I have to disagree with you there. I've currently got XP x64 on this machine, and I gave Vista x64 a try over the summer. My experience was awful, and a lot of it had to do with drivers. Really, the only benefit I saw with Vista was that during install, I didn't have to hunt down a floppy drive to install RAID drivers; and maybe slightly better multiple monitor support. Now, thanks to a slip-streamed XP x64 CD, the floppy drive part no longer an issue.
I'm a student doing my second degree in a fairly rigorous academic institution.
Me too.
There is no way referencing Wikipedia is OK.
If by referencing you mean citing, I agree. And that's not limited to just Wikipedia, either - you shouldn't be citing Britannica, or any encyclopedia in your work. At least, that's what I've been taught - I've done it only once, and I've never found the need to do it again.
My last two phones have been bought off of eBay, unlocked, with no branding or disabled features of any kind. Both worked without a hitch on AT&T (and Cingular, at that time), though I don't use data services, so I can't speak to that.
As for the phones they sell you, I've heard that if you ask nicely, and have an account history with them, they will unlock your phone for a legitimate reason - e.g., if you are traveling overseas for a few months. Again, I didn't have to do this when I was abroad, since my phone was already unlocked.
TRANSLATION: A movie is "shit" only when you have to pay for it. Otherwise it's a justified use of bandwidth (downloading it), storage (burn it to media), and maybe even time (watching it).
It's called elasticity. When the price rises above a negligible amount, a lot of people will no longer consume this particular good. As for the "costs" you mention: A) people are already paying for bandwidth - it doesn't cost them anything extra to download a movie as opposed to letting their connection sit idle; B) burn it to media? who does that?; C) we're posting on/. - clearly our time isn't that valuable:-)
I got an e-mail from Sun the other day offering to send me Solaris on DVD, and if I activate it within 45 days, they'll also send me some gift certificates for various restaurants. I think it's funny that they're kind of bribing people into trying Solaris.
Indeed, portions of Neandertal DNA (and mtDNA, I believe) have been sequenced - this is one of the ways by which phylogenetics progresses. However, I'd be very interested to know if this has been done with older samples (millions of years old) as opposed to Neandertals, mammoths, etc. (samples in the hundreds of thousands of years, or earlier). If not, "dinosour DNA" would be an order of magnitude older than anything we've sequenced.
Funny that a few stories down we should have an example of one of Kevin Martin's ventures in the other direction. Then of course is one of my favorite quotes of his, "The public interest is not what any company wants." Not particularly eloquent, but succinct and true enough. I like to think the man's heart is pointing in the right direction. Anyone care to comment?
My reading in the area is from 2004. I could cite more recent references, but they're not relevant to my point, which is that you can't sequence what's not there.
The field of sequencing ancient DNA was in its infancy in the late 80s and early 90s, and has matured since then. One of the results of that maturity is the realization that DNA is highly unlikely to survive in fossils for millions of years, and that when someone claims to have sequenced DNA from a fossil of that age, contamination is highly suspect. The dearth of recent articles claiming to have sequenced DNA from specimens of such age (at least at the time I was reading, there was a dearth) seems to bear out that conclusion.
Apologies for replying to my own post, but I managed to find the article I mentioned. There were two, actually: "Golenberg EM. 1991. Amplification and analysis of Miocene plant fossil DNA. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 333:419-427." and "Golenberg EM, Giannasi E, Clegg M, Smiley CJ, Durban M, Henderson D and Zurawski G. 1990. Chloroplast sequence from a Miocene magnolia species. Nature 344:656-658." Golenberg believed he had sequenced a 770 base pair nucleotide chain from a 20 million year old leaf. The findings were later discredited by Svante Paabo, the well-known paleogeneticist.
It's been several years since I've looked at any of the literature on the topic of ancient DNA, and my particular area of interest was the sequencing of human and Neandertal DNA in the arena of phylogenetics, but as I remember, the general consensus was that it would be extremely unlikely to be able to extract, amplify, and sequence enough DNA from specimens beyond, say, about 100,000 years old. The difficulties posed in specimens of geologic age would be even greater.
Apart from deterioration, contamination of specimens by modern DNA is a huge concern. I vaguely remember at least one instance where a published paper claimed to have sequenced DNA from fossilized leaves, when it later turned out that the specimen had been contaminated with modern plant matter, or something similar. Of course, when researching prehistoric human DNA, the chances of contamination are extremely high, are very difficult to detect. I'm not sure how difficult contamination would be to detect in animal samples, but I suspect it wouldn't be easy to rule out.
The word comes from the latin "censura" meaning judgement, and became attached to the judgement of morals and ethics in 1592.
Actually, according to the OED, the word comes from the Latin censor, not the closely related word censura. If you're going to nitpick so much, you may as well be accurate. There were two censors at any given time, and they had control over the public register, and could choose to omit people from the register based on what they considered to be immoral conduct, among other things. (This is all a bit fuzzy, I had a course in Roman Law several years ago). Thus, even in Latin the word "censor" would have had connotations of judging morality.
Of course, given that you're insisting that something you believe is true, ignorant of reference work, I'm willing to bet you're a descriptivist, and that you have no idea what descriptivism is. Giant shock: the language doesn't change just because you're no good at it. You can, in fact, be wrong; just because a group of people misuses a word doesn't mean its meaning has changed.
Get off your prescriptivist horse for a minute and realize that despite what you may think, language is defined by widespread usage, not by you or some academy or a dictionary. "Censorship" in common parlance simply means "official supervision" over works (again from the OED) - note that there's nothing mentioned about the government there. For example, the Catholic church exercised censorship with its Index Librorum Prohibitorum (which didn't mean that books couldn't be printed anywhere, just that they couldn't be read by good Catholics). A school newspaper can exercise censorship over what is printed in its paper. Such censorship isn't necessarily illegal or unconstitutional, but it is censorship by the common definition of the word. You should note that not all words have the same meaning in all contexts - thus a legal definition of a word might not be applicable in other arenas.
If you had read the GP, you would know that I didn't make the analogy in the first place - I simply tried to make his analogy more appropriate to the situation.
Furthermore, it's easy for us to say "Why don't they ask for a fair wage up front," but they're not exactly negotiating with the most equitably-minded people. What makes you think they'll be able to wring such a concession from distributors? They're unwilling to pay up front precisely because they don't want to take the risk of a show bombing.
I also don't think this has as much to do with copyright as the/. crowd would like. If you think that IP rights are being abused here, it's the distributors who are doing the abusing. You seem to want to make an analogy between writers seeking to be fairly compensated for the economic exploitation of their scripts ($0.08 a DVD isn't all that much to ask, IMO), and the record companies wanting to handsomely profit off of distributing someone else's music. Now that's a shitty analogy.
But in no way do most of the working world consider this "unfair" to the special subset of people who feel that they need to be paid for the rest of their life for one momentary spark years ago.
I think the issue is that, unlike you, writers aren't paid up front what the distributors believe their work to be worth. To avoid the risk of paying for scripts and shows that bomb, they pay only a small amount, then pay for further showings. That way, if a show does extremely well, the writer is rewarded, and if a show bombs, the distributor didn't waste a lot of money.
A better analogy to your situation: imagine if you developed a product, but were only paid a small amount, and told that you would be paid well later on if the product sells well. Then, you find out that the distributor is selling your product but not holding up their end of the bargain by giving you payments. I dare say you wouldn't be as sanguine as you are now about the whole thing.
We are reliant because they work damn good. Its not like they were the simpliest of ideas, they were just the ones taht stuck because they worked.
They may work "good", but don't forget that good is often the enemy of better. How much of the reason we stick to improving old technologies is because of familiarity, inertia in R&D, and lack of imagination? Probably more than we can imagine, which is itself part of the problem.
If you're referring to the Hebrew and Aramaic, then that's upwards of 5/6000 years ago. It used to be that since "Christianity" was such a hot topic this dating would be denied...this is changing (I go to a public, highly secular, university and have learned that historians are verifying the Bible as incresingly valid as a Historical document for many things, just as any other ancient documents is used).
Um, no. The dates you give aren't even supported by the internal chronology of the Bible. In fact, you're the first person I've ever heard claim that any of the Bible was written five to six thousand years ago. Most modern scholars will tell you that none of it is older than three thousand years. We don't even have evidence of written Hebrew from five to six thousand years ago, let alone Aramaic.
Of course the biblical writings could and probably do contain much older oral traditions, but as another poster points out, your dates are before most of those events could have happened.
The submitter of the story is Charles Nesson, who is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. See also Wikipedia.
I'm not sure if you're confused or just being a karma whore with the links, but no, the submitter of the story is not Charles Nesson. It would appear to be Ray Beckerman. Or better still, Ray Beckerman.
Under the terms of the settlement, the $120 million payment would have been cut to $80 million had the appeals court in Washington agreed to review the decision. Holmdel, New Jersey- based Vonage must pay $117.5 million to Verizon and give $2.5 million to charity.
What's with the $2.5 million to charity? Is this a common thing in such lawsuits? And does anyone know what charity/charities?
I was interested in checking out the company's website, but the link you provided led me to a site for "Tigi bedhead manipulators." I'm not sure what those are, but I'm pretty sure they don't have anything to do with DRAM-based SSDs. Got a better link? Or did the site disappear?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, and the fact that our tax dollars pay for propaganda.
I have to disagree with you there. I've currently got XP x64 on this machine, and I gave Vista x64 a try over the summer. My experience was awful, and a lot of it had to do with drivers. Really, the only benefit I saw with Vista was that during install, I didn't have to hunt down a floppy drive to install RAID drivers; and maybe slightly better multiple monitor support. Now, thanks to a slip-streamed XP x64 CD, the floppy drive part no longer an issue.
I remember that one. There was also another one where the "Binars" created an enticing holodeck character to distract Riker.
Well, to be quite honest, I find it's rarely that easy, especially when dealing with older apps.
My favorite scene was when they come over the hill, and there's the Costco, and it just stretches on and on and on... and has its own shuttle system.
Me too.
If by referencing you mean citing, I agree. And that's not limited to just Wikipedia, either - you shouldn't be citing Britannica, or any encyclopedia in your work. At least, that's what I've been taught - I've done it only once, and I've never found the need to do it again.
My last two phones have been bought off of eBay, unlocked, with no branding or disabled features of any kind. Both worked without a hitch on AT&T (and Cingular, at that time), though I don't use data services, so I can't speak to that.
As for the phones they sell you, I've heard that if you ask nicely, and have an account history with them, they will unlock your phone for a legitimate reason - e.g., if you are traveling overseas for a few months. Again, I didn't have to do this when I was abroad, since my phone was already unlocked.
Aw, that's crap. I knew there had to be a catch.
It's called elasticity. When the price rises above a negligible amount, a lot of people will no longer consume this particular good. As for the "costs" you mention: A) people are already paying for bandwidth - it doesn't cost them anything extra to download a movie as opposed to letting their connection sit idle; B) burn it to media? who does that?; C) we're posting on /. - clearly our time isn't that valuable :-)
I got an e-mail from Sun the other day offering to send me Solaris on DVD, and if I activate it within 45 days, they'll also send me some gift certificates for various restaurants. I think it's funny that they're kind of bribing people into trying Solaris.
Indeed, portions of Neandertal DNA (and mtDNA, I believe) have been sequenced - this is one of the ways by which phylogenetics progresses. However, I'd be very interested to know if this has been done with older samples (millions of years old) as opposed to Neandertals, mammoths, etc. (samples in the hundreds of thousands of years, or earlier). If not, "dinosour DNA" would be an order of magnitude older than anything we've sequenced.
Funny that a few stories down we should have an example of one of Kevin Martin's ventures in the other direction. Then of course is one of my favorite quotes of his, "The public interest is not what any company wants." Not particularly eloquent, but succinct and true enough. I like to think the man's heart is pointing in the right direction. Anyone care to comment?
My reading in the area is from 2004. I could cite more recent references, but they're not relevant to my point, which is that you can't sequence what's not there.
The field of sequencing ancient DNA was in its infancy in the late 80s and early 90s, and has matured since then. One of the results of that maturity is the realization that DNA is highly unlikely to survive in fossils for millions of years, and that when someone claims to have sequenced DNA from a fossil of that age, contamination is highly suspect. The dearth of recent articles claiming to have sequenced DNA from specimens of such age (at least at the time I was reading, there was a dearth) seems to bear out that conclusion.
Apologies for replying to my own post, but I managed to find the article I mentioned. There were two, actually: "Golenberg EM. 1991. Amplification and analysis of Miocene plant fossil DNA. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 333:419-427." and "Golenberg EM, Giannasi E, Clegg M, Smiley CJ, Durban M, Henderson D and Zurawski G. 1990. Chloroplast sequence from a Miocene magnolia species. Nature 344:656-658." Golenberg believed he had sequenced a 770 base pair nucleotide chain from a 20 million year old leaf. The findings were later discredited by Svante Paabo, the well-known paleogeneticist.
It's been several years since I've looked at any of the literature on the topic of ancient DNA, and my particular area of interest was the sequencing of human and Neandertal DNA in the arena of phylogenetics, but as I remember, the general consensus was that it would be extremely unlikely to be able to extract, amplify, and sequence enough DNA from specimens beyond, say, about 100,000 years old. The difficulties posed in specimens of geologic age would be even greater.
Apart from deterioration, contamination of specimens by modern DNA is a huge concern. I vaguely remember at least one instance where a published paper claimed to have sequenced DNA from fossilized leaves, when it later turned out that the specimen had been contaminated with modern plant matter, or something similar. Of course, when researching prehistoric human DNA, the chances of contamination are extremely high, are very difficult to detect. I'm not sure how difficult contamination would be to detect in animal samples, but I suspect it wouldn't be easy to rule out.
Actually, according to the OED, the word comes from the Latin censor, not the closely related word censura. If you're going to nitpick so much, you may as well be accurate. There were two censors at any given time, and they had control over the public register, and could choose to omit people from the register based on what they considered to be immoral conduct, among other things. (This is all a bit fuzzy, I had a course in Roman Law several years ago). Thus, even in Latin the word "censor" would have had connotations of judging morality.
Get off your prescriptivist horse for a minute and realize that despite what you may think, language is defined by widespread usage, not by you or some academy or a dictionary. "Censorship" in common parlance simply means "official supervision" over works (again from the OED) - note that there's nothing mentioned about the government there. For example, the Catholic church exercised censorship with its Index Librorum Prohibitorum (which didn't mean that books couldn't be printed anywhere, just that they couldn't be read by good Catholics). A school newspaper can exercise censorship over what is printed in its paper. Such censorship isn't necessarily illegal or unconstitutional, but it is censorship by the common definition of the word. You should note that not all words have the same meaning in all contexts - thus a legal definition of a word might not be applicable in other arenas.
If you had read the GP, you would know that I didn't make the analogy in the first place - I simply tried to make his analogy more appropriate to the situation.
Furthermore, it's easy for us to say "Why don't they ask for a fair wage up front," but they're not exactly negotiating with the most equitably-minded people. What makes you think they'll be able to wring such a concession from distributors? They're unwilling to pay up front precisely because they don't want to take the risk of a show bombing.
I also don't think this has as much to do with copyright as the /. crowd would like. If you think that IP rights are being abused here, it's the distributors who are doing the abusing. You seem to want to make an analogy between writers seeking to be fairly compensated for the economic exploitation of their scripts ($0.08 a DVD isn't all that much to ask, IMO), and the record companies wanting to handsomely profit off of distributing someone else's music. Now that's a shitty analogy.
I think the issue is that, unlike you, writers aren't paid up front what the distributors believe their work to be worth. To avoid the risk of paying for scripts and shows that bomb, they pay only a small amount, then pay for further showings. That way, if a show does extremely well, the writer is rewarded, and if a show bombs, the distributor didn't waste a lot of money.
A better analogy to your situation: imagine if you developed a product, but were only paid a small amount, and told that you would be paid well later on if the product sells well. Then, you find out that the distributor is selling your product but not holding up their end of the bargain by giving you payments. I dare say you wouldn't be as sanguine as you are now about the whole thing.
They may work "good", but don't forget that good is often the enemy of better. How much of the reason we stick to improving old technologies is because of familiarity, inertia in R&D, and lack of imagination? Probably more than we can imagine, which is itself part of the problem.
Um, no. The dates you give aren't even supported by the internal chronology of the Bible. In fact, you're the first person I've ever heard claim that any of the Bible was written five to six thousand years ago. Most modern scholars will tell you that none of it is older than three thousand years. We don't even have evidence of written Hebrew from five to six thousand years ago, let alone Aramaic.
Of course the biblical writings could and probably do contain much older oral traditions, but as another poster points out, your dates are before most of those events could have happened.
I'm not sure if you're confused or just being a karma whore with the links, but no, the submitter of the story is not Charles Nesson. It would appear to be Ray Beckerman. Or better still, Ray Beckerman.
What's with the $2.5 million to charity? Is this a common thing in such lawsuits? And does anyone know what charity/charities?
with the most innovation happening on the unlicensed bands (2.4ghz and it's multiple 5.8 ghz).
You, sir, have an interesting definition of multiple.
I was interested in checking out the company's website, but the link you provided led me to a site for "Tigi bedhead manipulators." I'm not sure what those are, but I'm pretty sure they don't have anything to do with DRAM-based SSDs. Got a better link? Or did the site disappear?
Yeah, PETA was all over Samson for that.