Wouldn't the pressure of the wind (assuming flurries of wind instead of a constant wind) do pretty much the same thing as the pressure of a rain drop? Put it on an angled roof and you'd get solar power, rain power, and wind power all in one. Use these things instead of shingles.
If we could make these things tough enough then we could replace all sidewalks with these things and also make use of walking energy.
You seem to have missed the point. The author is asking for a document he could give to his employer that they could sign that would open source the code. It's right there in the summary: "I've looked online to try to find a legal document I could present to my employer to get them to sign off on it".
You wouldn't need a submarine for this. You just need a big boat, an anchor, and a chart of where the cables are.
If these cuts are intentional then they seem much more like simple cheap attacks. If you want to cut the middle east off from western influence then cutting off cross-ocean internet links is a good way to do it for someone with minimal means. You can't easily stop satellites or TV transmissions, but cutting up the internet cables is something that can be done relatively easily.
Godaddy also provides web hosting and dedicated server hosting. I personally have two dedicated servers there because they are very cheap (a little over $100 a month) yet also very responsive when I need help. I don't know how big a percentage of their business is hosting and how much is domain names, but it's not like domain names are the only thing they do.
Are you quoting that Star Trek crap verbatim? I had no idea that people took that seriously. I groaned every time Data acted all confused by human emotion.
Humor is surprise, discomfort, and recognition of the unusual. It's how we react to things that take us by surprise in very particular ways. Humor may be difficult to define because it requires a specific understanding of what humans find surprising. But, there's nothing bloody magical about it.
I suppose it's cool to emphasize the semantic web use of SPARQL. But, at its core SPARQL is a query language for RDF data stores. It takes some learning, but using SPARQL against an RDF data store feels much cleaner than using SQL against a relational database. It's slower though. Much slower. That's why it works best for small data sets.
My company stores the schema for our objects in RDF and use SPARQL to query against that schema. The actual data is saved to a relational database (our experiments with an all-RDF system concluded that it's just too slow for large data sets).
The RDF data stores can exist in arbitrary places (they don't need to be local), but I wonder how slow that would be to query.
Nevertheless, I encourage people to at least learn about this stuff. It's good for the same reason that learning about Ruby and Python is a good thing even if you only ever program in Java or C++. RDF and SPARQL make you start thinking about inferences and ways of storing data which allow you to derive more information from your information. When I first learned about RDF I had the same type of aha moments that I had when I first learned a dynamic language (FWIW, it was TADS3) after years of using static languages.
I haven't plugged it into a Kill-A-Watt in a while, but at the time I believe I measured my system to take 300-400w idle and 500-600w when in use.
I don't have an air conditioner.
The system at the time had a bunch of hard drives that were only used on occasion. To reduce power I've unplugged the ones that are just for backup and ones that contain stuff I rarely use.
I also had 3 crt monitors. I've replaced two of those with flat screen displays which take half the power.
At the time I had a dual cpu system. I've replaced the motherboard so I only have a single cpu that has 4 cores.
I used to have two 500w power supplies in the system. I have since replaced that with a single 750w power supply. That shouldn't actually reduce power usage except that that's one less fan in the system.
I also unplugged some of the case fans in the system.
But, right in the very beginning, before doing all that, I simply saved power by shutting it off at night. I used to leave it on so that I could quickly browse the web. But, now I just power up a laptop for that. Laptops power on fairly quickly.
I agree. If there isn't enough power to go around then it's a limited resource and they should be charging more. Actually, they are charging more. A few years ago I was able to reduce my power bill by $100 a month (from $200 down to $100) just by turning off my computer at night. But, if they are still running out of power then they should either build another plant or charge even more for energy.
What is a "Dyson"? Wikipedia has a whole bunch of things that have "Dyson" in the name, but none of them is wieldable unless you're talking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster wielding a Dyson Sphere somehow. If the FSM threw one of those at you then you'd certainly be in trouble.
I think the gp was making the argument that morals don't enter into it. He's not making a moral judgement. He's just saying whether it's morally acceptable to use stolen car radios. If the car radios are widely available and if a large number of people use them then from an economic standpoint, they are a competitor to all car radio sellers.
You can either preach to the heathen about how they should change their morals, or you can accept reality and deal with it. One way to deal with it is to use the law against them. But, if that doesn't work, you need to accept reality and price and market your product accordingly.
This reminds me of people who are always talking about how, instead of recycling, people should just consume less. Yes, you can make that argument, and perhaps some people will agree, but at the end of the day you need to create alternatives (like recycling) for people who simply are not willing to consume less.
I think you're being a bit over-literal. If that phrase is interpreted to mean "the punishment should fit the crime" (and I think that's a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the phrase) then this punishment is clearly well beyond reasonable.
If that's not what it meant then the $222k fine would be reasonable because it's not at all unusual for companies to be fined millions of dollars for various infractions.
Another way to look at it is to scale the punishment up to larger numbers of songs. Someone here once did that and calculated that if all music piracy was punished in this way then the fines would be some large multiple of the total GDP of the United States.
That's rather ridiculous. The fines do not fit the crime.
She may have been guilty, but it was still a tremendous miscarriage of justice. I have no idea what "cruel and unusual" is supposed to mean if $222k for 24 songs isn't cruel.
Ironically, this would not have happened if Apple had been willing to license its DRM to other retailers. Doing that would have allowed other sites besides itunes to sell DRMed music that works on ipods.
So, it looks like we end up with the best results in the end.
Now I hope that this sort of thing will catch on with movies. I for one hate (with a passion!) those god damned dvds that have unskippable advertisements. If I get a dvd like that from netflix then I'm absolutely guaranteed not to buy that dvd. In fact, those damned fbi warnings at the beginning of dvds make we want to jump out of my chair and go pirate something purely out of spite for their damn 30 second unskippable warnings.
Here is my helpful reference page for big numbers. I love big numbers. I'm actually working on a site right now which will help people to visualize big numbers. I can't give out the url yet because it'll be another month or two before it's ready to be seen. But, it'll have many fun options like Cow Stacking and Hamster Canyon.
Cow stacking is where you select cow as the animal and from earth to moon as the place and you'll see a graphic of cows being stacked to the moon and the number of cows which would be required to complete that stack.
Hamster Canyon will be where you select a hamster and the Grand Canyon and you'll see a picture of the Grand Canyon filled with hamsters and a number that indicates the total number of hamsters required to fill the canyon.
I had that problem a while back (I have an expensive keyboard that I didn't want to repurchase just to get a USB version). I bought a bunch of different PS/2->USB and ended up buying a $70 converter that actually worked.
Any idea why that is the case? Furthermore, what are those cheap converters for if they don't work for keyboards? Do they work for mice?
They won't be as able to restrict their kids and prevent them spending all their time on the computer instead of, say, going outside and kicking a ball.
We can only hope that's the case. Myself, I intend to forbid my kids from going outside and kicking balls. I don't want them to grow up to be jocks.
The face to face interviews are probably deeper. In my experience, very basic questions like "what is polymorphism" have a tendency to filter out most applicants (for a programming position). I sometimes hear my coworkers give phone interviews and it's utterly pathetic how many people have problems with the simplest of questions. I sometimes wonder why these people even bothered becoming programmers.
It isn't until face to face interviews when deeper questions are needed.
You would be right if all airlines colluded to come up with a uniform security policy that was required for all travelers. But, any rules made by the federal government are in total violation of the commerce clause. Yes, the commerce clause is dead, but until it's repealed from the constitution, it's perfectly correct to say that the federal government has no right to make these rules.
Stop pretending to be reasonable. It's far better to overreact to prevent a downward slide than it is to under react and let the slide occur.
In any case the propaganda pushers in gitmo are not posting personal stories. They're doing their jobs. That means they're inventing fiction in an attempt to make gitmo seem like a happy candyland. 1984 may be quoted a lot, but it's not over quoted. This is pretty clearly comparable to the ministry of truth.
I've long been in favor of a 12 year overall politician term limit. That would mean that a single person can never spend more than 12 years working as a politician. Preferably, the 12 years would come near the end of their lives so that they will have had a full life of experience working in some non-governmental capacity. Career politicians are a cancer.
I'm also in favor of hiding politicians in boxes and forcing people to vote for them without knowing what they look like or sound like or what their name is. The ability to look and sound good seem to often be in opposition to the ability to think.
They should have picked a mid-level politician and made up evidence that it was him. That way they'd appear to be complying with the unjust law while also kicking a politician in the nadgers at the same time. No downside!
The obvious response is to require that creative works be labelled in obvious ways. When it comes to Harry Potter, if the author isn't Rowling then people will know it's not the official book. Some people may say that if it's not Rowling then it's not cannon. If Rowling wants to compete then she'll need to keep up the quality of her books. If her books start to suck then she should not have any right to prevent others from picking up the slack.
In fact, since she has quit writing Potter books I guess that means that Potter is finished. The current IP laws allow her to hold Potter hostage to her personal whims. That's not right.
In any case I already said that copyright should last 5 years. That's plenty of time to make plenty of money of creative works. I'm not denying the need for IP laws. I'm denying the need for IP laws that last for a long time. And, I'm denying the need to IP laws that go beyond the specific content of a work to broad concepts and worlds and ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't the pressure of the wind (assuming flurries of wind instead of a constant wind) do pretty much the same thing as the pressure of a rain drop? Put it on an angled roof and you'd get solar power, rain power, and wind power all in one. Use these things instead of shingles. If we could make these things tough enough then we could replace all sidewalks with these things and also make use of walking energy.
You seem to have missed the point. The author is asking for a document he could give to his employer that they could sign that would open source the code. It's right there in the summary: "I've looked online to try to find a legal document I could present to my employer to get them to sign off on it".
You wouldn't need a submarine for this. You just need a big boat, an anchor, and a chart of where the cables are.
If these cuts are intentional then they seem much more like simple cheap attacks. If you want to cut the middle east off from western influence then cutting off cross-ocean internet links is a good way to do it for someone with minimal means. You can't easily stop satellites or TV transmissions, but cutting up the internet cables is something that can be done relatively easily.
Godaddy also provides web hosting and dedicated server hosting. I personally have two dedicated servers there because they are very cheap (a little over $100 a month) yet also very responsive when I need help. I don't know how big a percentage of their business is hosting and how much is domain names, but it's not like domain names are the only thing they do.
Are you quoting that Star Trek crap verbatim? I had no idea that people took that seriously. I groaned every time Data acted all confused by human emotion.
Humor is surprise, discomfort, and recognition of the unusual. It's how we react to things that take us by surprise in very particular ways. Humor may be difficult to define because it requires a specific understanding of what humans find surprising. But, there's nothing bloody magical about it.
I suppose it's cool to emphasize the semantic web use of SPARQL. But, at its core SPARQL is a query language for RDF data stores. It takes some learning, but using SPARQL against an RDF data store feels much cleaner than using SQL against a relational database. It's slower though. Much slower. That's why it works best for small data sets.
My company stores the schema for our objects in RDF and use SPARQL to query against that schema. The actual data is saved to a relational database (our experiments with an all-RDF system concluded that it's just too slow for large data sets).
The RDF data stores can exist in arbitrary places (they don't need to be local), but I wonder how slow that would be to query.
Nevertheless, I encourage people to at least learn about this stuff. It's good for the same reason that learning about Ruby and Python is a good thing even if you only ever program in Java or C++. RDF and SPARQL make you start thinking about inferences and ways of storing data which allow you to derive more information from your information. When I first learned about RDF I had the same type of aha moments that I had when I first learned a dynamic language (FWIW, it was TADS3) after years of using static languages.
I haven't plugged it into a Kill-A-Watt in a while, but at the time I believe I measured my system to take 300-400w idle and 500-600w when in use.
I don't have an air conditioner.
The system at the time had a bunch of hard drives that were only used on occasion. To reduce power I've unplugged the ones that are just for backup and ones that contain stuff I rarely use.
I also had 3 crt monitors. I've replaced two of those with flat screen displays which take half the power.
At the time I had a dual cpu system. I've replaced the motherboard so I only have a single cpu that has 4 cores.
I used to have two 500w power supplies in the system. I have since replaced that with a single 750w power supply. That shouldn't actually reduce power usage except that that's one less fan in the system.
I also unplugged some of the case fans in the system.
But, right in the very beginning, before doing all that, I simply saved power by shutting it off at night. I used to leave it on so that I could quickly browse the web. But, now I just power up a laptop for that. Laptops power on fairly quickly.
I agree. If there isn't enough power to go around then it's a limited resource and they should be charging more. Actually, they are charging more. A few years ago I was able to reduce my power bill by $100 a month (from $200 down to $100) just by turning off my computer at night. But, if they are still running out of power then they should either build another plant or charge even more for energy.
What is a "Dyson"? Wikipedia has a whole bunch of things that have "Dyson" in the name, but none of them is wieldable unless you're talking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster wielding a Dyson Sphere somehow. If the FSM threw one of those at you then you'd certainly be in trouble.
I think the gp was making the argument that morals don't enter into it. He's not making a moral judgement. He's just saying whether it's morally acceptable to use stolen car radios. If the car radios are widely available and if a large number of people use them then from an economic standpoint, they are a competitor to all car radio sellers.
You can either preach to the heathen about how they should change their morals, or you can accept reality and deal with it. One way to deal with it is to use the law against them. But, if that doesn't work, you need to accept reality and price and market your product accordingly.
This reminds me of people who are always talking about how, instead of recycling, people should just consume less. Yes, you can make that argument, and perhaps some people will agree, but at the end of the day you need to create alternatives (like recycling) for people who simply are not willing to consume less.
I think you're being a bit over-literal. If that phrase is interpreted to mean "the punishment should fit the crime" (and I think that's a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the phrase) then this punishment is clearly well beyond reasonable.
If that's not what it meant then the $222k fine would be reasonable because it's not at all unusual for companies to be fined millions of dollars for various infractions.
Another way to look at it is to scale the punishment up to larger numbers of songs. Someone here once did that and calculated that if all music piracy was punished in this way then the fines would be some large multiple of the total GDP of the United States.
That's rather ridiculous. The fines do not fit the crime.
She may have been guilty, but it was still a tremendous miscarriage of justice. I have no idea what "cruel and unusual" is supposed to mean if $222k for 24 songs isn't cruel.
Ironically, this would not have happened if Apple had been willing to license its DRM to other retailers. Doing that would have allowed other sites besides itunes to sell DRMed music that works on ipods.
So, it looks like we end up with the best results in the end.
Now I hope that this sort of thing will catch on with movies. I for one hate (with a passion!) those god damned dvds that have unskippable advertisements. If I get a dvd like that from netflix then I'm absolutely guaranteed not to buy that dvd. In fact, those damned fbi warnings at the beginning of dvds make we want to jump out of my chair and go pirate something purely out of spite for their damn 30 second unskippable warnings.
*laugh* That's actually a good quote. I think I'll use that on the site.
Here is my helpful reference page for big numbers. I love big numbers. I'm actually working on a site right now which will help people to visualize big numbers. I can't give out the url yet because it'll be another month or two before it's ready to be seen. But, it'll have many fun options like Cow Stacking and Hamster Canyon.
Cow stacking is where you select cow as the animal and from earth to moon as the place and you'll see a graphic of cows being stacked to the moon and the number of cows which would be required to complete that stack.
Hamster Canyon will be where you select a hamster and the Grand Canyon and you'll see a picture of the Grand Canyon filled with hamsters and a number that indicates the total number of hamsters required to fill the canyon.
I had that problem a while back (I have an expensive keyboard that I didn't want to repurchase just to get a USB version). I bought a bunch of different PS/2->USB and ended up buying a $70 converter that actually worked.
Any idea why that is the case? Furthermore, what are those cheap converters for if they don't work for keyboards? Do they work for mice?
The face to face interviews are probably deeper. In my experience, very basic questions like "what is polymorphism" have a tendency to filter out most applicants (for a programming position). I sometimes hear my coworkers give phone interviews and it's utterly pathetic how many people have problems with the simplest of questions. I sometimes wonder why these people even bothered becoming programmers.
It isn't until face to face interviews when deeper questions are needed.
You would be right if all airlines colluded to come up with a uniform security policy that was required for all travelers. But, any rules made by the federal government are in total violation of the commerce clause. Yes, the commerce clause is dead, but until it's repealed from the constitution, it's perfectly correct to say that the federal government has no right to make these rules.
Stop pretending to be reasonable. It's far better to overreact to prevent a downward slide than it is to under react and let the slide occur.
In any case the propaganda pushers in gitmo are not posting personal stories. They're doing their jobs. That means they're inventing fiction in an attempt to make gitmo seem like a happy candyland. 1984 may be quoted a lot, but it's not over quoted. This is pretty clearly comparable to the ministry of truth.
That's a good one. Perhaps they can be combined. A single politician is allowed at most 3 non-consecutive 4 year terms.
I've long been in favor of a 12 year overall politician term limit. That would mean that a single person can never spend more than 12 years working as a politician. Preferably, the 12 years would come near the end of their lives so that they will have had a full life of experience working in some non-governmental capacity. Career politicians are a cancer.
I'm also in favor of hiding politicians in boxes and forcing people to vote for them without knowing what they look like or sound like or what their name is. The ability to look and sound good seem to often be in opposition to the ability to think.
They should have picked a mid-level politician and made up evidence that it was him. That way they'd appear to be complying with the unjust law while also kicking a politician in the nadgers at the same time. No downside!
It used to be stigmatized as childish. I think The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park changed that years ago.
The obvious response is to require that creative works be labelled in obvious ways. When it comes to Harry Potter, if the author isn't Rowling then people will know it's not the official book. Some people may say that if it's not Rowling then it's not cannon. If Rowling wants to compete then she'll need to keep up the quality of her books. If her books start to suck then she should not have any right to prevent others from picking up the slack.
In fact, since she has quit writing Potter books I guess that means that Potter is finished. The current IP laws allow her to hold Potter hostage to her personal whims. That's not right.
In any case I already said that copyright should last 5 years. That's plenty of time to make plenty of money of creative works. I'm not denying the need for IP laws. I'm denying the need for IP laws that last for a long time. And, I'm denying the need to IP laws that go beyond the specific content of a work to broad concepts and worlds and ideas.