What exactly are you talking about? Did we read the same article? Because the article I read didn't say that only Windows 7/Vista support IPv6. There was one specific feature, I think, DHCPv6 or something, which maybe Win Vista/7 support and others don't.
You, too missed some stuff in your code there. I'd say you must be using a revision from the early days of Fox News, except for the reference to Obama.
If ("journalist employer" == "Fox News")
{
Add Paragraph
Hire wack job pseudo scientist to provide doomsday prediction
Blame Obama
Plug Tea Party candidate
Remind Viewers to Tune in to [Beck/Hannity] in 10 minutes.
In light of the doomsday prediction, remind viewers to BUY GOLD, GUNS, AND EMERGENCY FOOD. Provide phone number and website for Gold Retailer who is show sponsor.
Remind viewers that if Obama and Pelosi weren't socialists, jamming policy down your throat, this wouldn't be happening.
Make sure viewers know that voting for Republican or Tea Party candidate will bring timely tax cut, which can stave off doomsday for at least one election cycle.
(It doesn't matter what the supposed problem is -- a tax cut will definitely help prevent the extinction of honeybees due to Colony Collapse Syndrome).
Finish with another quote, mentioning that deregulating {related industry}, while passing laws limiting their legal liabilities, will help greatly too.
}
Yeah, business pretty much always works like this - a company introduces a new tech, or new companies enter the market, and you get some (relatively) good deals (sometimes - I'm still not convinced that at close to $100/mo for one phone, the 'unlimited' plans were much of a good deal - just not AS BAD a deal as their *other* offerings.
In the end, when you see good deals (or at least deals you can live with), take advantage of them while you can. Yes, it won't last forever.
Take for example, Hulu.com - when it first launched it was pretty awesome. They had a number of relatively good movies and a great back catalog of TV shows. I knew it wouldn't last, but I enjoyed it while it did. Now, of course, they've yanked something like 75% of their library and made it part of the Hulu+ subscription service. I knew it'd happen someday (when I was watching streams on Hulu, I got *way* too many ads for non-profits and environmental groups, etc - low-rate ads which they hardly make any money on, so I knew their free model was failing), but it didn't make it any less good while it lasted.
Convince the cell phone industry to modernize the MMS/SMS system to allow messages longer than 256 bytes. (Sort-of done - you can send pics in MMS messages which are longer than 256-bytes, so if the 'content' of your message is actually in the 'attachment' to the message and the main text is essentially ignored, you could maybe get longer messages.
Update everybody's phones (everywhere in the world) to be able to receive the longer messages.
Make it part of the SMS/TXT standard to allow HTML (or a simplified subset thereof) which can be rendered by the messaging app built into the phones (so that long URL's can be hidden in nice anchor tags as in standard web-pages).
Update everybody's phones (everywhere in the world) to support the new standard with embedded HTML.
Convince twitter (and similar services - facebook, identi.ca, diaspora, etc), now that phones can send and receive longer messages, with HTML embedded, to update their services to allow longer messages, with HTML embedded.
Personally, I'd like to see url shorteners die, because of a number of problems, but realistically I know it's not gonna happen. Things I don't like about shorteners:
You don't really know where the URL is going to take you. Surprise! You're at a site with a browser exploit, or a phishing site pretending to be something else, or a goatse site. Perhaps such 'shortened' URLs could potentially even be hijacked by whoever owns the shortening service - redirected so somewhere other than what was originally intended, like to a competitor's site.
You're doing research on something and trying to review tweets from 2 or 5 years ago (or maybe a search engine sent you to an older page about a topic which you are researching, and someone in the comments of the page included a shortened URL to a related page which would be of interest to you), and the shortener url is no longer valid, either because it expired, or the site was bought by a competitor and shut down, or just went bankrupt, whatever, and you HAVE NO IDEA what was originally being linked. At least if you had the original URL, and the original site was no longer available, there's a small chance you might be able to find a copy of the linked page in the Wayback machine/Internet Archive, or similar.
Someone who isn't the site you are going to visit, is tracking your browsing of that site.
There's probably other problems I haven't thought of just yet.
The English department at my high school had a very strict rule about 'Being' verbs - am, is, are, was, were be, being, been, and do. In our Big end-of-senior year paper, we could only use being-verbs 5 times in, I don't remember exactly, but I think a 7 or 10 page paper - less than once per page. When you went over the count, they started deducting points - IIRC, they deducted like 5% off the total report grade for each extra being verb. That was enough to give you a very strong incentive go back through your drafts looking for being verbs and rewriting sentences and paragraphs to excise them from the text. (Wow, it is so hard to write in the past tense without being verbs; although, for an English paper, you aren't usually talking about history so you can usually avoid the past-tense). I don't think direct quotes from sources in your Bibliography counted against you.
As the parent points out, you can almost always replace a being verb, with an *active* verb - you say what the subject is *doing*, not what the subject is *being*, or is having done to it (obviously there are a few certain cases where you must use being verbs, some in this post - I've re-read before posting, and there's certain sentences I cannot figure out how to re-write). The word 'do' is kind of in-between, but it's better, as the parent shows, to say the group *released* instead of 'did a release', or 'released a new build', or 'released a new version', or 'published a release', or 'released a new snapshot', etc. It makes your language more interesting.
I do think that the strictness of my school's English policies did help me learn to be a better communicator - one of the great complaints about a lot of geeks is that they don't have sufficient communication skills to effectively relay/teach other people about the tech they are working on. I don't claim to be a *great* communicator, but I think I do alright most of the time.
"Despite that, several jurisdictions filed criminal charges and arrest warrants against her, although the charges were eventually dismissed."
Prosecutors filing charges doesn't really mean anything, though. In the end what matters is whether the courts accept that as a valid defense [I'm not sure if this would be a judge issue (finding of law), or a jury issue (finding of fact), but my hunch is that it would be the former - that a judge would make the legal ruling as to whether getting advice from an attorney protects you from the 'knowingly' clause].
There's got to be a case somewhere in American history (or multiple cases) that dealt exactly with this issue - I can't believe no-one ever tried to hide behind their lawyers on an issue where 'knowingly' is part of the legal test for penalty).
"For the love of your particular deity, will someone hold the companies who abuse our laws responsible for something?"
Wouldn't it make more sense to hold the people accountable who pass (and don't modify/repeal) such bad laws, e.g. Congress and the President (who has to sign legislation into law)?
Unfortunately, it's seems kind of difficult to get most people to care about things like copyright and patent law - in part because there's so many issues of even more consequence out there that demand the public's attention - wars, disasters, budget deficits, unemployement, health care, education, etc.
The real problem is we have such bad an inneffective government, and have for so long, that our country has become *massively* screwed up - copyright and patent abuse are the least severe symptoms of that problem - although it's certainly true that for some individuals and companies, they are much more severe than for the general public.
I hit submit too soon, I meant to respond to the other part of your post, too.
"And seem to survive for an unknown reason."
I'm no expert on the health effects of radiation exposure, but I've been trying to do some reading on it lately (and plan to do more). If my understanding is correct (which it might not be), if you are exposed to very high levels of radiation, you die quickly - days to weeks, at a somewhat lower magnitude, the radiation kills you slowly (tumors, cancer, etc) - months or a few years. At a lower threshold still, it kills you very slowly - like exposure as an adolescent at this lower level, might lead to you having a shortened life expetency so instead of dieing at 70 or 80, maybe you die in your 50s or 60s from something like a cancer which develops later in life, but not right immediately after exposure, but in the case of someone who was already in their 50s or 60s at the time of such an exposure, it might just not have long enough time to have much effect in shortening your life.
But, in the fairly low-exposure case, it's also my understanding that your reproductive cells can experience genetic mutations that can carry forward to future offspring. Because of that last factor, I've read that some scientists and physicians who specialize in this sort of thing, estimate that something like only 10% of the expected deaths or disabilities due to the Chernobyl disaster will occur within the first generation of those exposed.
We (I mean the whole world when I say we - UN WHO, Ukraine Health Dept, various European national health organizations, the health community in general) really need to keep good data and continuing followup on the populations affected by Chernobyl (much of Europe to one extent or another) over the course of generations, to see what the long-term impacts are, to find out if there actually *is* increased reproductive problems, increased incidences of cancers, etc in the descendants. Also, find out if there's any increase in beneficial mutations too (e.g. improved senses, athleticism, general health, etc).
I've even read that at very very low levels, radiation can be, possibly, pretty beneficial (the term I heard applied was 'hormesis'. However, I think that 'the experts' believe most of the people exposed, were exposed at levels too great for the hormesis effect in most cases.
"(scientists don't know how to stop the boiling stuff!)"
Funny. I've heard Scientists talk about how certain elements are fission 'poisons' because they absorb neutrons without themselves fissioning and giving of more neutrons. The contexts I've seen the discussions in was how in a working reactor this is undesirable, and how reactors have to be designed to avoid the formation of such elements. It would seem like, in this case, they should be able to inject some quantity of such an element into the molten reactor core and 'poison' the fission happening, so it cools off? Why hasn't anyone tried such a thing? Is it just impossible right now to even safely drill a small hole through the containment to attempt such a poisoning?
Yeah, but Fallout 3 also depicts the landscape as essentially void of plant life. As we see with Chernobyl, that's probably wrong (I've only just recently begun playing Fallout 3, though, and never played the earlier Fallouts, so I suppose there could be a sort of surprise ending - perhaps things aren't as they seem at the beginning - that is, perhaps this wasn't all the result of nuclear war, but something else; don't spoil it if that's the case).
Anyhow, at least the way the game is setup at the beginning, there was a nuclear war 200 years before the game starts. Now, I could see a thermonuclear warhead killing all plant life within, I dunno 30 or 50 kilometers of the hypocenter immediately during the blast, but after 200 years, I'd expect a pretty high degree of reforestation of the affected area - even directly under the hypocenter.
I always love when they through in language like "knowingly", because, I'm no lawyer, but isn't it pretty hard to prove that someone 'knowingly' misrepresented. If they just say, "We didn't know", how do you counter that? The only way I can think of is if you happen to get lucky and find an email or other record of a private conversation between company employees where they essentially admit it.
Also, to what extent can lawyers "shield" their clients? I.e. if a Client goes to their lawyer, and the lawyer tells them "yeah, that's infringing", even though it isn't, does the law hold the lawyer liable? I mean, if you acted on advice of your attorney, can you claim you didn't know you were making a misrepresentation (after all, your lawyer told you so, it's just your lawyer was wrong)? Is there anything to stop corrupt little deals where lawyers tell their clients what they want to hear, so that the client can act on advice of their attorney, and because the attorney doesn't face any penalties, it's all sort of 'legal'?
So, you've never been away from your computer for a few days and missed some news? Even people who read any of those sites, might've missed the *particular article* announcing that GOG.com is alive and well.
I'm not sure, but if any 'harm' comes to the company from this, I suspect it'll be less from people being angry at them, and more from people who either saw the reports of GOG's demise, or saw the 'placeholder' page, left, and don't come back because they missed the news that the site is back.
That is, people who heard GOG was dead, and believed it, and just never look again.
I don't really know, but I suspect that they did that just because this is a preview and they haven't bothered with packaging it yet.
Or, maybe, they realize that if they just release it as a.tar.gz, then the distros will package it up for them, and they don't have to do anything? I'm sure someone will package this up in a deb for debian, ubuntu, and similar. Meanwhile, someone *else* will package it as an rpm for Suse/RedHat/Fedora/etc.
As long as it's available as a tarball, and the license terms allow redistribution, packaging pretty much takes care of itself.
Are you sure they can unencrypt HDCP content? I thought those converters will work fine, as long as you had an unencrypted signal, but didn't work for the HDCP 'protected' content? Also, those convertors are like $250 I think. I'd rather have something in software which just spits out an unencrypted signal on the DVI-out port. Much simpler, much cheaper.
"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story."
Not sure who said that, but when it comes to journalism, it's as true to today as when it was first uttered (which was something like 50 or 100 years ago - maybe longer).
Still, I'd like to know what else was in the email. I'm not sure someone would actually get banned just for calling the President a vulgar name.
Interesting question though - the First Amendment limits government limitations on speech. I'm not sure if the Constitution actually applies to foreign nationals, but in the case of the First Amendment, it is a limitation on the government, not a privilege afforded to people. What I mean is, the text of the First Amendment, of course, is:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
It doesn't say Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion of U.S. Citizens, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof for U.S. Citizens; or abridging the freedom of speech of U.S. Citizens, or of the U.S. press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It might be argued that it might be implied/obvious that it only applies to U.S. citizens - guess that would really be a SCOTUS question. Still, it seems to me that as it stands, the government can't use laws to suppress speech anywhere - doesn't seem like it would only limit Congress's powers with regards to U.S. citizens but give them complete unfettered power w.r.t. foreign nationals.
I mean, I suppose it's completely reasonable to prevent someone from entering the country if they've actually made *threats* against the President, or any person in the U.S., or against the military, or any property (e.g. a threat to blow up a building or a subway, or any other thing), or to harm the environment (e.g. set off a dirty bomb, contaminate a water supply, etc), etc.
But calling someone a name isn't a threat against them. That would seem to fall under protected speech.
Let's say I have an older monitor without HDMI/HDCP (in fact, I do have a flat panel that is about 4 years old, which uses VGA and DVI inputs, and I believe does not support HDCP). Let's say I have a perfectly legit Blu-Ray movie, and a BD-ROM/RW drive, and wish to watch my movie, but I don't want to spend 500-600 to get a new monitor. Potentially, someone might be able to create a hacked driver which would allow the decoded digital video to be sent out on the DVI out of my vid card, so I could watch the movie in full HD on my older monitor, something the idiots who created the HDCP spec decided I have no right to do even if I haven't ripped off their movie.
I think the Blu-Ray people don't realize how much HDCP has actually hurt Blu-Ray sales. If a)Blu-Ray drives were a bit cheaper 2 or 3 years ago, and b) I could actually use my *perfectly good high res* monitor, I would have been buying/renting, and watching Blu-Ray movies years ago, but I'm not and won't. The Blu-Ray people seem pretty desperate to get people to buy Blu-Ray, but as far as I can tell, the industry has been having a somewhat hard time getting the public to buy. While HDCP certainly isn't the only reason, I bet it's a not insignificant reason - it makes it harder for honest, paying customers to make completely legitimate use of what the industry wants them to buy.
I have no inclination to play games where having a lot of cash can buy you substantial benefits that other players can't. However, I understand that there are some people out there, to whom $500 is like $1 to me. If Zynga can convince them to drop that kind of cash on their games, I say more power to 'em. If someone is dropping $500 and they don't really *have* the money, that person needs some help, in much the same way that anyone else with an addiction and possible other psychological problems, needs help.
Mostly, I view such games the same way I view high-stakes games of poker or other casino games - I simply can't afford to play, so I won't. For those who can afford to play, it might be a foolish way to lose their money, but hey, it's their money to lose, and I bet that whoever gets the money (the house/Zynga) will likely spend that money more responsibly. Or, you can look at it like a Rolex or luxury yacht. Some rich businessman or celebrity spends big money on a luxury good. You might think, well that money could have fed and clothed a lot of people. Well, even when people spend a lot of money on 'stupid' things, the money they spend provides jobs (often a lot of well-paid jobs) to a lot of other people, so they *are* feeding and clothing lots of people even as they 'waste' their money.
When someone buys a $30 Million yacht, for example, they provide jobs to the skilled craftsmen (and unskilled assembly workers) who work on building the boat, the engineers who designed the boat, the accountants and marketers and salesmen and managers who work for the boat company, plus the boat company buys materials, parts, services, advertising from *other* companies, so that money provides further jobs at the 'upstream' providers that the boat companies pays. Also, it will typically cause the person buying the luxury item to pay a large amount of tax (although, sometimes they find creative ways to avoid taxes), plus the taxes paid by the boat company, employees of the boat companies, any suppliers for the boat company and their employees, etc).
So, in the end, if Zynga can convince some fool to part with $500 on their 'free-to-play' games, I have no problem with that - as long as there's no fraud going on (e.g. charging players who weren't expecting/didn't agree to charges, etc). Although, if other players are unaware that such a program exists which might be advantaging the people paying $500 against the people not paying, and not aware that the program exists, then that does seem a little shady - if people knowingly get into that situation, I don't blame Zynga, but if Zynga hides these deals, it's a bit like rigging a sporting event for bribes. If everyone *knows* the rigging is going on, but they still enjoy the game, well then, that's up to them.
You know, one thing I've not understood for years is why the Telco can't simply run fiber cables that have a couple copper conductors physically joined to the fiber, for power? Very often I hear this argument that copper lines can be used to provide enough power that the phone works even when main power is down. With digital, the argument goes, power goes down, you can't use the phone even if the fiber line is perfectly fine and the telco has power at their equipment.
So, it seems the obvious solution is to bring some (low) power in along-side of the fiber cable. Then, whatever piece of equipment terminates the fiber cable at the residence, can distribute that power to the house (e.g. if it ties into a copper analog phone cable in the house that a POTS phone plug into, the power can be channeled out onto the analog plug of the fiber router, and if there is an ethernet network hooked up to the router, the router could channel power also onto the network (Power-over-Ethernet), so any devices which can be powered via PoE (like a properly designed alarm system, WiFi AP, VoIP phones, etc) will still be powered. You could further supplement this setup by having a UPS attached to the fiber router, so if for some reason power from both telco and mains was cut, you'd have a small reserve of battery power (say a few hours) to keep your home network going.
Unfortunately, I don't hear any noise in the telecoms industry to implement such a thing.
I wouldn't necessarily agree. It may be that the guy in question already had his name on the *legitimate* domain name as an administrative or technical contact. Someone looking to register the fraud domain might just go out and suck down the info for the real domain, the submit the same info for his/her registration. I don't know this for sure, but I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that this is necessarily an inside job. If they didn't get the info from the 'real' domain, it might be that whoever did this did some other research, or social engineering.
Also, for something which is mostly 'new', it takes about 6 years, even in the fast-moving software world, for it to become widely, internationally adopted. I'm sure there are exceptions, but when people start doing something, 5-6 years seems to be the 'uptake' period. At the end of which, you might have hundreds of millions or even billions of people 'infringing' the patent. If patents were granted faster, people might avoid the patents, and you'd never get the level of 'infringment' (I put that in quotes, because lots of patents are rather silly, of course). The very fact that people filing for patent protection can wait SO LONG to disclose and enforce the patents means that the lawsuits hit too late to change course easily.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly are you talking about? Did we read the same article? Because the article I read didn't say that only Windows 7/Vista support IPv6. There was one specific feature, I think, DHCPv6 or something, which maybe Win Vista/7 support and others don't.
You, too missed some stuff in your code there. I'd say you must be using a revision from the early days of Fox News, except for the reference to Obama.
Yeah, business pretty much always works like this - a company introduces a new tech, or new companies enter the market, and you get some (relatively) good deals (sometimes - I'm still not convinced that at close to $100/mo for one phone, the 'unlimited' plans were much of a good deal - just not AS BAD a deal as their *other* offerings.
In the end, when you see good deals (or at least deals you can live with), take advantage of them while you can. Yes, it won't last forever.
Take for example, Hulu.com - when it first launched it was pretty awesome. They had a number of relatively good movies and a great back catalog of TV shows. I knew it wouldn't last, but I enjoyed it while it did. Now, of course, they've yanked something like 75% of their library and made it part of the Hulu+ subscription service. I knew it'd happen someday (when I was watching streams on Hulu, I got *way* too many ads for non-profits and environmental groups, etc - low-rate ads which they hardly make any money on, so I knew their free model was failing), but it didn't make it any less good while it lasted.
Personally, I'd like to see url shorteners die, because of a number of problems, but realistically I know it's not gonna happen. Things I don't like about shorteners:
There's probably other problems I haven't thought of just yet.
The English department at my high school had a very strict rule about 'Being' verbs - am, is, are, was, were be, being, been, and do. In our Big end-of-senior year paper, we could only use being-verbs 5 times in, I don't remember exactly, but I think a 7 or 10 page paper - less than once per page. When you went over the count, they started deducting points - IIRC, they deducted like 5% off the total report grade for each extra being verb. That was enough to give you a very strong incentive go back through your drafts looking for being verbs and rewriting sentences and paragraphs to excise them from the text. (Wow, it is so hard to write in the past tense without being verbs; although, for an English paper, you aren't usually talking about history so you can usually avoid the past-tense). I don't think direct quotes from sources in your Bibliography counted against you.
As the parent points out, you can almost always replace a being verb, with an *active* verb - you say what the subject is *doing*, not what the subject is *being*, or is having done to it (obviously there are a few certain cases where you must use being verbs, some in this post - I've re-read before posting, and there's certain sentences I cannot figure out how to re-write). The word 'do' is kind of in-between, but it's better, as the parent shows, to say the group *released* instead of 'did a release', or 'released a new build', or 'released a new version', or 'published a release', or 'released a new snapshot', etc. It makes your language more interesting.
I do think that the strictness of my school's English policies did help me learn to be a better communicator - one of the great complaints about a lot of geeks is that they don't have sufficient communication skills to effectively relay/teach other people about the tech they are working on. I don't claim to be a *great* communicator, but I think I do alright most of the time.
"Despite that, several jurisdictions filed criminal charges and arrest warrants against her, although the charges were eventually dismissed."
Prosecutors filing charges doesn't really mean anything, though. In the end what matters is whether the courts accept that as a valid defense [I'm not sure if this would be a judge issue (finding of law), or a jury issue (finding of fact), but my hunch is that it would be the former - that a judge would make the legal ruling as to whether getting advice from an attorney protects you from the 'knowingly' clause].
There's got to be a case somewhere in American history (or multiple cases) that dealt exactly with this issue - I can't believe no-one ever tried to hide behind their lawyers on an issue where 'knowingly' is part of the legal test for penalty).
"For the love of your particular deity, will someone hold the companies who abuse our laws responsible for something?"
Wouldn't it make more sense to hold the people accountable who pass (and don't modify/repeal) such bad laws, e.g. Congress and the President (who has to sign legislation into law)?
Unfortunately, it's seems kind of difficult to get most people to care about things like copyright and patent law - in part because there's so many issues of even more consequence out there that demand the public's attention - wars, disasters, budget deficits, unemployement, health care, education, etc.
The real problem is we have such bad an inneffective government, and have for so long, that our country has become *massively* screwed up - copyright and patent abuse are the least severe symptoms of that problem - although it's certainly true that for some individuals and companies, they are much more severe than for the general public.
I hit submit too soon, I meant to respond to the other part of your post, too.
"And seem to survive for an unknown reason."
I'm no expert on the health effects of radiation exposure, but I've been trying to do some reading on it lately (and plan to do more). If my understanding is correct (which it might not be), if you are exposed to very high levels of radiation, you die quickly - days to weeks, at a somewhat lower magnitude, the radiation kills you slowly (tumors, cancer, etc) - months or a few years. At a lower threshold still, it kills you very slowly - like exposure as an adolescent at this lower level, might lead to you having a shortened life expetency so instead of dieing at 70 or 80, maybe you die in your 50s or 60s from something like a cancer which develops later in life, but not right immediately after exposure, but in the case of someone who was already in their 50s or 60s at the time of such an exposure, it might just not have long enough time to have much effect in shortening your life.
But, in the fairly low-exposure case, it's also my understanding that your reproductive cells can experience genetic mutations that can carry forward to future offspring. Because of that last factor, I've read that some scientists and physicians who specialize in this sort of thing, estimate that something like only 10% of the expected deaths or disabilities due to the Chernobyl disaster will occur within the first generation of those exposed.
We (I mean the whole world when I say we - UN WHO, Ukraine Health Dept, various European national health organizations, the health community in general) really need to keep good data and continuing followup on the populations affected by Chernobyl (much of Europe to one extent or another) over the course of generations, to see what the long-term impacts are, to find out if there actually *is* increased reproductive problems, increased incidences of cancers, etc in the descendants. Also, find out if there's any increase in beneficial mutations too (e.g. improved senses, athleticism, general health, etc).
I've even read that at very very low levels, radiation can be, possibly, pretty beneficial (the term I heard applied was 'hormesis'. However, I think that 'the experts' believe most of the people exposed, were exposed at levels too great for the hormesis effect in most cases.
"(scientists don't know how to stop the boiling stuff!)"
Funny. I've heard Scientists talk about how certain elements are fission 'poisons' because they absorb neutrons without themselves fissioning and giving of more neutrons. The contexts I've seen the discussions in was how in a working reactor this is undesirable, and how reactors have to be designed to avoid the formation of such elements. It would seem like, in this case, they should be able to inject some quantity of such an element into the molten reactor core and 'poison' the fission happening, so it cools off? Why hasn't anyone tried such a thing? Is it just impossible right now to even safely drill a small hole through the containment to attempt such a poisoning?
It's in Ukraine. Sure, Ukraine was part of the USSR, but it's not Russia.
Yeah, but Fallout 3 also depicts the landscape as essentially void of plant life. As we see with Chernobyl, that's probably wrong (I've only just recently begun playing Fallout 3, though, and never played the earlier Fallouts, so I suppose there could be a sort of surprise ending - perhaps things aren't as they seem at the beginning - that is, perhaps this wasn't all the result of nuclear war, but something else; don't spoil it if that's the case).
Anyhow, at least the way the game is setup at the beginning, there was a nuclear war 200 years before the game starts. Now, I could see a thermonuclear warhead killing all plant life within, I dunno 30 or 50 kilometers of the hypocenter immediately during the blast, but after 200 years, I'd expect a pretty high degree of reforestation of the affected area - even directly under the hypocenter.
I always love when they through in language like "knowingly", because, I'm no lawyer, but isn't it pretty hard to prove that someone 'knowingly' misrepresented. If they just say, "We didn't know", how do you counter that? The only way I can think of is if you happen to get lucky and find an email or other record of a private conversation between company employees where they essentially admit it.
Also, to what extent can lawyers "shield" their clients? I.e. if a Client goes to their lawyer, and the lawyer tells them "yeah, that's infringing", even though it isn't, does the law hold the lawyer liable? I mean, if you acted on advice of your attorney, can you claim you didn't know you were making a misrepresentation (after all, your lawyer told you so, it's just your lawyer was wrong)? Is there anything to stop corrupt little deals where lawyers tell their clients what they want to hear, so that the client can act on advice of their attorney, and because the attorney doesn't face any penalties, it's all sort of 'legal'?
So, you've never been away from your computer for a few days and missed some news? Even people who read any of those sites, might've missed the *particular article* announcing that GOG.com is alive and well.
I'm not sure, but if any 'harm' comes to the company from this, I suspect it'll be less from people being angry at them, and more from people who either saw the reports of GOG's demise, or saw the 'placeholder' page, left, and don't come back because they missed the news that the site is back.
That is, people who heard GOG was dead, and believed it, and just never look again.
I don't really know, but I suspect that they did that just because this is a preview and they haven't bothered with packaging it yet.
Or, maybe, they realize that if they just release it as a .tar.gz, then the distros will package it up for them, and they don't have to do anything? I'm sure someone will package this up in a deb for debian, ubuntu, and similar. Meanwhile, someone *else* will package it as an rpm for Suse/RedHat/Fedora/etc.
As long as it's available as a tarball, and the license terms allow redistribution, packaging pretty much takes care of itself.
Are you sure they can unencrypt HDCP content? I thought those converters will work fine, as long as you had an unencrypted signal, but didn't work for the HDCP 'protected' content? Also, those convertors are like $250 I think. I'd rather have something in software which just spits out an unencrypted signal on the DVI-out port. Much simpler, much cheaper.
"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story."
Not sure who said that, but when it comes to journalism, it's as true to today as when it was first uttered (which was something like 50 or 100 years ago - maybe longer).
Still, I'd like to know what else was in the email. I'm not sure someone would actually get banned just for calling the President a vulgar name.
Interesting question though - the First Amendment limits government limitations on speech. I'm not sure if the Constitution actually applies to foreign nationals, but in the case of the First Amendment, it is a limitation on the government, not a privilege afforded to people. What I mean is, the text of the First Amendment, of course, is:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
It doesn't say Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion of U.S. Citizens, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof for U.S. Citizens; or abridging the freedom of speech of U.S. Citizens, or of the U.S. press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It might be argued that it might be implied/obvious that it only applies to U.S. citizens - guess that would really be a SCOTUS question. Still, it seems to me that as it stands, the government can't use laws to suppress speech anywhere - doesn't seem like it would only limit Congress's powers with regards to U.S. citizens but give them complete unfettered power w.r.t. foreign nationals.
I mean, I suppose it's completely reasonable to prevent someone from entering the country if they've actually made *threats* against the President, or any person in the U.S., or against the military, or any property (e.g. a threat to blow up a building or a subway, or any other thing), or to harm the environment (e.g. set off a dirty bomb, contaminate a water supply, etc), etc.
But calling someone a name isn't a threat against them. That would seem to fall under protected speech.
Let's say I have an older monitor without HDMI/HDCP (in fact, I do have a flat panel that is about 4 years old, which uses VGA and DVI inputs, and I believe does not support HDCP). Let's say I have a perfectly legit Blu-Ray movie, and a BD-ROM/RW drive, and wish to watch my movie, but I don't want to spend 500-600 to get a new monitor. Potentially, someone might be able to create a hacked driver which would allow the decoded digital video to be sent out on the DVI out of my vid card, so I could watch the movie in full HD on my older monitor, something the idiots who created the HDCP spec decided I have no right to do even if I haven't ripped off their movie.
I think the Blu-Ray people don't realize how much HDCP has actually hurt Blu-Ray sales. If a)Blu-Ray drives were a bit cheaper 2 or 3 years ago, and b) I could actually use my *perfectly good high res* monitor, I would have been buying/renting, and watching Blu-Ray movies years ago, but I'm not and won't. The Blu-Ray people seem pretty desperate to get people to buy Blu-Ray, but as far as I can tell, the industry has been having a somewhat hard time getting the public to buy. While HDCP certainly isn't the only reason, I bet it's a not insignificant reason - it makes it harder for honest, paying customers to make completely legitimate use of what the industry wants them to buy.
I have no inclination to play games where having a lot of cash can buy you substantial benefits that other players can't. However, I understand that there are some people out there, to whom $500 is like $1 to me. If Zynga can convince them to drop that kind of cash on their games, I say more power to 'em. If someone is dropping $500 and they don't really *have* the money, that person needs some help, in much the same way that anyone else with an addiction and possible other psychological problems, needs help.
Mostly, I view such games the same way I view high-stakes games of poker or other casino games - I simply can't afford to play, so I won't. For those who can afford to play, it might be a foolish way to lose their money, but hey, it's their money to lose, and I bet that whoever gets the money (the house/Zynga) will likely spend that money more responsibly. Or, you can look at it like a Rolex or luxury yacht. Some rich businessman or celebrity spends big money on a luxury good. You might think, well that money could have fed and clothed a lot of people. Well, even when people spend a lot of money on 'stupid' things, the money they spend provides jobs (often a lot of well-paid jobs) to a lot of other people, so they *are* feeding and clothing lots of people even as they 'waste' their money.
When someone buys a $30 Million yacht, for example, they provide jobs to the skilled craftsmen (and unskilled assembly workers) who work on building the boat, the engineers who designed the boat, the accountants and marketers and salesmen and managers who work for the boat company, plus the boat company buys materials, parts, services, advertising from *other* companies, so that money provides further jobs at the 'upstream' providers that the boat companies pays. Also, it will typically cause the person buying the luxury item to pay a large amount of tax (although, sometimes they find creative ways to avoid taxes), plus the taxes paid by the boat company, employees of the boat companies, any suppliers for the boat company and their employees, etc).
So, in the end, if Zynga can convince some fool to part with $500 on their 'free-to-play' games, I have no problem with that - as long as there's no fraud going on (e.g. charging players who weren't expecting/didn't agree to charges, etc). Although, if other players are unaware that such a program exists which might be advantaging the people paying $500 against the people not paying, and not aware that the program exists, then that does seem a little shady - if people knowingly get into that situation, I don't blame Zynga, but if Zynga hides these deals, it's a bit like rigging a sporting event for bribes. If everyone *knows* the rigging is going on, but they still enjoy the game, well then, that's up to them.
"Oh, my battery's about to die. I'll call you back in 6 hours when my phone manages to recharge enough for a 10 minute conversation".
"I don't HAVE an alarm. Never did have one. It's just me, and my guns."
What, no dog?
You know, one thing I've not understood for years is why the Telco can't simply run fiber cables that have a couple copper conductors physically joined to the fiber, for power? Very often I hear this argument that copper lines can be used to provide enough power that the phone works even when main power is down. With digital, the argument goes, power goes down, you can't use the phone even if the fiber line is perfectly fine and the telco has power at their equipment.
So, it seems the obvious solution is to bring some (low) power in along-side of the fiber cable. Then, whatever piece of equipment terminates the fiber cable at the residence, can distribute that power to the house (e.g. if it ties into a copper analog phone cable in the house that a POTS phone plug into, the power can be channeled out onto the analog plug of the fiber router, and if there is an ethernet network hooked up to the router, the router could channel power also onto the network (Power-over-Ethernet), so any devices which can be powered via PoE (like a properly designed alarm system, WiFi AP, VoIP phones, etc) will still be powered. You could further supplement this setup by having a UPS attached to the fiber router, so if for some reason power from both telco and mains was cut, you'd have a small reserve of battery power (say a few hours) to keep your home network going.
Unfortunately, I don't hear any noise in the telecoms industry to implement such a thing.
I wouldn't necessarily agree. It may be that the guy in question already had his name on the *legitimate* domain name as an administrative or technical contact. Someone looking to register the fraud domain might just go out and suck down the info for the real domain, the submit the same info for his/her registration. I don't know this for sure, but I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that this is necessarily an inside job. If they didn't get the info from the 'real' domain, it might be that whoever did this did some other research, or social engineering.
Also, for something which is mostly 'new', it takes about 6 years, even in the fast-moving software world, for it to become widely, internationally adopted. I'm sure there are exceptions, but when people start doing something, 5-6 years seems to be the 'uptake' period. At the end of which, you might have hundreds of millions or even billions of people 'infringing' the patent. If patents were granted faster, people might avoid the patents, and you'd never get the level of 'infringment' (I put that in quotes, because lots of patents are rather silly, of course). The very fact that people filing for patent protection can wait SO LONG to disclose and enforce the patents means that the lawsuits hit too late to change course easily.
Well, I wanted to search for info on specific South American nations, but I never got passed "Bra".