"where markets are more free (e.g. entertainment or food provision)" Tell that to a musician trying to sign up with a major label, or a label trying to get radio time without some level of bribery, Or to a food supplier trying to import past the government subsidies.
"give better results than those areas where markets are less free (e.g. health care or schooling)" OK, food provision does give fairly good results in the USA, though I still have a hard time finding what I like (e.g. less sugar, no artificial sweeteners), But, aside from costs where the free market in insurance may leave you holding the bag, health care in the USA delivers pretty good results, And, despite the perpertual complaints, schooling is pretty good too, it gives you what you're willing to take from it (though I'd prefer an education to a schooling any day).
"Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size." John of Salisbury, 1159.
As you quoted, TFA talks about needing to maintain the exististing Hardware.
Yet I see dozens of comments about how it wouldn't be that hard to port the existing Software.
This is something of a non sequitur.
There are probably some (physical) signals being received and processed that would not be trivial to receive on modern hardware.
MS wants to be in control. If there's a truly open consensus format, Ms won't be able to lock in users as easily. If MS controls the format, they can pull the rug out from under others by extending it, since MS Word is the only (partial) implementation, and MS Word is a defacto monopoly, nobody else has a chance to keep up.
MS doesn't want to do the hard work of making their.exes work with somebody else's format. MSOOXML apparently closely follows their internal document structure, seomwhat of an enhanced memory dump. This gives MS the advantage of doing less work to be compatible with MS Office, while making it hard for others to keep up. It also means that borked ideas, like getting leap years wrong in 1900 (backwards compatible to Lotus' mistake from 20 years ago), having MS or Mac Office compatible base date options, not using ISO date formats, tagging things differently in different contexts, etc., work in MS' favor, but nobody else's. It also allows for propreitary blobs, like ActiveX objects, to be embedded between "XML" tags.
And to answer another comment to the parent, no, there is no real.doc backwards compatibility in MSOOXML, unless you count unelucidated black-box-type tags like "Line_Spacing_Like_Word_95" (not an exact tag, I forget the examples)
But basically, there are a lot of governments and other institutions that want open formats, and are finally starting to formally insist on them. ODF started getting traction, so MSOOXML is MS's fast track response to try to stop the bleeding.
What laptop and battery do you have that you only get 1 hour ?
I'm not saying power management is great on Linux, I've definitely had problems with sleeping and hibernating, but I'm using Fedora 6 on my old Dell Insprion with a Pentium M, speed stepping works fine, and I get 4 to 6 hours battery life, depending on what I'm doing (don't even try burning a DVD while on the battery). Compared to Fedora 3, XP seemed to get a little more battery life, but I don't notice a difference anymore. Never tried Vista, and I'm not going to at home, though at work they've started testing the apps we use for compatibility.
What laptop and battery do you have? I'm not saying power management is great on Linux, I've definitely had problems with sleeping and hibernating, but I'm using Fedora 6 (Fedora 7, which you say you've tried, is still in beta)on my old Dell Insprion with a Pentium M, speed stepping works fine, and I get 4 to 5 hours battery life, depending on what I'm doing (don't even try burning a DVD while on the battery). Compared to Fedora 3, XP seemed to get a little more battery life, but I don't notice a difference anymore. Never tried Vista, and I'm not going to at home, though at work they've started testing the apps we use for compatibility.
A patent is supposed to be detailed enough to allow anyone skilled in the art to reproduce the invention. I didn't see anything in the claims that would allow you to do this, only vague descriptions that the program parses the email and makes decisions.
Just a couple of years ago at work, one man who went on vacation set up an autoreply that said when he would be back, but set it up to copy the entire department, which, of course, included himself, and his email dutifully autoreplied, sending out 30 messages at a time, bouncing back and forth. When I got in in the morning, my email miraculously managed to start up, even with my inbox filled with several hundred messages and climbing. The whole email system ground to a halt shortly therafter, and when our IT guy finally showed up, (how come the receptionists have staggered hours so they're covered from 7:00 to 6:00, but the IT staff shows up at 9:00 and leaves before 5:00?) he was able to wrest control back.
"I checked stores like Best Buy and they all indicated long back orders on 15" Pro's."
Last Christmas, I checked stores like Best Buy to buy a Mac laptop for my wife, and none of them sold anything Apple except i-pods. (They also had a very poor selection of XP boxes, they were anticipating the rush to but Vista boxes as soon as they shipped) I was very disappointed, and ended up ordering online after Christmas. My wife is very happy with it, though it's vastly overpowered for what she uses a computer for. And it does "just work". The wireless HP printer we have, worked without a hitch. To connect an XP computer to it was painful, and it needed driver updates a couple of times, including when SP2 broke it.
Some of the complaints only indicate that MS sucks at implementing it's own standard. Other complaints are with the format itself, such as numerous different ways of marking up the same thing; dependencies hidden in various files instead of listed up front (forcing a parsing of the entire zip file to make a trivial change); inclusion of proprietary, undocumented, or partially documented parts, like VML; including assinine legacy structure, like the way dates are improperly stored, and on and on.
When you use MSExcel, you type in decimal numbers, represented by ASCII (ANSI?) characters. You expect to get that stored exactly in the ANSI characters of the XML file.
And you can store IEEE floating point numbers exactly using ASCII characters. (after all, you can code binary as a series of ASCII "0"s and "1"s)
"evolutional is not directional"
If you have any doubts about evolution's general directionality, compare species at various points along a timline of evolution.
"Species don't evolve to be 'better' or 'more advanced', . .."
Your a right that evolution doesn't distinguish better or worse, but people do, and they may judge the evolutionary timeline by those values.
IO don't know why, but I'm amazed at the lack of thoughtfulness found in shlashdot comments on subjects like this. The vervets are a big nuisance, but they haven't really been sexually harrassing the women, the quote is from aa woman that's "afraid they'l start sexually harrassing us." It's not like the ban has caused the vervets to become a nuisance. People have a tendency to treat human-looking monkeys with curiousity, and feed the cute little animals. (especially tourists) The monkeys start to lose their natural fear of humans, and become more of a nuisance. So people that have already taken over a lot of the monkeys' habitat start killing them in enough numbers to endager the species (not just some individual monkey, the whole species and all it's impact on the rest of the environment) That's when the governments step in and put a ban on further killing. There are ways to survive and protect your crops that don't involve making other species go extinct.
The ban is not to protect some individual monkey from being harmed, it's to prevent the extinction of species. And, they had been killing the monkeys. They've killed so many that they now have protected them to prevent the vervets, and the plants that depend on their seed dispersal, from going extinct.
They haven't really been sexually harrasing the women, TFA deosn't quie say that they have. Here's the quote from TFA ' "We are afraid that they will sexually harass us," said Njeri.' Another case of the/. headline not quite matching the article.
Here's an article from which the posted article appears to have copied:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6959209.stm/
And here's a web site with more info on vervets:
http://www.enviro.co.za/ethology/nuisance_value_of _the_vervet_mon.htm http://www.enviro.co.za/ethology/
So, you say the monkey nuisance is cuased by the government's ban on killing vervets.
But actually, the cause of the ban is that the people have been killing too many vervets,
the monkeys have been a nuisance all along.
And the vervets are not useless, they are important to the survival of many plants in the environment through their dispersal of the seeds.
http://www.enviro.co.za/ethology/
People encroach on the monkey's habitat and encounter the cute vervets.
The vervet monkeys have a natural fear of man.
People feed the monkeys.
The vervets get brave.
The vervets become a nuisance
The people start shooting and killing monkeys
The vervet population drops drastically, threatening plants that depend on them for seed dispersal, and animals that depend on the plants.
The vervet monkeys are protected by the government
The monkeys get brave and become a nuisance
"Why not just figure out a way to turn waste heat into energy . . . " Good idea. Get a plan with the details on my desk by Monday morning and we'll pass by the boys at the TVA.
Absorption chillers are, at best, inefficient (in both construction cost and operating cost senses) at the low temperatures of waste heat that the cooling towers dissipate.
No, actually according to TFA, this technique has been tried with varying success before, and "He noted that a similar treatment did not help Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman in a vegetative state whose care triggered national controversy before her death in 2005. That's the typical outcome for electrical brain stimulation in vegetative states, he said."
Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegative state, from which there is virtually no hope of recovering if it persists for a year or two. The subject of TFA was in a minimally concious state, from which varying degrees of spontaneous recovery is not unknown (though eventual death before any recovery is not uncommon either).
Slashdot Mirror
"I've heard this before hence assume its true . . . "
It's not true. There're more differences among the individual candidates than there is between the Republican and Democratic parties.
I was refering to the form of signals in the earthbound hardware, not the radio signal.
"where markets are more free (e.g. entertainment or food provision)"
Tell that to a musician trying to sign up with a major label, or a label trying to get radio time without some level of bribery,
Or to a food supplier trying to import past the government subsidies.
"give better results than those areas where markets are less free (e.g. health care or schooling)"
OK, food provision does give fairly good results in the USA, though I still have a hard time finding what I like (e.g. less sugar, no artificial sweeteners),
But, aside from costs where the free market in insurance may leave you holding the bag, health care in the USA delivers pretty good results,
And, despite the perpertual complaints, schooling is pretty good too, it gives you what you're willing to take from it (though I'd prefer an education to a schooling any day).
"Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size." John of Salisbury, 1159.
As you quoted, TFA talks about needing to maintain the exististing Hardware.
Yet I see dozens of comments about how it wouldn't be that hard to port the existing Software.
This is something of a non sequitur.
There are probably some (physical) signals being received and processed that would not be trivial to receive on modern hardware.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
MS wants to be in control.
.exes work with somebody else's format. MSOOXML apparently closely follows their internal document structure, seomwhat of an enhanced memory dump. This gives MS the advantage of doing less work to be compatible with MS Office, while making it hard for others to keep up. It also means that borked ideas, like getting leap years wrong in 1900 (backwards compatible to Lotus' mistake from 20 years ago), having MS or Mac Office compatible base date options, not using ISO date formats, tagging things differently in different contexts, etc., work in MS' favor, but nobody else's. It also allows for propreitary blobs, like ActiveX objects, to be embedded between "XML" tags.
.doc backwards compatibility in MSOOXML, unless you count unelucidated black-box-type tags like "Line_Spacing_Like_Word_95" (not an exact tag, I forget the examples)
If there's a truly open consensus format, Ms won't be able to lock in users as easily.
If MS controls the format, they can pull the rug out from under others by extending it, since MS Word is the only (partial) implementation, and MS Word is a defacto monopoly, nobody else has a chance to keep up.
MS doesn't want to do the hard work of making their
And to answer another comment to the parent, no, there is no real
But basically, there are a lot of governments and other institutions that want open formats, and are finally starting to formally insist on them. ODF started getting traction, so MSOOXML is MS's fast track response to try to stop the bleeding.
What laptop and battery do you have that you only get 1 hour ?
I'm not saying power management is great on Linux, I've definitely had problems with sleeping and hibernating, but I'm using Fedora 6 on my old Dell Insprion with a Pentium M, speed stepping works fine, and I get 4 to 6 hours battery life, depending on what I'm doing (don't even try burning a DVD while on the battery). Compared to Fedora 3, XP seemed to get a little more battery life, but I don't notice a difference anymore.
Never tried Vista, and I'm not going to at home, though at work they've started testing the apps we use for compatibility.
What laptop and battery do you have?
I'm not saying power management is great on Linux, I've definitely had problems with sleeping and hibernating, but I'm using Fedora 6 (Fedora 7, which you say you've tried, is still in beta)on my old Dell Insprion with a Pentium M, speed stepping works fine, and I get 4 to 5 hours battery life, depending on what I'm doing (don't even try burning a DVD while on the battery). Compared to Fedora 3, XP seemed to get a little more battery life, but I don't notice a difference anymore.
Never tried Vista, and I'm not going to at home, though at work they've started testing the apps we use for compatibility.
A patent is supposed to be detailed enough to allow anyone skilled in the art to reproduce the invention. I didn't see anything in the claims that would allow you to do this, only vague descriptions that the program parses the email and makes decisions.
Just a couple of years ago at work, one man who went on vacation set up an autoreply that said when he would be back, but set it up to copy the entire department, which, of course, included himself, and his email dutifully autoreplied, sending out 30 messages at a time, bouncing back and forth. When I got in in the morning, my email miraculously managed to start up, even with my inbox filled with several hundred messages and climbing. The whole email system ground to a halt shortly therafter, and when our IT guy finally showed up, (how come the receptionists have staggered hours so they're covered from 7:00 to 6:00, but the IT staff shows up at 9:00 and leaves before 5:00?) he was able to wrest control back.
"I checked stores like Best Buy and they all indicated long back orders on 15" Pro's."
Last Christmas, I checked stores like Best Buy to buy a Mac laptop for my wife, and none of them sold anything Apple except i-pods. (They also had a very poor selection of XP boxes, they were anticipating the rush to but Vista boxes as soon as they shipped) I was very disappointed, and ended up ordering online after Christmas.
My wife is very happy with it, though it's vastly overpowered for what she uses a computer for.
And it does "just work". The wireless HP printer we have, worked without a hitch. To connect an XP computer to it was painful, and it needed driver updates a couple of times, including when SP2 broke it.
"Corporate greed has always existed in one form or the other since the dawn of the human race"
Funny how corporate greed existing long before coprorations did.
(And, no, corporations are not human beings. Resulting in corporate greed that is much more pathological than a typical human's greed.)
Some of the complaints only indicate that MS sucks at implementing it's own standard.
Other complaints are with the format itself, such as numerous different ways of marking up the same thing; dependencies hidden in various files instead of listed up front (forcing a parsing of the entire zip file to make a trivial change); inclusion of proprietary, undocumented, or partially documented parts, like VML; including assinine legacy structure, like the way dates are improperly stored, and on and on.
When you use MSExcel, you type in decimal numbers, represented by ASCII (ANSI?) characters.
You expect to get that stored exactly in the ANSI characters of the XML file.
And you can store IEEE floating point numbers exactly using ASCII characters.
(after all, you can code binary as a series of ASCII "0"s and "1"s)
"evolutional is not directional" ."
If you have any doubts about evolution's general directionality, compare species at various points along a timline of evolution.
"Species don't evolve to be 'better' or 'more advanced', . .
Your a right that evolution doesn't distinguish better or worse, but people do, and they may judge the evolutionary timeline by those values.
This is the best post so far, but I lost the ability to mod it up by replying to an earlier thread.
IO don't know why, but I'm amazed at the lack of thoughtfulness found in shlashdot comments on subjects like this.
The vervets are a big nuisance, but they haven't really been sexually harrassing the women, the quote is from aa woman that's "afraid they'l start sexually harrassing us."
It's not like the ban has caused the vervets to become a nuisance.
People have a tendency to treat human-looking monkeys with curiousity, and feed the cute little animals. (especially tourists)
The monkeys start to lose their natural fear of humans, and become more of a nuisance. So people that have already taken over a lot of the monkeys' habitat start killing them in enough numbers to endager the species (not just some individual monkey, the whole species and all it's impact on the rest of the environment) That's when the governments step in and put a ban on further killing. There are ways to survive and protect your crops that don't involve making other species go extinct.
The ban is not to protect some individual monkey from being harmed, it's to prevent the extinction of species.
And, they had been killing the monkeys. They've killed so many that they now have protected them to prevent the vervets, and the plants that depend on their seed dispersal, from going extinct.
They haven't really been sexually harrasing the women, TFA deosn't quie say that they have. Here's the quote from TFA ' "We are afraid that they will sexually harass us," said Njeri.' Another case of the /. headline not quite matching the article.
f _the_vervet_mon.htm
Here's an article from which the posted article appears to have copied:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6959209.stm/
And here's a web site with more info on vervets:
http://www.enviro.co.za/ethology/nuisance_value_o
http://www.enviro.co.za/ethology/
So, you say the monkey nuisance is cuased by the government's ban on killing vervets.
But actually, the cause of the ban is that the people have been killing too many vervets,
the monkeys have been a nuisance all along.
And the vervets are not useless, they are important to the survival of many plants in the environment through their dispersal of the seeds.
http://www.enviro.co.za/ethology/ People encroach on the monkey's habitat and encounter the cute vervets.
The vervet monkeys have a natural fear of man.
People feed the monkeys.
The vervets get brave.
The vervets become a nuisance
The people start shooting and killing monkeys
The vervet population drops drastically, threatening plants that depend on them for seed dispersal, and animals that depend on the plants.
The vervet monkeys are protected by the government
The monkeys get brave and become a nuisance
"Why not just figure out a way to turn waste heat into energy . . . "
Good idea. Get a plan with the details on my desk by Monday morning and we'll pass by the boys at the TVA.
Absorption chillers are, at best, inefficient (in both construction cost and operating cost senses) at the low temperatures of waste heat that the cooling towers dissipate.
"This is why I think copyright infringement should be up to the courts to investigate and prove or disprove as a criminal matter and NOT the plaintiff (corporations)" Copyright violation is up to the plaintiffs to prove, rather than the government, because (typically) it is NOT a crime, but a civil matter. But that could change http://openskills.blogspot.com/2007/04/copyright-i nfringement-crime.html/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,116791-c,copyrig ht/article.html/
http://www.cynical-c.com/?p=7502/
Copyright violation is a civil matter, not typically a crime. http://stason.org/TULARC/business/copyright/3-3-Is -copyright-infringement-a-crime-or-a-civil-matter. html/
No, actually according to TFA, this technique has been tried with varying success before, and "He noted that a similar treatment did not help Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman in a vegetative state whose care triggered national controversy before her death in 2005. That's the typical outcome for electrical brain stimulation in vegetative states, he said."
Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegative state, from which there is virtually no hope of recovering if it persists for a year or two. The subject of TFA was in a minimally concious state, from which varying degrees of spontaneous recovery is not unknown (though eventual death before any recovery is not uncommon either).