now locked into a (usually) 2
>> year contract to use and pay for a phone with no future.
> I'm sure they'll both be pissed.
Steve Ballmer has three children.
Now all they need to do is come up with a drink which protects against death by starvation and torture and the North Korean people will have something to celebrate.
c.
> Repeat offenders should be fined in the billions of
> dollars as a warning to other companies.
Why? Bigger fines are either going to be shrugged off, or are going to basically wreck the company and seriously hurt shareholders, customers and employees and NOT the assholes responsible for the problem in the first place.
Fuck fines. PUT PEOPLE IN JAIL. I'm pretty confident that if they put the CEO's and CFO's from those nine companies in jail for three years you'd never again see a DRAM price fixing scheme of that scale anytime in the next decade or two.
c.
> surely you remember nodding along to the McCahill comp.infosystems.gopher post
See, exactly my point... by the time the gopher community started to pay attention to HTTP, I'd already seen someone doing nifty things with HTTP...
c.
> ... would you really want to read a cogently argued article
> that garnered nothing but "Yup" and "Seems right" responses?
After 20 years on the 'net, I'd be curious to see something like that just for the novelty value.
c.
> Is it just me, or does that seem a little big?
They might want to scan at such a high resolution that someone can study the makeup of the manuscript paper and things like brush and pen strokes...
If you assume 1200DPI non-lossy and uncompressed at 32bpp, an 8.5x11 piece of paper might be 500MB or so (depending on how they encode it), and old manuscripts aren't necessarily going to be as small as regular paper. They're probably also scanning things like maps.
c.
> If I own a company and sell a product to another company, I
> don't have any realistic expectation to control what that company does.
You do, however, have the ability to control whether than company gets any future products from you. That's quite a bit of leverage if your products are in sufficiently high demand.
It also wouldn't surprise me if Apple has contracts with retailers covering that sort of thing, along with stuff like not shipping before an actual release date and whatnot,
c.
> For example, statcounter is currently showing four straight weeks of
> flat usage share for windows 7 in north america. If this is really a
> trend or if statcounter is flubbing their surveys remains to be seen.
Okay... that's a bit scary. What happened four weeks ago? iPad release.
Naw, must be a coincidence...
c.
> Regardless of how lax their security measures are you might
> misplace a phone while drinking so don't bring it drinking!
> If you want to or accidentally take it drinking, you're
> accepting the risks.
Unless one of the reasons you have the thing is to test it under "realistic conditions".
If that's the reason Apple let him off their campus with the iPhone prototype (and, given how they camouflaged it as a 3G, I's say it was meant to be used where random non-Apple people would see it) then I'd say he did exactly what he was supposed to do... tested the remote disabling function by getting shitfaced and losing "his" phone.
> Or am I missing something here?
Slavish adherence to corporate IT policies which require AV software on any system which can run it?
c.
> Reduction in yield? Is this a problem?
Can't speak for other countries, but in Ontario, milk producers are under a quota system. So a higher yield means less cattle to reach that quota. Less cattle is pretty much always a good thing.
Whether milk overproduction is a problem in the grand scheme of things... yeah, probably. But the entire agriculture industry is a largely artificial market these days anyways, so I wouldn't be singling this one out. Particularly since it's one of the few where small family operations are still viable.
c.
> I thought you weren't supposed to exercise the meat you eat
Milk cows. People don't eat them too often.
That being said, a farmer's daughter I know told me that they actually increased milk yields when they reduced access to the exercise yard for their cows. I would imagine the reduction in costs due to power use would more than offet a reduction in yield, though.
c.
At work, I get accounts assigned to me all the time. My rule of thumb is that if I don't log onto to a system inside the password expiry period, I let the account lapse. I figure it's less hassle to have the account resurrected the next time I need it than to remember another password I'm obviously not using...
c.
No, Apple usually does major cosmetic tweaks. Even if they didn't, they have the marketing savvy to actually get people excited in a way that Palm just doesn't. WebOS is the first major thing to come out of Palm in ages, and it arrived about 3 years too late.
c.