I wouldn't mind a single technical information summary sticker on the underside of the laptop. You know, where the manufacturer typically puts a sticker with serial number, model number, etc.? Something which is sort of the computer equivalent of the 'nutrition facts' box on food packaging, which included info about:
* CPU make/model/revision/speed/number of cores. * Amount of RAM originally installed * List of built-in devices (wifi chip, ethernet chip, audio chip, GPU, memory card reader chip, etc)
Only thing is, I think putting all that info on a sticker, in text large enough to read, would lead to a giant sticker, which might interfere with things like removable batteries, removable access panels (e.g. the panel you normally remove to access the memory slots, etc), cooling vents, removable drives, etc, which are all usually accessed on the bottom of the laptop.
Man, I just did a Google search for 'techcrunch rumor false', and got a lot of hits on different rumors. TechCrunch appears to be the high-tech industry equivalent of a supermarket tabloid?
Didn't TechCrunch put out another widely repeated rumor a month or two ago that turned out to be completely false? Seems like it was something else Slashdot reported (based on the TechCrunch source), but it was bogus. But, now I can't remember what it was. Racking my brain, but drawing a blank.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that once upon a time, there was a 'stable universe' theory that posited the universe had always existed and always would exist. Then a few things (like entropy and the idea of the 'heat death of the universe', and the observed expansion [and rate of that expansion[ of the universe) forced scientists to come to the conclusion that the universe could not always exists in the form we see it today - hence ideas like the big-bang theory.
My point is, that people could accept that, "Maybe everything has always existed in some form", but we have to fit our hypothesis to the facts, and not the other way around - that is, we can't *assume* that everything has always existed in some form, it must be shown to be (probably) true.
I'll have to check his book out, to see what he actually says, but somehow I'm missing how 'gravity' makes it necessary that anything must exists. If there is no matter, there can be no gravity, right? Maybe I'm completely wrong about that though - I don't really understand string theory, or claim to, but maybe his book will shed some light on the dark of the matter.
I dunno if it's actually cost effective (it might be cheaper to mine/extract 'new' lithium), but if need be, shouldn't the lithium in the battery be recylable? Batteries go bad, but it's not like the elemental lithium in the battery is destroyed through use (well, I'm not sure what the half-life of Lithium is, but since it doesn't seem to be a radiation hazard, I'm going to guess it has a nice long, stable half-life, so that means that it's not decaying into some other element in any time period we care about [dunno if it would ever decay into something else - Wikipedia article for isotopes of Lithium just says that Lithiumm-7 is 'stable'; not sure if that means it takes billions of years to decay, or simply never will decay]).
Anyhow, it seems like, logically, all those automotive, cell-phone, laptop, etc batteries could be recycled into new batteries when they start to lose the ability to hold a charge. But again, it might just be too expensive to recycle when lots of fairly cheap 'virgin' lithium may be available?
It's not a huge leap to suggest that, even though the Nubians might not have developed medical science as we know it, they might have made a connection between drinking the beer and curing certain types of illnesses. Hence the term *empirical* - knowledge gained through experience and practical demonstration that it's true, even without knowing *why* it's true at a theoretical level.
When a wiki page is changed, Wikipedia automatically generates a new 'version' of the page. You can cite a specific version of the page instead of the 'current'. Not sure many people know about that, but for any page, there is a 'history' link, and you can get a url from that page to access any specific version. As far as I know, that version link should remain valid and unchanged forever (or until Wikipedia shuts down, at least).
So, I'm confused. Did they cite wikipedia, or did they cite the 'Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders DSM-IV-TR?' Because, to me, the latter sounds like it's an actual scientific publication from some sort of Industry Association of mental health professionals? I mean, if you go to Wiki, and Wiki cites an actual recognized publication, and you then cite that publication, does it make it any less valid just because you discovered that publication through Wikipedia?
I just did some quick Google searching, and it appears that is a publication of the American Psychiatric Association. Is there some question as to the credibility of the APA when it comes to mental health problems?
Problem solved: all HP devices will automatically located HP printers on any network in range and send advertisements to the printers at random intervals.
Trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps you know an *area*/stretch of road, is likely to have IEDs, but you don't know exactly where they are? But, in that case, wouldn't a simpler solution to be a chopper that can pickup a humvee, fly over the dangerous area, deliver it to a known safe drop point, and drop the hummer? Then, when it's time to go, pick up the hummer again and carry it out?
I'm not sure either a rotary wing or fixed wing is going to react/get you airborne fast enough to avoid the IED. I'd almost think you'd need something like rockets pointed toward the ground that you could fire almost instantly and 'launch' the vehicle some height in the air. . . then you need to figure out how to get it safely down again.
Is it just me, or does it seem kind of redundant to have a rotary wing (helicopter style rotor), and fixed wing with rear-thrust device (can't tell if it's a jet or what it is, but the picture seems to have something at the rear of the car which looks like it's to produce thrust). I suppose sometimes redundancy is good, but in this case, wouldn't those two different types of flight systems interfere with each other (that is, either one is making you fly and the other is creating unnecessary drag/weight, or vice versa?)
Seriously, the situations are incredibly rare, but I can see in true crisis situations, someone eating the flesh of another person to survive until they can get help/other sources of food, without morally transgressing. I could see a parent, seeing their family on the verge of starvation, giving of themselves (quite literally), so their children could survive. I think such situations could very well be ethical.
If this is all about the 'cartels', then don't pirate them - just boycott them. The difference between a boycott and piracy is that, even if they disagree with your boycott, most people will agree you have the right not to consume content controlled by businesses whose practices you do not support. The problem with pirates is they just want stuff for free. There's no moral high ground when you rip people off. So please, spare us the lameness of trying to stand upon that quicksand.
It also does not explain why so many small businesses and independent creators get ruthlessly ripped off by the pirates. If it's just about the 'cartels', then why do people ripoff the smaller companies and true indies?
Oh yeah, I forgot about MonoTouch. Is that product even still viable? I thought Apple was banning all apps developed using third-party toolkits, including MonoTouch?
I think the honest truth of the matter is that, ultimately, various copyright holder constituencies/industry groups have gone about fighting piracy the wrong way. You can't legislate or sue people into doing the right thing (only to some extent).
That is really a cultural issue - people need to start realizing it is not right to rip off software, music, movie, etc creators *just because you can get away with it*. There needs to be both a positive cultural attitude towards supporting creators, and a cultural stigma against ripping them off. That may take a very long time to bring, but that will be far more effective in the long run - getting people to voluntarily pay creators (or the businesses that employ them) is far easier than catching and litigating every single person who rips you off.
I don't know for sure, but Google, about 6 months after the original Android/G1 release, made a native SDK available. I imagine that for something like Mono, you would create a native executable JIT compiler/runtime (which is how you do.Net on any other platform). Or, perhaps, your mono code will be cross-compiled to a native Android/ARM binary program which does not require a separate Mono runtime to be installed on end-user phones.
Interesting thing about MonoDroid is that while all the other incarnations of Mono are Open Source, MonoDroid apparently will not be. An interesting choice for Novell, I'd say.
.Net has been around for years and years, Mono has been around for almost as long, and there's been no lawsuit, so Microsoft has no interest or intention of suing, right? I'm not convinced. The way I always figured it, if you're going to sue for something like that, you wait till the 'unofficial' platform has become wildly popular and it's largely too late to 'turn the ship', so to speak, then you sue.
Microsoft's problem with.Net and Mono is that while it's become used somewhat, it hasn't really become used to the extent that, say, Java on Android (where every Android phone has the Dalvik VM and nearly every app is written in Java). Mono exists on Linux/Mac/*BSD, but mostly people don't use it that much, in my experience (I'm sure someone somewhere has a story about how there company has a mission critical app built on Mono, running on Linux or whatever platform, but I just don't see most Linux distro's deploying many Mono apps by default, and I don't see any widely-used 'killer apps' that are built on Mono).
Basically,.Net/Mono never reached the point of deployment and mission critical-ness to warrant a lawsuit, because MS would likely get small-time damages right now. Gotta wait till the damages are worth the bad PR (which may never come in.Net's case).
The Slashdot summary, talking about the objects passing in front of their stars, got me to wondering:
* Is there any probability that there are stars out there whose planets orbit in a plane which is perpendicular to our line of view (that is, the planets would never cross in front of their star, from our point of view, because we are sort of looking at the their orbits top-down? It would seem that this is likely, seeing as their are stars which, from our point of view, are at every degree of latitude and longitude from the earth.
* Is there any sort of 'bias' which tends to cause stars in our galaxy to form their planetary orbits within a few degrees parallel to a common plane? (For example, perhaps most stars have spin which is parallel to the plane of the galactic disc of the Milky Way, because the galactic motion of the matter maybe pre-disposes matter to spin and orbit that way)?
* Can our current extra-solar planet searching activities detect planets which are in such perpendicular planes to our line of view?
IANAL, but when you make a well documented public claim, I think that claim can be presented to a judge in court, and may have the weight of a contract or license. In any case, there must be an actual written license which will go along with this claim, and whatever that license says, would have weight in court.
Ok, so I realized about 1 minute after I posted this last night that you weren't responding to the post I thought you were./. had hidden the post you were replying to, so it looked like you were replying directly to the GP. Having realized my mistake, I would have deleted the post, but this being slashdot, I couldn't. I guess I gotta not post after 12:00am - too tired to notice the small detail that the quote at the top of your post wasn't from the GP. (sigh)
"Forbidding private business owners from discriminating based on race, color, religion, or national origin (and enforcing this prohibition) was an expansion of government powers. A valid one, in my view."
Don't be obtuse. What you said is exactly what the grandparent was saying - "Arguably the largest civil rights movements . ..have ALL come to fruition from larger government involvement, not less."
Man, you would think people at a site with "News For Nerds" would have better reading comprehension.
Hmm, I'm trying to imagine the scenario you are worried about. I guess you are suggesting the hostile government could easily setup a Man-In-The-Middle attack, because, presuming they control the DNS Server you are connecting to also (or can intercept your DNS requests), they could A) tell your computer that *.gmail.com, *.google.com have IP addresses that really belong to proxy servers they control (or, alternatively, report the 'real' IP addresses with DNS, but intercept all packets to those IP addresses and send them to the proxy server), B) they make a *real* connection to gmail, using the real gmail cert, but send to your computer *their* SSL Cert which *claims* to be for *.google.com or *.gmail.com, and because they co-opted the CA, your computer will think it really belongs to google/gmail (because it is signed), then, C) they proxy your traffic to the real gmail servers?
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, if they're playing WoW 18 hours a day there won't be any time left for them to plan to blow people up or kidnap them.
Faith is all fine and good, but faith is not "knowing for a fact".
1) I hope I never have occasion to be in front of a jury to begin with.
2) If I am ever in front of a Jury, I hope none of them think like CrazyJim1.
I wouldn't mind a single technical information summary sticker on the underside of the laptop. You know, where the manufacturer typically puts a sticker with serial number, model number, etc.? Something which is sort of the computer equivalent of the 'nutrition facts' box on food packaging, which included info about:
* CPU make/model/revision/speed/number of cores.
* Amount of RAM originally installed
* List of built-in devices (wifi chip, ethernet chip, audio chip, GPU, memory card reader chip, etc)
Only thing is, I think putting all that info on a sticker, in text large enough to read, would lead to a giant sticker, which might interfere with things like removable batteries, removable access panels (e.g. the panel you normally remove to access the memory slots, etc), cooling vents, removable drives, etc, which are all usually accessed on the bottom of the laptop.
Man, I just did a Google search for 'techcrunch rumor false', and got a lot of hits on different rumors. TechCrunch appears to be the high-tech industry equivalent of a supermarket tabloid?
Didn't TechCrunch put out another widely repeated rumor a month or two ago that turned out to be completely false? Seems like it was something else Slashdot reported (based on the TechCrunch source), but it was bogus. But, now I can't remember what it was. Racking my brain, but drawing a blank.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that once upon a time, there was a 'stable universe' theory that posited the universe had always existed and always would exist. Then a few things (like entropy and the idea of the 'heat death of the universe', and the observed expansion [and rate of that expansion[ of the universe) forced scientists to come to the conclusion that the universe could not always exists in the form we see it today - hence ideas like the big-bang theory.
My point is, that people could accept that, "Maybe everything has always existed in some form", but we have to fit our hypothesis to the facts, and not the other way around - that is, we can't *assume* that everything has always existed in some form, it must be shown to be (probably) true.
I'll have to check his book out, to see what he actually says, but somehow I'm missing how 'gravity' makes it necessary that anything must exists. If there is no matter, there can be no gravity, right? Maybe I'm completely wrong about that though - I don't really understand string theory, or claim to, but maybe his book will shed some light on the dark of the matter.
I dunno if it's actually cost effective (it might be cheaper to mine/extract 'new' lithium), but if need be, shouldn't the lithium in the battery be recylable? Batteries go bad, but it's not like the elemental lithium in the battery is destroyed through use (well, I'm not sure what the half-life of Lithium is, but since it doesn't seem to be a radiation hazard, I'm going to guess it has a nice long, stable half-life, so that means that it's not decaying into some other element in any time period we care about [dunno if it would ever decay into something else - Wikipedia article for isotopes of Lithium just says that Lithiumm-7 is 'stable'; not sure if that means it takes billions of years to decay, or simply never will decay]).
Anyhow, it seems like, logically, all those automotive, cell-phone, laptop, etc batteries could be recycled into new batteries when they start to lose the ability to hold a charge. But again, it might just be too expensive to recycle when lots of fairly cheap 'virgin' lithium may be available?
It's not a huge leap to suggest that, even though the Nubians might not have developed medical science as we know it, they might have made a connection between drinking the beer and curing certain types of illnesses. Hence the term *empirical* - knowledge gained through experience and practical demonstration that it's true, even without knowing *why* it's true at a theoretical level.
When a wiki page is changed, Wikipedia automatically generates a new 'version' of the page. You can cite a specific version of the page instead of the 'current'. Not sure many people know about that, but for any page, there is a 'history' link, and you can get a url from that page to access any specific version. As far as I know, that version link should remain valid and unchanged forever (or until Wikipedia shuts down, at least).
So, I'm confused. Did they cite wikipedia, or did they cite the 'Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders DSM-IV-TR?' Because, to me, the latter sounds like it's an actual scientific publication from some sort of Industry Association of mental health professionals? I mean, if you go to Wiki, and Wiki cites an actual recognized publication, and you then cite that publication, does it make it any less valid just because you discovered that publication through Wikipedia?
I just did some quick Google searching, and it appears that is a publication of the American Psychiatric Association. Is there some question as to the credibility of the APA when it comes to mental health problems?
Problem solved: all HP devices will automatically located HP printers on any network in range and send advertisements to the printers at random intervals.
Trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps you know an *area*/stretch of road, is likely to have IEDs, but you don't know exactly where they are? But, in that case, wouldn't a simpler solution to be a chopper that can pickup a humvee, fly over the dangerous area, deliver it to a known safe drop point, and drop the hummer? Then, when it's time to go, pick up the hummer again and carry it out?
I'm not sure either a rotary wing or fixed wing is going to react/get you airborne fast enough to avoid the IED. I'd almost think you'd need something like rockets pointed toward the ground that you could fire almost instantly and 'launch' the vehicle some height in the air. . . then you need to figure out how to get it safely down again.
Is it just me, or does it seem kind of redundant to have a rotary wing (helicopter style rotor), and fixed wing with rear-thrust device (can't tell if it's a jet or what it is, but the picture seems to have something at the rear of the car which looks like it's to produce thrust). I suppose sometimes redundancy is good, but in this case, wouldn't those two different types of flight systems interfere with each other (that is, either one is making you fly and the other is creating unnecessary drag/weight, or vice versa?)
There ain't no party like a Donner Party.
Seriously, the situations are incredibly rare, but I can see in true crisis situations, someone eating the flesh of another person to survive until they can get help/other sources of food, without morally transgressing. I could see a parent, seeing their family on the verge of starvation, giving of themselves (quite literally), so their children could survive. I think such situations could very well be ethical.
If this is all about the 'cartels', then don't pirate them - just boycott them. The difference between a boycott and piracy is that, even if they disagree with your boycott, most people will agree you have the right not to consume content controlled by businesses whose practices you do not support. The problem with pirates is they just want stuff for free. There's no moral high ground when you rip people off. So please, spare us the lameness of trying to stand upon that quicksand.
It also does not explain why so many small businesses and independent creators get ruthlessly ripped off by the pirates. If it's just about the 'cartels', then why do people ripoff the smaller companies and true indies?
Oh yeah, I forgot about MonoTouch. Is that product even still viable? I thought Apple was banning all apps developed using third-party toolkits, including MonoTouch?
I think the honest truth of the matter is that, ultimately, various copyright holder constituencies/industry groups have gone about fighting piracy the wrong way. You can't legislate or sue people into doing the right thing (only to some extent).
That is really a cultural issue - people need to start realizing it is not right to rip off software, music, movie, etc creators *just because you can get away with it*. There needs to be both a positive cultural attitude towards supporting creators, and a cultural stigma against ripping them off. That may take a very long time to bring, but that will be far more effective in the long run - getting people to voluntarily pay creators (or the businesses that employ them) is far easier than catching and litigating every single person who rips you off.
I don't know for sure, but Google, about 6 months after the original Android/G1 release, made a native SDK available. I imagine that for something like Mono, you would create a native executable JIT compiler/runtime (which is how you do .Net on any other platform). Or, perhaps, your mono code will be cross-compiled to a native Android/ARM binary program which does not require a separate Mono runtime to be installed on end-user phones.
Interesting thing about MonoDroid is that while all the other incarnations of Mono are Open Source, MonoDroid apparently will not be. An interesting choice for Novell, I'd say.
.Net has been around for years and years, Mono has been around for almost as long, and there's been no lawsuit, so Microsoft has no interest or intention of suing, right? I'm not convinced. The way I always figured it, if you're going to sue for something like that, you wait till the 'unofficial' platform has become wildly popular and it's largely too late to 'turn the ship', so to speak, then you sue.
Microsoft's problem with .Net and Mono is that while it's become used somewhat, it hasn't really become used to the extent that, say, Java on Android (where every Android phone has the Dalvik VM and nearly every app is written in Java). Mono exists on Linux/Mac/*BSD, but mostly people don't use it that much, in my experience (I'm sure someone somewhere has a story about how there company has a mission critical app built on Mono, running on Linux or whatever platform, but I just don't see most Linux distro's deploying many Mono apps by default, and I don't see any widely-used 'killer apps' that are built on Mono).
Basically, .Net/Mono never reached the point of deployment and mission critical-ness to warrant a lawsuit, because MS would likely get small-time damages right now. Gotta wait till the damages are worth the bad PR (which may never come in .Net's case).
The Slashdot summary, talking about the objects passing in front of their stars, got me to wondering:
* Is there any probability that there are stars out there whose planets orbit in a plane which is perpendicular to our line of view (that is, the planets would never cross in front of their star, from our point of view, because we are sort of looking at the their orbits top-down? It would seem that this is likely, seeing as their are stars which, from our point of view, are at every degree of latitude and longitude from the earth.
* Is there any sort of 'bias' which tends to cause stars in our galaxy to form their planetary orbits within a few degrees parallel to a common plane? (For example, perhaps most stars have spin which is parallel to the plane of the galactic disc of the Milky Way, because the galactic motion of the matter maybe pre-disposes matter to spin and orbit that way)?
* Can our current extra-solar planet searching activities detect planets which are in such perpendicular planes to our line of view?
IANAL, but when you make a well documented public claim, I think that claim can be presented to a judge in court, and may have the weight of a contract or license. In any case, there must be an actual written license which will go along with this claim, and whatever that license says, would have weight in court.
Ok, so I realized about 1 minute after I posted this last night that you weren't responding to the post I thought you were. /. had hidden the post you were replying to, so it looked like you were replying directly to the GP. Having realized my mistake, I would have deleted the post, but this being slashdot, I couldn't. I guess I gotta not post after 12:00am - too tired to notice the small detail that the quote at the top of your post wasn't from the GP. (sigh)
"Forbidding private business owners from discriminating based on race, color, religion, or national origin (and enforcing this prohibition) was an expansion of government powers. A valid one, in my view."
Don't be obtuse. What you said is exactly what the grandparent was saying - "Arguably the largest civil rights movements . . .have ALL come to fruition from larger government involvement, not less."
Man, you would think people at a site with "News For Nerds" would have better reading comprehension.
Hmm, I'm trying to imagine the scenario you are worried about. I guess you are suggesting the hostile government could easily setup a Man-In-The-Middle attack, because, presuming they control the DNS Server you are connecting to also (or can intercept your DNS requests), they could A) tell your computer that *.gmail.com, *.google.com have IP addresses that really belong to proxy servers they control (or, alternatively, report the 'real' IP addresses with DNS, but intercept all packets to those IP addresses and send them to the proxy server), B) they make a *real* connection to gmail, using the real gmail cert, but send to your computer *their* SSL Cert which *claims* to be for *.google.com or *.gmail.com, and because they co-opted the CA, your computer will think it really belongs to google/gmail (because it is signed), then, C) they proxy your traffic to the real gmail servers?