The summary suggests that an appeal might be on its way, and I imagine the ruling will be shot down. To make any changes to currency would not only require completely recirculating the billions of papers out there, but it would probably require drastic changes to the printing process. Different shapes, sizes, or including braille print sound like expensive alterations. other countries already do theese things with thier bills (partly for difficulty of copying as well as blind access), i agree requring them to immediately replace every bill in circulation would be going too far but requiring small changes to the printing process that would also improve security (i've heared stories of people bleaching US bills and reprinting them to higher values) for new runs seems perfectly reasonable to me. The old bills would probablly be mostly out of circulation in a few years anyway due to normal wear and tear.
at least in my experiance on my laptop when i click on a pdf with acrobat not running the acrobat splash screen pops up very quickly indicating that firefox knows the document is a PDF
at the same time my laptops fan goes to its highest setting, task manager indicates firefox at 100% CPU and firefox freezes.
once acrobat finishes loading firefox usually recovers but every so often it doesn't.
right because standard analog lines only need power at the exchange end which is well backed up (i suspect the reason its well backed up is that phones are the primary means of getting emergency assistance but i dunno for sure)
your company could if they wanted buy similar backups for thier internal systems, obviously they decided that it wasn't worth the price (i'm not sure how keeping the phones up is that usefull in a modern office if you don't keep the computers up as well and keeping computers up during a power cut requires quite a bit of capacity)
there isn't any rocket science to battery backup, its just a matter of cost/benifit.
And how do you propose to sell closed-source software that runs on all versions of 'Nux pretty easilly, staticly link the libs that vary and build on an older distro to get arround the one way nature of linux binary compatibility.
that should be enough to get your app running on any i386 linux distro and any amd64 one that provides a set of i386 libs (debian and ubuntu certainly do, not sure about others).
obviously if you wan't to support powerpc linux (PS3/older macs) you will have to ship a seperate binary for that, i don't think there are any other linux architectures at the moment that have the performance for a gamer to wan't them anyway.
ok so what setting do you propose i change if the high resoloution i've selected makes general text/images in dialogs menus toolbars etc on my windows box too small?
how will using that setting avoid the problem of text that has a larger size (measured in pixels) won't fit properly in existing pixel designed dialogs?
how will using that setting deal with images that are too small too see without ugly scaling?
back in the real world (IE windows) apps are generally designed in terms of pixel counts, so if you mess arround with the windows font size the effect in many apps is horrible.
also even if we assume the OS and aps are designed to allow scaling like this we run into another problem
Scaling bitmap images by an ammount other than an integer scale factor generally results in either blockyness of a loss of sharp edges. This is essentially why the image on an LCD monitor running at non-native resoloution ranges from poor to terrible and will mean that any scaled bitmap (and lets face it the web uses a lot of bitmaps) will look relatively poor.
one soloution to this is to crank up the resoloution to the point at which the concept of a pixel becomes completely invisible to the eye but to get there we have to cross the bad band between "readilly visible pixels" and "pixels too small to see at all"
the difficult bit is getting more usable energy out than is put in. One important milestone on the way to achiving that is to get a plasma that will keep fusing without external heating, hopefully iter will achive this milestone.
This game system may single handledly change the fat kid playing video games generalization to in shape kids. maybe but i doubt it, the fat/unfit will more likely tire quickly and go back to playing with a conventional controller
btw what is controller support like, i know there are at least 3 controllers that can be used with the wii (gamecube controllers, the new controller and the "classic controller" but do all games work with all types of controller or do you have to use the right one for the game in question?
Cesium does nearly the exact same thing. no cesium is a shitload WORSE
i've seen small ammounts of lithium sodium and potassium dropped into water in a school science lab, approximately the same ammount of each and the lithium was the least violent of the three.
the teacher couldn't demostrate more than that for safety reasons but she showed us a video where they did the entire sequence from lithium through to cesium, lithium was pretty uneventfull, sodium burnt relatively gently, potassium burnt violently, rubidium jumped back out and cesium destroyed the bowl.
I just hope they never have probes on Mars and Venus at the same time because calling both types of day 'sol' will be confusing not really, the teams controlling the probes will likely be pretty independent of each other.
there is always something that limits your devices lifetime, what it will be is hard to predict especially when sending a brand new design that was strictly weight limited into a hostile environment with no chance of repair.
i belive with this mission it was predicted to be dust on the solar panels (cleaning mechanisms would have added both a lot of weight and another major point of failure) that didn't happen to anywhere near the expected level due to the unexpected actions of the martian wind.
there is also the political side, if you estimate too high it increases the chance of a mission being seen as a failure, not to mention that its probablly a lot easier to get money to keep a sucessfull project going than it is to get more money allocated when the project is in development.
i could be wrong but i belive sony's intention is that for gaming you would buy PS3 games and for other stuff you would use linux.
i suspect if they hadn't crippled the possibility of gaming under PS3 linux it would have severely pissed off the official game developers and those developers are the lifeblood of any console manufacturer (both from a financial point of view and the fact that your console will fail if it doesn't have a good selection of games availible for purchase)
yeah it looks like java will be opened in dribs and drabs though and java isn't that big even when taken as a whole.
sure there may be a bit of a rush when they opensource enough to actually run java apps on a completely free stack but i doubt that the number of people interested in this will be very significant compared to suns day in day out supply of windows binaries.
The great advantage of a three-phase system is that you can convey more power with the same length of copper (as compared to a monophase system). thats neither true nor the main advantage of 3 phase (the main advantages of 3 phase are continuous power transfer and the ability to generate a rotating magnetic field both of which significantly increase the efficiancy of motors and generators).
That's because in a monophase system you must run two wires, one to convey power and the other for current return, the latter being just a physical requirement which brings no extra power transfer capacity to the transmission line. the main costs with transmission lines come from the earth relative voltage (insulators, pylon heights etc) and the current (conductor material).
for the same earth relative voltage and volt drop a single phase system with its conductors at equal and opposite potentials relative to earth will use the same ammount of conductor material (afaict its generally aluminium in most transmission lines because aluminium can self support over longer distances and is cheaper) as the 3 phase system.
Obviously, if you're losing the war, you'll do anything at all to get ahead and therin lies the problem, the very people who won't be following any mine ban treaty (desperate groups who don't answer to anyone) are the very same people who's mines will be the nastiest (because there is unlikely to be any accessible record of thier location) after the war.
the source for java is easilly availible to anyone who wants it anyway.
trouble is right now you can't legally do much with it without seperate pay for licenses from sun.
they've given us a date for changing that, lets hope sun sticks to it and we see proper java in main for feisty and etch+1 (yes there is a repackaged binary version in non-free/multiverse now but debian can't legally provide any security patches for that nor build it for architectures that sun doesn't supply).
while VAT is added when the value is increased it *can* be claimed back again at a later stage.
so if something is exported out of the EU then provided the exporter has done things correctely there should be no net vat payed on the item (people in the chain will pay vat and then the exporter will claim it back)
similarlly if it is bought from a vat registered buisness in one EU country by a vat registered buisness in another the VAT from the first country will be refunded.
no real need to get someone to do it for you as you are pretty anonymous on the web anyway.
fact is while wikipedia can't stop people writing about subjects they have a personal interest in, such works are generally pretty easy to spot as they are generally hugely biased and are generally candidates for deletion on notability grounds.
If one research paper is really the only point of view that exists on a subject then it probablly isn't notable enough for wikipedia anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary suggests that an appeal might be on its way, and I imagine the ruling will be shot down. To make any changes to currency would not only require completely recirculating the billions of papers out there, but it would probably require drastic changes to the printing process. Different shapes, sizes, or including braille print sound like expensive alterations.
other countries already do theese things with thier bills (partly for difficulty of copying as well as blind access), i agree requring them to immediately replace every bill in circulation would be going too far but requiring small changes to the printing process that would also improve security (i've heared stories of people bleaching US bills and reprinting them to higher values) for new runs seems perfectly reasonable to me. The old bills would probablly be mostly out of circulation in a few years anyway due to normal wear and tear.
i don't think so.
h eckout*/charset/data/xml/gb-18030-2000.xml
at least in my experiance on my laptop when i click on a pdf with acrobat not running the acrobat splash screen pops up very quickly indicating that firefox knows the document is a PDF
at the same time my laptops fan goes to its highest setting, task manager indicates firefox at 100% CPU and firefox freezes.
once acrobat finishes loading firefox usually recovers but every so often it doesn't.
firefox does have problems in the rendering big documents area though, a good example of a document that is perfectly valid but makes firefox rather sick can be found at http://dev.icu-project.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/*c
At least with proprietary software you have the right to demand that things get fixed
ROFL
if you buy ordinary grade licenses for off the shelf propietry software you get no such thing.
if you need that level of support gaurantee you are going to have to buy it seperately regardless of if the software is opensource or not.
and if you don't get what you want then you can find an alternative.
you can do that with OSS too.
right because standard analog lines only need power at the exchange end which is well backed up (i suspect the reason its well backed up is that phones are the primary means of getting emergency assistance but i dunno for sure)
your company could if they wanted buy similar backups for thier internal systems, obviously they decided that it wasn't worth the price (i'm not sure how keeping the phones up is that usefull in a modern office if you don't keep the computers up as well and keeping computers up during a power cut requires quite a bit of capacity)
there isn't any rocket science to battery backup, its just a matter of cost/benifit.
You have a solid release schedule
we shall see
the 6 month release schedule is going to be a pita for those who run a lot of systems.
the 3/5 year lts schedule looks nice but its unproven as yet.
there is generally quite a large difference though between "considered safe" and "known to be deadly"
so in other words if you wan't to run vista home on a vm for testing then it's time to REALLY pay through the nose.
msdn subscriptions are damn expensive.
And how do you propose to sell closed-source software that runs on all versions of 'Nux
pretty easilly, staticly link the libs that vary and build on an older distro to get arround the one way nature of linux binary compatibility.
that should be enough to get your app running on any i386 linux distro and any amd64 one that provides a set of i386 libs (debian and ubuntu certainly do, not sure about others).
obviously if you wan't to support powerpc linux (PS3/older macs) you will have to ship a seperate binary for that, i don't think there are any other linux architectures at the moment that have the performance for a gamer to wan't them anyway.
ok so what setting do you propose i change if the high resoloution i've selected makes general text/images in dialogs menus toolbars etc on my windows box too small?
how will using that setting avoid the problem of text that has a larger size (measured in pixels) won't fit properly in existing pixel designed dialogs?
how will using that setting deal with images that are too small too see without ugly scaling?
back in the real world (IE windows) apps are generally designed in terms of pixel counts, so if you mess arround with the windows font size the effect in many apps is horrible.
also even if we assume the OS and aps are designed to allow scaling like this we run into another problem
Scaling bitmap images by an ammount other than an integer scale factor generally results in either blockyness of a loss of sharp edges. This is essentially why the image on an LCD monitor running at non-native resoloution ranges from poor to terrible and will mean that any scaled bitmap (and lets face it the web uses a lot of bitmaps) will look relatively poor.
one soloution to this is to crank up the resoloution to the point at which the concept of a pixel becomes completely invisible to the eye but to get there we have to cross the bad band between "readilly visible pixels" and "pixels too small to see at all"
they could actually, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
the difficult bit is getting more usable energy out than is put in. One important milestone on the way to achiving that is to get a plasma that will keep fusing without external heating, hopefully iter will achive this milestone.
This game system may single handledly change the fat kid playing video games generalization to in shape kids.
maybe but i doubt it, the fat/unfit will more likely tire quickly and go back to playing with a conventional controller
btw what is controller support like, i know there are at least 3 controllers that can be used with the wii (gamecube controllers, the new controller and the "classic controller" but do all games work with all types of controller or do you have to use the right one for the game in question?
Cesium does nearly the exact same thing.
no cesium is a shitload WORSE
i've seen small ammounts of lithium sodium and potassium dropped into water in a school science lab, approximately the same ammount of each and the lithium was the least violent of the three.
the teacher couldn't demostrate more than that for safety reasons but she showed us a video where they did the entire sequence from lithium through to cesium, lithium was pretty uneventfull, sodium burnt relatively gently, potassium burnt violently, rubidium jumped back out and cesium destroyed the bowl.
I just hope they never have probes on Mars and Venus at the same time because calling both types of day 'sol' will be confusing
not really, the teams controlling the probes will likely be pretty independent of each other.
i presume they use the term sol because its easier to have a distinct one word term for the "mars day" as apposed to the earth day.
there is always something that limits your devices lifetime, what it will be is hard to predict especially when sending a brand new design that was strictly weight limited into a hostile environment with no chance of repair.
i belive with this mission it was predicted to be dust on the solar panels (cleaning mechanisms would have added both a lot of weight and another major point of failure) that didn't happen to anywhere near the expected level due to the unexpected actions of the martian wind.
there is also the political side, if you estimate too high it increases the chance of a mission being seen as a failure, not to mention that its probablly a lot easier to get money to keep a sucessfull project going than it is to get more money allocated when the project is in development.
i could be wrong but i belive sony's intention is that for gaming you would buy PS3 games and for other stuff you would use linux.
i suspect if they hadn't crippled the possibility of gaming under PS3 linux it would have severely pissed off the official game developers and those developers are the lifeblood of any console manufacturer (both from a financial point of view and the fact that your console will fail if it doesn't have a good selection of games availible for purchase)
yeah it looks like java will be opened in dribs and drabs though and java isn't that big even when taken as a whole.
sure there may be a bit of a rush when they opensource enough to actually run java apps on a completely free stack but i doubt that the number of people interested in this will be very significant compared to suns day in day out supply of windows binaries.
The great advantage of a three-phase system is that you can convey more power with the same length of copper (as compared to a monophase system).
thats neither true nor the main advantage of 3 phase (the main advantages of 3 phase are continuous power transfer and the ability to generate a rotating magnetic field both of which significantly increase the efficiancy of motors and generators).
That's because in a monophase system you must run two wires, one to convey power and the other for current return, the latter being just a physical requirement which brings no extra power transfer capacity to the transmission line.
the main costs with transmission lines come from the earth relative voltage (insulators, pylon heights etc) and the current (conductor material).
for the same earth relative voltage and volt drop a single phase system with its conductors at equal and opposite potentials relative to earth will use the same ammount of conductor material (afaict its generally aluminium in most transmission lines because aluminium can self support over longer distances and is cheaper) as the 3 phase system.
Obviously, if you're losing the war, you'll do anything at all to get ahead
and therin lies the problem, the very people who won't be following any mine ban treaty (desperate groups who don't answer to anyone) are the very same people who's mines will be the nastiest (because there is unlikely to be any accessible record of thier location) after the war.
the source for java is easilly availible to anyone who wants it anyway.
trouble is right now you can't legally do much with it without seperate pay for licenses from sun.
they've given us a date for changing that, lets hope sun sticks to it and we see proper java in main for feisty and etch+1 (yes there is a repackaged binary version in non-free/multiverse now but debian can't legally provide any security patches for that nor build it for architectures that sun doesn't supply).
while VAT is added when the value is increased it *can* be claimed back again at a later stage.
so if something is exported out of the EU then provided the exporter has done things correctely there should be no net vat payed on the item (people in the chain will pay vat and then the exporter will claim it back)
similarlly if it is bought from a vat registered buisness in one EU country by a vat registered buisness in another the VAT from the first country will be refunded.
you don't consider the inability to mix gpl code with code under virtually any other copyleft free license to be a nasty restriction? i certainly do!
Sure will make it difficult to go to Mars, eh? Sigh.
Well the launch systems won't be affected.
The long term space stuff (stuff that actually goes to mars) will be but that will have to be built on totally different tech anyway.
no real need to get someone to do it for you as you are pretty anonymous on the web anyway.
fact is while wikipedia can't stop people writing about subjects they have a personal interest in, such works are generally pretty easy to spot as they are generally hugely biased and are generally candidates for deletion on notability grounds.
If one research paper is really the only point of view that exists on a subject then it probablly isn't notable enough for wikipedia anyway.