There's a big difference between 1% planned downtime which can be scheduled for the wee hours of a Sunday morning or a holiday and 1% failure-related downtime. A bare "uptime" number, while not devoid of significance, is not a terribly useful metric out of context -- 24/7 availability is a lot more important in a web server or firewall than in (for instance) a POP server.
PS: as a side note, Russell Crowe is a New Zealander who just happens to have spent some time in Australia; Mel Gibson is an American who went to acting school in Australia, and most aussies are nothing like Paul Hogan. Given that we are in a australia + movie context, I just thought I should clear this up.
Mel Gibson was born in upstate New York to an Australian mother and American father. The whole family picked up and moved to Australia when Mel was about eight years old, so he didn't just "go to acting school" there.
How does any law get passed without appearing in the record of the legislative body in question? (the Congressional Record, for instance) These records are in the public domain, and all laws voted on must appear in that record, otherwise you could wind up with something like "All those in favor of what we discussed over lunch say aye." So how do you vote on a law without the law appearing in the record and thus being in the public domain?
Incidentally, what happens if a representative decides to introduce a copyrighted work into the record in its entirety? Senators have been known to filibuster by reading the Bible or Moby Dick out loud on the floor -- what if they read Who Moved My Cheese? or Rule By Secrecy instead? Does the copyright effectively evaporate? Does the Senator get sued? Does it fall under fair use, while further reproductions of the entire text would not?
My point was that Q. Todd was mischaracterizing the issue. No one has ever suggested that any patent applications should not be examined. What he was being asked was essentially "What's up with granting these absurd patents?" He didn't answer the question, he made an irrelevant statement about the right to have an application granted.
Since you apparently didn't read the article, you must've missed the part where some patent office spokesman pointed to the constant 67% acceptance ratio as evidence that they were being just as stringent as ever. Of course, if you have a sudden influx of capricious applications and your acceptance ratio remains the same, it follows that you're granting a higher number of spurious patents.
While declining to discuss individual patents, Q. Todd Dickinson, immediate-past PTO director, says the office doesn't have a "silliness standard" in evaluating applications. "People pay their money, and they have a right to have their patents examined," he says.
Hey genius: examined != granted. You have no "silliness standard" for granting patents? I'd say that right there is the problem in a nutshell.
Please God (Bill?), don't let the incompetents who made this game so crappy screw up Halo.
Bungie historically had a "it'll be ready when it's ready" approach to release dates. Only after selling out to M$ did they hand Oni off to Gathering of Developers and Take-Two, who for whatever reasons decided to push a premature release. Neither GoD nor Take-Two have anything to do with Halo, although I would be worried about Bill & Co. "consolifying" it, since it's supposed to be a flagship XBox title.
I just looked up some stuff at Scientific American, and found that temperature in continental crust increases at about 25°C per kilometer of depth. 1200 ft is not all that deep: 365m, or less than a quarter-mile, and temperature near the surface is generally steady in the teens, so I don't think it's mainly geothermic unless they're near a fault line or volcano, in which case they probably wouldn't be mining there at all. 65.5°C (150°F) is roughly three times hotter than it "should" be due to depth, but I can't seem to find a range of temperature/depth scales for different crust thicknesses, just that one figure from SciAm.
Every cave and coal mine I've been in have been quite cool year-round. The article doesn't mention why these caves are between 100 and 150 degrees Farenheit 1200 feet below the surface -- anyone care to enlighten me? I'm guessing it's not from nearby magma or crystal vibrations...
Huh? Abstractions can't be real? When we say that "society can/can't be trusted to [whatever,]" we're talking about the effects that the [whatever] would have on everyone else. Society cannot be trusted to have, say, nuclear handguns readily available, even though some individuals may be perfectly able to carry that responsibility intelligently and maturely. The possible negative effects of cloning/genetic tweaking are less obvious, but still there.
It's amazing how wrong this article manages to be. Even discounting minor quibbles (calling anime a genre) there are more factual misstatements than I even want to count. Let's see...
Current televised children's anime is more violent than Road Runner and Tom & Jerry? I don't see Pikachu dropping anvils on Team Rocket, or blowing anyone up with barrels of TNT, or going after a bunny rabbit with a shotgun, all of which were regular occurences (and more linked to the real world than Pikachu's electric bolts or whatever) on Looney Tunes.
They imply that Batman Jr. kills someone by strangling him with a pole. I didn't see that episode, but I really doubt that the guy was meant to be dead rather than unconscious. (And personally, I don't see any anime influence on Bruce Timm's design/animation style that Batman/Superman/Batman Beyond are based on.)
They hold up "Saved By The Bell" and "Goosebumps" as being benign. If the way Screech's "friends" treated him on SBtB is supposed to be a "benign" behavioral model, well, that would explain a lot of that Hellmouth stuff... Goosebumps was a friggin horror show, fer cryin out loud! Mild, but still involving zombies and vampires and other things that give kids the heebie-jeebies. Not that there's anything wrong with heebie-jeebies, but they're making Goosebumps sound like Winnie the Pooh, and later on they make it sound as if adult-oriented anime "with sex and violence" is being shown on Fox on Saturday mornings.
The "won't somebody think of the children!" folks seem to have calmed down a little and realized that "Not all violence is equal, and not all fighting is equal [...] Who are the heroes? Is aggressive behavior being re-enforced? [sic]" Two paragraphs later, a dean emeritus (read: geezer) explains that parents aren't being more reasonable, they're just "desensitized."
Waitaminute, I thought Transformers were the knockoff. Weren't Go-bots mostly die-cast metal, while Transformers were plastic?
And why were you allowed to have one and not the other? Were Go-bots "less violent" or something?
Me, I always had a problem with the idea that giant space robots would come to Earth and think that morphing themselves into giant space tractor-trailer bristling with laser guns would make them somehow less conspicuous...
Your analogy is flawed: You going over 65 doesn't cause someone else to engage in illegal behavior.
Speeding lis illegal because it leads to a higher likelihood of an accident, and the accident is likely to be worse. Neither of those direct relationships are in question. The porn-molestation connection has no evidence to support it. If there were credible studies suggesting a significantly higher incidence of molestation when fake kiddie porn is available, and a causal link between the two, I'd be all for criminalizing it.
Exactly my point. But there are a lot more beer-drinkers who aren't beating their wives than ones who are. It's the "wife-beating" part that is (and should be) illegal, not the beer-drinking.
The argument that it should be illegal because it might "cause" someone else to do something is thoroughly unconvincing, especially lacking any serious studies implying a strong causal relationship between fake child porn and actual child molestation. Hell, a sixpack could "whet the appetite," and they're not outlawing beer.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a big difference between 1% planned downtime which can be scheduled for the wee hours of a Sunday morning or a holiday and 1% failure-related downtime. A bare "uptime" number, while not devoid of significance, is not a terribly useful metric out of context -- 24/7 availability is a lot more important in a web server or firewall than in (for instance) a POP server.
There sure is: 'roid rage.
Since when is Mozilla anywhere near the "mainstream?"
Anyway, you're forgetting Senator Alan Cranston, Christa McAuliffe (okay, attempted space tourist...), and probably a few others.
Mel Gibson was born in upstate New York to an Australian mother and American father. The whole family picked up and moved to Australia when Mel was about eight years old, so he didn't just "go to acting school" there.
Incidentally, what happens if a representative decides to introduce a copyrighted work into the record in its entirety? Senators have been known to filibuster by reading the Bible or Moby Dick out loud on the floor -- what if they read Who Moved My Cheese? or Rule By Secrecy instead? Does the copyright effectively evaporate? Does the Senator get sued? Does it fall under fair use, while further reproductions of the entire text would not?
Isn't that the other way around? Higher octane = faster burning?
Sorry, hit submit too soon. That should read "...have an application examined."
My point was that Q. Todd was mischaracterizing the issue. No one has ever suggested that any patent applications should not be examined. What he was being asked was essentially "What's up with granting these absurd patents?" He didn't answer the question, he made an irrelevant statement about the right to have an application granted.
Since you apparently didn't read the article, you must've missed the part where some patent office spokesman pointed to the constant 67% acceptance ratio as evidence that they were being just as stringent as ever. Of course, if you have a sudden influx of capricious applications and your acceptance ratio remains the same, it follows that you're granting a higher number of spurious patents.
Hey genius: examined != granted. You have no "silliness standard" for granting patents? I'd say that right there is the problem in a nutshell.
Please God (Bill?), don't let the incompetents who made this game so crappy screw up Halo.
Bungie historically had a "it'll be ready when it's ready" approach to release dates. Only after selling out to M$ did they hand Oni off to Gathering of Developers and Take-Two, who for whatever reasons decided to push a premature release. Neither GoD nor Take-Two have anything to do with Halo, although I would be worried about Bill & Co. "consolifying" it, since it's supposed to be a flagship XBox title.
I just looked up some stuff at Scientific American, and found that temperature in continental crust increases at about 25°C per kilometer of depth. 1200 ft is not all that deep: 365m, or less than a quarter-mile, and temperature near the surface is generally steady in the teens, so I don't think it's mainly geothermic unless they're near a fault line or volcano, in which case they probably wouldn't be mining there at all. 65.5°C (150°F) is roughly three times hotter than it "should" be due to depth, but I can't seem to find a range of temperature/depth scales for different crust thicknesses, just that one figure from SciAm.
Every cave and coal mine I've been in have been quite cool year-round. The article doesn't mention why these caves are between 100 and 150 degrees Farenheit 1200 feet below the surface -- anyone care to enlighten me? I'm guessing it's not from nearby magma or crystal vibrations...
Huh? Abstractions can't be real? When we say that "society can/can't be trusted to [whatever,]" we're talking about the effects that the [whatever] would have on everyone else. Society cannot be trusted to have, say, nuclear handguns readily available, even though some individuals may be perfectly able to carry that responsibility intelligently and maturely. The possible negative effects of cloning/genetic tweaking are less obvious, but still there.
It's amazing how wrong this article manages to be. Even discounting minor quibbles (calling anime a genre) there are more factual misstatements than I even want to count. Let's see...
Current televised children's anime is more violent than Road Runner and Tom & Jerry? I don't see Pikachu dropping anvils on Team Rocket, or blowing anyone up with barrels of TNT, or going after a bunny rabbit with a shotgun, all of which were regular occurences (and more linked to the real world than Pikachu's electric bolts or whatever) on Looney Tunes.
They imply that Batman Jr. kills someone by strangling him with a pole. I didn't see that episode, but I really doubt that the guy was meant to be dead rather than unconscious. (And personally, I don't see any anime influence on Bruce Timm's design/animation style that Batman/Superman/Batman Beyond are based on.)
They hold up "Saved By The Bell" and "Goosebumps" as being benign. If the way Screech's "friends" treated him on SBtB is supposed to be a "benign" behavioral model, well, that would explain a lot of that Hellmouth stuff... Goosebumps was a friggin horror show, fer cryin out loud! Mild, but still involving zombies and vampires and other things that give kids the heebie-jeebies. Not that there's anything wrong with heebie-jeebies, but they're making Goosebumps sound like Winnie the Pooh, and later on they make it sound as if adult-oriented anime "with sex and violence" is being shown on Fox on Saturday mornings.
The "won't somebody think of the children!" folks seem to have calmed down a little and realized that "Not all violence is equal, and not all fighting is equal [...] Who are the heroes? Is aggressive behavior being re-enforced? [sic]" Two paragraphs later, a dean emeritus (read: geezer) explains that parents aren't being more reasonable, they're just "desensitized."
Worst Article Ever.
Clicking "I Agree" is hardly the legal equivalent of a signature, hence EULAs are not legally binding.
Oops, didn't preview...
Here are two pictures of her. (scroll down)
Here are two:
Waitaminute, I thought Transformers were the knockoff. Weren't Go-bots mostly die-cast metal, while Transformers were plastic?
And why were you allowed to have one and not the other? Were Go-bots "less violent" or something?
Me, I always had a problem with the idea that giant space robots would come to Earth and think that morphing themselves into giant space tractor-trailer bristling with laser guns would make them somehow less conspicuous...
Your analogy is flawed: You going over 65 doesn't cause someone else to engage in illegal behavior.
Speeding lis illegal because it leads to a higher likelihood of an accident, and the accident is likely to be worse. Neither of those direct relationships are in question. The porn-molestation connection has no evidence to support it. If there were credible studies suggesting a significantly higher incidence of molestation when fake kiddie porn is available, and a causal link between the two, I'd be all for criminalizing it.
Laws do not exist simply to make the job of law-enforcement easier.
Exactly my point. But there are a lot more beer-drinkers who aren't beating their wives than ones who are. It's the "wife-beating" part that is (and should be) illegal, not the beer-drinking.
The argument that it should be illegal because it might "cause" someone else to do something is thoroughly unconvincing, especially lacking any serious studies implying a strong causal relationship between fake child porn and actual child molestation. Hell, a sixpack could "whet the appetite," and they're not outlawing beer.
They better get in touch with these folks, too.
Apple stole idea from Xerox, and put their own twist on it. MS did the same from Apple.
I'm amazed that this still comes up in every Apple thread. Get it straight: Apple licensed technologies from Xerox. As in "paid for."