Remember back when Tom's Hardware pulled off the heatsink from a Pentium 4 CPU while it was running? The CPU scaled back its clock automatically. Up against the Athlon, well, the Athlon fried. Of course, there were several things wrong with using the results to judge the CPU's that were subsequently pointed out, but that's really another story.
If someone had an older, slower P4 lying around collecting dust, it could serve the function of a silent router with no noise at all. I don't suggest running the P4 without a heatsink; only the CPU and case fans would have to be removed or disconnected from the system for a silent PC. The only other moving part would be the hard disk, which isn't particularly loud, though the end results really depend on the drive and the case.
The advantage of a "gaming" router over such a setup would be ease of setup and probably the smaller physical size of the router. But, gamers constantly upgrade their PC's (I was one myself back some time ago), and it wouldn't be too surprising if they did have a P4 sitting around collecting dust. Then again, since gamers tend to spend in the hundreds yearly on upgrades, what's another hundred dollars?
Nobody says to sit around and wait to get blown to bits, or get turned into another +1 for the next bodycount.
Vigilance is the best defense. If there's a bag on the floor and nobody seems to be claiming it, say something. If somebody's acting suspicious (like a good friend suddenly gone strange), confront the person. If somebody wants to ram the plan you're riding in into a building (and has a gun) stop that person. Terrorism is not a war against a nation, it's a war against a collective group of people (hence the name, i.e. it inspires terror in the common). Most people do not accept that they are in a battlefield. Most people don't want any part of a war, any part of a fight they do not perceive is theirs. Most people would rather stand by idly and wait for someone else to stop the terrorists than contribute something meaningful. I've seen this with my own two eyes, and when I see it in the people I know, it makes me ashamed. And then, there are those people in denial that they are even at war (i.e. the government's policies that brought about this, it should be the government fighting).
The recent terror-inspired draconian laws were put into place to remove the responsibility from the public. If the terrorists blow something up and kill a bunch of people, it becomes a failure of law enforcement. If those plans were foiled, law enforcement were able to do their job. Well, obviously, if these newfound powers of law enforcement still did nothing to prevent the next attack, then they didn't have enough power. If these powers allowed them to accomplish the task, by all means, keep giving them more power so that they can do an even better job. What needs to happen is the return of power to the hands of the common--the people, whom the government is supposed to serve. And for that to happen, the people must accept the responsibility of defending their life and more importantly, their way of life.
Here's the thing (and this is a reply to all the siblings else as much the parent), by shutting down certain means of communication, they are able to force the terrorists to resort to other forms that are more convenient for law enforcement. Law enforcement believes that text can contain hidden codes (this is a product of the Cold War actually, and is a strategy born from the censorship that the McCarthy era introduced to a free society in the name of a "perceived" threat). The thing is, the internationalization and the freedom of the internet is a very big problem for local (national) law enforcement. So by shutting this down, the terrorists will have to resort to snail mail, telephone calls, secret physical signals, etc. that create many more points of potential failure. Don't forget the commonly quoted phrase, that criminals must not make a single mistake, but law enforcement only needs one. Thus the more chances for the criminal (terrorist) making a mistake, the better.
Or so that's the idea.
What this is in reality is censorship, and at a level that many of us have come to expect in a war against terror, again, from our experience with the Cold War. This has and will be said many times, but this act sets a horrible precedent, especially in a supposedly free nation that supposedly believes in the freedom of expression. For something like this, I take a page out of the Freenet supporters' book: when given the choice of upholding the freedom of expression over silencing those considered wrong, the former is the greater good. This is possibly the greatest challenge of every individual and group who believe in true freedom. Thus far, all the supposedly "free" nations have been utterly failing this challenge.
Along the same lines, there is always Freenet for these terrorists to spread their word, and I would not be surprised to find terrorist sites up already. What scares me the most is the thought of when all the law enforcement agencies in the world collectively declare Freenet a tool of terrorism and arrest all the operators of nodes as terrorists--not because I am running a node (an act I will freely admit to), but because this event would herald the beginning of the end to free society (are we really free if we can't strive to promote freedom?).
Google likely has patents on things like their search algorithms, which are patents on products of research. Automated incorporation of advertising into RSS (and like) feeds is patenting a business model. The former is arguably on an order of magnitude less evil than the latter.
Like the sibling post says, if Google's intent was defensive, they could have widely implemented this into something like Google News or Groups before everyone else so that anyone who attempts to patent the process would be faced with an enormous amount of prior art.
But, IIRC, Google had a patent dispute over adsense and keyword advertising for search engines back in the late 90's. So perhaps this really isn't anything new, though since there is a good amount of possible prior art, it might just come down to whether Google's lawyer starts sending out C&D letters.
IANAL, but from the patent application linked, it seems Google's covered just about every form of advertisement possible through XML, RSS, and Atom syndication delivery standards. The patent says the ads are automatically generated and incorporated into the feed based on the content of the feed, but the alternative is to hand-pick them somehow.
They also look to be about the same size (though that might depend on the angle of the photographs), with the PSP being slightly wider (or maybe the Zodiac's slightly taller). Actually, I might have been thinking about the PSP concept images, where there is a greater resemblance between those two, even though the controls on the left are still very different.
Anyway, I didn't intend to make the claim that one company copied another's design, but it seems like the two-handed horizontal design that Nintendo's re-adopted (after the GBA SP) is getting increasingly popular. It's certainly not ideal for portable pr0n-watching, but I wonder if the same could not be said of portable organization. After all, a lot of such tasks require at least one hand to write, and it would seem that the two-handed requirement would only be acceptable for tasks that didn't require a lot of stylus work.
Actually, what's OK (moral) and what's legal are two separate issues. What's legal is dependent on the law of the land. This isn't a moral move by Google by any means, but it is a legal one. In fact, nothing that I've described above is moral, especially not in the United States. But a legal one? Well, given that Kai Fu Lee is likely not a US citizen, I'd say that these are in fact legal options.
Yes. And for that reason, the person's name cannot show up in Google's records. But there are other ways of paying people, giving them benefits, etc. And a contract is a piece of paper. It doesn't have to have a date if it's just going into someone's safe (it's not like the FBI can raid Google China's headquarters).
Think of it this way. The goal of the employee is to get paid. The goal of the employer is to get work done. So long as these two criteria are met, that constitutes a working relationship. Whether the person is "officially" an employee is completely irrelevant to the relationship.
Besides, how many Kai-Fu Lee's are there? Given that there are about 1400 distinct sounds (including tones), most of which are close enough that their romanization is or can be the same (xia vs. xa), resulting in a little over 200 unique, distinctly romanizeable sounds, two sounds per name (Lee is among the top 10 most common surnames), and 1.2 billion people, I'd say quite a few. In fact, since only a small subset of the few thousand characters are male-name-worthy, the chances of hiring multiple Kai-Fu Lee's are enormous. This argument alone would be able to convince a judge in the US that the Kai-Fu Lee in Google's books is not the one that left Microsoft. Skew the date and where the person was hired, and for all intents and purposes, they are two different people.
That's the hard way to go about doing things--actually having to go to court. The easy way would be to keep his name off the books, as I said. Hiring him under a different name is one way. Google can also hire him under a contractor where payroll only knows to pay to the contractor. He can also be paid unofficially. Add a few dollars to the various petty cash accounts, while withholding the additional money for this person, and that should be enough to constitute a person's salary.
And if Microsoft hires PI's in China, well, good luck first getting a reliable PI with a clean record, and second, if the PI takes pictures of this person entering Google's campus, well, the courts cannot force Google to ban someone from their campus, especially on foreign soil, not to mention private property (though those rights as you know them in the US aren't quite the same in China).
Microsoft will require the Chinese government to get involved before this restraining order can be enforced, and well, if they could, they would have already.
How does the United States plan on enforcing this?
I can think of three ways Google can get around this legally (legally in China does not necessarily mean legally in the US, and then sometimes, legally in China does not necessarily mean legally in China;) ). One of those ways is as simple as hiring this person under a different name.
The thing about games is that things tend to get better with every sequel. Engines get more realistic, gameplay gets more complex, scripting/modding tools get better, etc. Sometimes, sequels are only vaguely based off of the original, in terms of storyline. Sometimes, the sequel is a completely different story that's using the name of the original as a form of marketing by association e.g. Final Fantasy.
On the other hand, movie sequels are more likely to be the next 2-1.5 hours of the first part. Some of them can't even bother with a new story and do no more than rehash the first one. The equivalent in video games would be releasing a sequel that just adds some more missions. That, in the video game industry, is called an expansion pack, and they are nowhere near as widely-received as sequels, though often as or more prevelant. As for actualy video game sequels that are really just rehashes of the first game, they tend not to be so popular, though fandom and prerelease hype skews the reality of that statement somewhat.
But all this highlights a fundamental difference between video games and movies. Movies are one-dimensional. The story happens while you watch. Video games are multi-dimensional. You control the story, you control the events, and you're watching it. So a video game sequel has much more room for improvement, and such improvements happen to be expected of a sequel.
Don't forget that cellphones operate in an area of the electromagnetic spectrum that's in between radio waves that go through human skin but do not have enough energy to do anything to our molecules, and infrared/visible light, waves that have enough energy to affect our molecules, but cannot penetrate our skin due to the reflective property of melanin. Effectively, it's in the same range as microwaves, which do in fact penetrate our skin and do have enough power to mess with out molecules.
The only reason why cellphones haven't been literally cooking our brains is because they aren't powerful enough to produce any immediate noticeable effects, even after a prolonged period of use. Basically, they don't have enough power to boil the water molecules in our body. This we know for sure, and is the basis of most studies claiming no link between cell phones and physiological maladies. However, what we don't know is what the long-term effects are, and these results I wouldn't expect for at least another hundred years (massively overdosing a few rats like we do with medicine and industrial chemicals won't work in this case).
I pretty much agree with you. What we don't know we shouldn't ignore, but attempt to find out. Nor should we be afraid of technology, but we certainly should exercise reasonable caution. The exact meaning of "reasonable" will vary from person to person, and should be debated.
You mean Rock Formation A instead of Rock Formation B? Sure, anyone can claim anything. But the real question is, how does one prevent another from invading their claim on the moon? While the image of one pilot in a bulky space suit taking a whack at another pilot in a bulky space suit with a moon rock might be comical, I doubt it'd be very realistic. On the same note, I wouldn't imagine anyone bothering to send up armies to the moon to defend their claims up there if they could just do the fighting here, in which case no one would really be up there to claim anything.
BTW, the so-called "social do gooder cry babies" are not the only ones contributing to the degradation of our educational system. General apathy, private interests, politics, and a failure to separate Church from State on a personal and social level have all contributed to this. Furthermore, the values and attitudes of adults gets absorbed and are reflected in their children. With only a few local exceptions, the US as a country has never really placed much value in education, and it shows; we are coming very close to a second witch hunt in post-colonial US history.
Since the piece of foam in question fell off during launch but didn't hit and damage the Discovery, I'm sure the Discovery will be able to land. It's just that once the shuttle is on the ground, it won't go up again.
At least, that's the impression I got from reading the (short) article.
This is a form of deterrent, not prevention. If it takes you a fair amount of time to set up 10 accounts, those 10 accounts will be worth much more to you than if it took you 10 ms to set them up, which means that you'll be less likely to use any one of those 10 accounts for activity that might result in the account being cancelled within the hour.
While the effectiveness of current implementations might be subject to debate, these things certainly can contribute to the prevention of widespread malicious activity. The other factor is how quickly the malicious accounts can be detected and removed. For freemail accounts that are used to send spam, that is very easy.
Now, whether malicious activity can be eliminated is a different question entirely, and one that can be easily answered: No.
As for your version of CAPTCHA, I think it'll be far more effective than any type of text-based system. But the two drawbacks are the need for an enormous database of unambigious images of a variety of common or at least well-known subjects.
Don't feel too offended. Being the good hypocrite that I am, I must admit that my post was largely filled with superficial information too. BTW, wikipedia will definitely offer more specific information on vector and raster graphics, especially with regards to the different standards and types for both.
As I might have hinted, my interest in this area lies in why these two formats, being completely opposite in nature, would also end up complementing each other so perfectly, and of course, how to maximize the results of such a pairing--except, on a much more abstract level.
Well, no need to bore you with details, but to give a better example of how these two are completely opposing in nature, note that where one is discrete, the other is continuous, and vice versa. Vector graphics use curves defined by mathematical functions to generate an image (known as rendering). Yet, every element is discretely defined, as is the nature of curves from mathematical functions.
On the other hand, raster graphics are comprised of discrete pixels that, when put together, form a coherent image. Yet, the elements within the image are continuous--that is, there is no absolute position where one can assert that an element in the picture ends and another begins.
Yet only through combining the two forms in the manner I previous described can CG achieve an accurate visual representation of reality.
This kind of thinking, unfortunately, is at best ungeeky, and tends to bore or amuse more than interest.
What I find particularly funny is that the summary is almost begging for the homepage to be slashdotted. If everyone knew what inkscape was beforehand, it would make sense that they'd all go to the sourceforge site to download the binaries first. After all, given the number of people who RTFA here, it'd make more sense that everyone would go to the homepage to troubleshoot their problems only after trying out the program first.
I can't help but note a strange karma whoring smell. I don't mean to encourage these types of posts (which, while related, only provide superficial information an a subject that almost everyone knows about), I do wish to point out one thing with which I cannot come to terms.
Vector graphics is not an alternative to raster graphics. Raster graphics and vector graphics have two mutually exclusive applications, even though both offer visual sensory input as an end result.
Using only the Adobe product names for the two different digital graphic forms, it is not difficult to recognize this. Photoshop's specialty is manipulating raster images, and the main application would be photos. For example, PS is great for doing things like white balancing and color filtering, i.e. post processing of captured images. Illustrator, on the other hand, is great for creating scaleable and animated visual medium (cartoon-like illustrations like clipart, or flash movies).
The tradeoff is realism. BTW, one subset of vector graphics is in fact 3D modeling, and this relation becomes especially apparent with NURBS. 3D models aren't very realistic plainly rendered, even with simple materials. They require textures, which are bitmaps (rasters), to create the illusion of continuity.
Finally, on a tangent, it should be noted that vector graphics are mathematically intensive to render, whereas raster graphics tend to be memory intensive to render.
It says to grab your package, not somebody else's.
I would hazard a guess that it's some strange form of cheer equivalent to the more common form of clapping one's hand. Perhaps it's symbolic of male fertility.
What I don't understand is why we're cheering for Windows, unless it's actually an insult not unlike the middle finger, in which case I'd wonder if this was not written by a BSD fan.
And once NASA's sent a probe to Uranus, a few lucky scientists might just have the chance to hear those sounds.
Re:Still a single point of failure
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Basics of RAID
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It really depends.
The controller can mess things up. But, if it supports something like 51 or 15 (one is more redundant than the other BTW), especially over multiple controllers, the amount of redundancy in there probably could survive anything except for the physical destruction of several HDD's (four and up, depending on the number of mirrors).
That's the beauty of RAID. It can be scaled to any level of redundancy necessary. RAID 1 (mirroring) can be performed multiple times across RAID 5. And, it can be done over separate controllers. And, with network speeds reaching the gigabit, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody offered a solution to do it over multiple privately networked machines, in multiple locations.
The drawback to RAID (from a small business standpoint) is that to take full advantage of it, you need HDD's that offer exactly the same number of bytes of storage. That's usually the most difficult part. I'd assume that RAID controllers automatically scale to the HDD with the lowest capacity, thus wasting whatever's left over, and thus requiring the backup drives to hold the most bytes in the general capacity area (18GB, 36GB, 72GB, 100GB, 120GB, 180GB, 200GB, 250GB, etc.). Some people suggest buying from the same batch, but that actually is begging for problems, since RAID was not designed to recover from happening upon a defective batch in which all share the same defect (for example, the same sectors in every drive is weak or corrupted). For companies that can afford server farms, which probably have several layers of data redundancy (RAID, tape, backup servers, etc.), this isn't a problem, but for a person who only uses RAID for redundancy, well, you can imagine the horror of having lost everything.
And to answer your question, RAID controllers won't fail logically (causing data corruption) from wear and tear, unless it is used in an extreme environment. It's like wondering whether your modem would eventually fail and corrupt your packets (the answer is not likely--I still have a 9600 baud ISA modem that is still chugging along on an old IBM AT). Usually, manufacturing defects or poor design result in bad controllers, and these are almost immediately noticeable. Now, a good and properly-configured controller and RAID setup should be able to take over a failed controller seamlessly. Unfortunately, having to replace controllers really defeats the true purpose of RAID, which is to be able to recover from hardware (specifically HDD) failures without powering down the machine.
Oh BTW, RAID for homes is very basic, very watered-down. It's been relegated to little more than a fancy way to mirror HDD's. Very few home systems support hot-swapping, which means the machine will have to be brought down to replace the defective HDD anyway. The largest advantage comes in performance gains (taking about half the time to read for RAID 1, and half the time to write too for RAID 0). Most other RAID levels actually induce a performance decrease when it comes to writing.
Yes, it's a little old. But, I found it to be very comprehensive, especially for its day (remember, RAID 0 and RAID 1 were only beginning to show its face in the consumer market when the guide was written). It's actually a mirror of another page, but since I stumbled upon this one first, I don't remember where the original is or what it might have been called, or, for that matter, which pages/paragraphs were in the original and which ones were not.
"'Periodically revisiting the Patriot Act is a good thing,' said Rep. Martin Meehan, D-Massachusetts. 'The Patriot Act was an effort to answer the most difficult question a democracy faces: How much freedom are we willing to give up to feel safe?'"
The answer to that question should be none. We cannot give up any freedom just to feel safe, or, for that matter, to even be safe.
On the other hand, it's about time people start realizing freedom is something they'll have to fight for--if they even want it anymore that is.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember back when Tom's Hardware pulled off the heatsink from a Pentium 4 CPU while it was running? The CPU scaled back its clock automatically. Up against the Athlon, well, the Athlon fried. Of course, there were several things wrong with using the results to judge the CPU's that were subsequently pointed out, but that's really another story.
If someone had an older, slower P4 lying around collecting dust, it could serve the function of a silent router with no noise at all. I don't suggest running the P4 without a heatsink; only the CPU and case fans would have to be removed or disconnected from the system for a silent PC. The only other moving part would be the hard disk, which isn't particularly loud, though the end results really depend on the drive and the case.
The advantage of a "gaming" router over such a setup would be ease of setup and probably the smaller physical size of the router. But, gamers constantly upgrade their PC's (I was one myself back some time ago), and it wouldn't be too surprising if they did have a P4 sitting around collecting dust. Then again, since gamers tend to spend in the hundreds yearly on upgrades, what's another hundred dollars?
But in the meantime....ignore it at your peril.
Nobody says to sit around and wait to get blown to bits, or get turned into another +1 for the next bodycount.
Vigilance is the best defense. If there's a bag on the floor and nobody seems to be claiming it, say something. If somebody's acting suspicious (like a good friend suddenly gone strange), confront the person. If somebody wants to ram the plan you're riding in into a building (and has a gun) stop that person. Terrorism is not a war against a nation, it's a war against a collective group of people (hence the name, i.e. it inspires terror in the common). Most people do not accept that they are in a battlefield. Most people don't want any part of a war, any part of a fight they do not perceive is theirs. Most people would rather stand by idly and wait for someone else to stop the terrorists than contribute something meaningful. I've seen this with my own two eyes, and when I see it in the people I know, it makes me ashamed. And then, there are those people in denial that they are even at war (i.e. the government's policies that brought about this, it should be the government fighting).
The recent terror-inspired draconian laws were put into place to remove the responsibility from the public. If the terrorists blow something up and kill a bunch of people, it becomes a failure of law enforcement. If those plans were foiled, law enforcement were able to do their job. Well, obviously, if these newfound powers of law enforcement still did nothing to prevent the next attack, then they didn't have enough power. If these powers allowed them to accomplish the task, by all means, keep giving them more power so that they can do an even better job. What needs to happen is the return of power to the hands of the common--the people, whom the government is supposed to serve. And for that to happen, the people must accept the responsibility of defending their life and more importantly, their way of life.
Here's the thing (and this is a reply to all the siblings else as much the parent), by shutting down certain means of communication, they are able to force the terrorists to resort to other forms that are more convenient for law enforcement. Law enforcement believes that text can contain hidden codes (this is a product of the Cold War actually, and is a strategy born from the censorship that the McCarthy era introduced to a free society in the name of a "perceived" threat). The thing is, the internationalization and the freedom of the internet is a very big problem for local (national) law enforcement. So by shutting this down, the terrorists will have to resort to snail mail, telephone calls, secret physical signals, etc. that create many more points of potential failure. Don't forget the commonly quoted phrase, that criminals must not make a single mistake, but law enforcement only needs one. Thus the more chances for the criminal (terrorist) making a mistake, the better.
Or so that's the idea.
What this is in reality is censorship, and at a level that many of us have come to expect in a war against terror, again, from our experience with the Cold War. This has and will be said many times, but this act sets a horrible precedent, especially in a supposedly free nation that supposedly believes in the freedom of expression. For something like this, I take a page out of the Freenet supporters' book: when given the choice of upholding the freedom of expression over silencing those considered wrong, the former is the greater good. This is possibly the greatest challenge of every individual and group who believe in true freedom. Thus far, all the supposedly "free" nations have been utterly failing this challenge.
Along the same lines, there is always Freenet for these terrorists to spread their word, and I would not be surprised to find terrorist sites up already. What scares me the most is the thought of when all the law enforcement agencies in the world collectively declare Freenet a tool of terrorism and arrest all the operators of nodes as terrorists--not because I am running a node (an act I will freely admit to), but because this event would herald the beginning of the end to free society (are we really free if we can't strive to promote freedom?).
Google likely has patents on things like their search algorithms, which are patents on products of research. Automated incorporation of advertising into RSS (and like) feeds is patenting a business model. The former is arguably on an order of magnitude less evil than the latter.
Like the sibling post says, if Google's intent was defensive, they could have widely implemented this into something like Google News or Groups before everyone else so that anyone who attempts to patent the process would be faced with an enormous amount of prior art.
But, IIRC, Google had a patent dispute over adsense and keyword advertising for search engines back in the late 90's. So perhaps this really isn't anything new, though since there is a good amount of possible prior art, it might just come down to whether Google's lawyer starts sending out C&D letters.
IANAL, but from the patent application linked, it seems Google's covered just about every form of advertisement possible through XML, RSS, and Atom syndication delivery standards. The patent says the ads are automatically generated and incorporated into the feed based on the content of the feed, but the alternative is to hand-pick them somehow.
How long until they just patent "doing evil"
Microsoft will sue. They have both an interest and prior art.
HP and Blue Gene reach nuptial agreement.
IBM and Earth Simulator could not be reached for comment.
They also look to be about the same size (though that might depend on the angle of the photographs), with the PSP being slightly wider (or maybe the Zodiac's slightly taller). Actually, I might have been thinking about the PSP concept images, where there is a greater resemblance between those two, even though the controls on the left are still very different.
Anyway, I didn't intend to make the claim that one company copied another's design, but it seems like the two-handed horizontal design that Nintendo's re-adopted (after the GBA SP) is getting increasingly popular. It's certainly not ideal for portable pr0n-watching, but I wonder if the same could not be said of portable organization. After all, a lot of such tasks require at least one hand to write, and it would seem that the two-handed requirement would only be acceptable for tasks that didn't require a lot of stylus work.
...but does anyone else see a resemblence in the physical appearance to the PSP?
It just struck me as odd.
Actually, what's OK (moral) and what's legal are two separate issues. What's legal is dependent on the law of the land. This isn't a moral move by Google by any means, but it is a legal one. In fact, nothing that I've described above is moral, especially not in the United States. But a legal one? Well, given that Kai Fu Lee is likely not a US citizen, I'd say that these are in fact legal options.
Yes. And for that reason, the person's name cannot show up in Google's records. But there are other ways of paying people, giving them benefits, etc. And a contract is a piece of paper. It doesn't have to have a date if it's just going into someone's safe (it's not like the FBI can raid Google China's headquarters).
Think of it this way. The goal of the employee is to get paid. The goal of the employer is to get work done. So long as these two criteria are met, that constitutes a working relationship. Whether the person is "officially" an employee is completely irrelevant to the relationship.
Besides, how many Kai-Fu Lee's are there? Given that there are about 1400 distinct sounds (including tones), most of which are close enough that their romanization is or can be the same (xia vs. xa), resulting in a little over 200 unique, distinctly romanizeable sounds, two sounds per name (Lee is among the top 10 most common surnames), and 1.2 billion people, I'd say quite a few. In fact, since only a small subset of the few thousand characters are male-name-worthy, the chances of hiring multiple Kai-Fu Lee's are enormous. This argument alone would be able to convince a judge in the US that the Kai-Fu Lee in Google's books is not the one that left Microsoft. Skew the date and where the person was hired, and for all intents and purposes, they are two different people.
That's the hard way to go about doing things--actually having to go to court. The easy way would be to keep his name off the books, as I said. Hiring him under a different name is one way. Google can also hire him under a contractor where payroll only knows to pay to the contractor. He can also be paid unofficially. Add a few dollars to the various petty cash accounts, while withholding the additional money for this person, and that should be enough to constitute a person's salary.
And if Microsoft hires PI's in China, well, good luck first getting a reliable PI with a clean record, and second, if the PI takes pictures of this person entering Google's campus, well, the courts cannot force Google to ban someone from their campus, especially on foreign soil, not to mention private property (though those rights as you know them in the US aren't quite the same in China).
Microsoft will require the Chinese government to get involved before this restraining order can be enforced, and well, if they could, they would have already.
How does the United States plan on enforcing this?
;) ). One of those ways is as simple as hiring this person under a different name.
I can think of three ways Google can get around this legally (legally in China does not necessarily mean legally in the US, and then sometimes, legally in China does not necessarily mean legally in China
The thing about games is that things tend to get better with every sequel. Engines get more realistic, gameplay gets more complex, scripting/modding tools get better, etc. Sometimes, sequels are only vaguely based off of the original, in terms of storyline. Sometimes, the sequel is a completely different story that's using the name of the original as a form of marketing by association e.g. Final Fantasy.
On the other hand, movie sequels are more likely to be the next 2-1.5 hours of the first part. Some of them can't even bother with a new story and do no more than rehash the first one. The equivalent in video games would be releasing a sequel that just adds some more missions. That, in the video game industry, is called an expansion pack, and they are nowhere near as widely-received as sequels, though often as or more prevelant. As for actualy video game sequels that are really just rehashes of the first game, they tend not to be so popular, though fandom and prerelease hype skews the reality of that statement somewhat.
But all this highlights a fundamental difference between video games and movies. Movies are one-dimensional. The story happens while you watch. Video games are multi-dimensional. You control the story, you control the events, and you're watching it. So a video game sequel has much more room for improvement, and such improvements happen to be expected of a sequel.
Don't forget that cellphones operate in an area of the electromagnetic spectrum that's in between radio waves that go through human skin but do not have enough energy to do anything to our molecules, and infrared/visible light, waves that have enough energy to affect our molecules, but cannot penetrate our skin due to the reflective property of melanin. Effectively, it's in the same range as microwaves, which do in fact penetrate our skin and do have enough power to mess with out molecules.
The only reason why cellphones haven't been literally cooking our brains is because they aren't powerful enough to produce any immediate noticeable effects, even after a prolonged period of use. Basically, they don't have enough power to boil the water molecules in our body. This we know for sure, and is the basis of most studies claiming no link between cell phones and physiological maladies. However, what we don't know is what the long-term effects are, and these results I wouldn't expect for at least another hundred years (massively overdosing a few rats like we do with medicine and industrial chemicals won't work in this case).
I pretty much agree with you. What we don't know we shouldn't ignore, but attempt to find out. Nor should we be afraid of technology, but we certainly should exercise reasonable caution. The exact meaning of "reasonable" will vary from person to person, and should be debated.
the choice real estate on the moon
You mean Rock Formation A instead of Rock Formation B? Sure, anyone can claim anything. But the real question is, how does one prevent another from invading their claim on the moon? While the image of one pilot in a bulky space suit taking a whack at another pilot in a bulky space suit with a moon rock might be comical, I doubt it'd be very realistic. On the same note, I wouldn't imagine anyone bothering to send up armies to the moon to defend their claims up there if they could just do the fighting here, in which case no one would really be up there to claim anything.
BTW, the so-called "social do gooder cry babies" are not the only ones contributing to the degradation of our educational system. General apathy, private interests, politics, and a failure to separate Church from State on a personal and social level have all contributed to this. Furthermore, the values and attitudes of adults gets absorbed and are reflected in their children. With only a few local exceptions, the US as a country has never really placed much value in education, and it shows; we are coming very close to a second witch hunt in post-colonial US history.
Since the piece of foam in question fell off during launch but didn't hit and damage the Discovery, I'm sure the Discovery will be able to land. It's just that once the shuttle is on the ground, it won't go up again.
At least, that's the impression I got from reading the (short) article.
This is a form of deterrent, not prevention. If it takes you a fair amount of time to set up 10 accounts, those 10 accounts will be worth much more to you than if it took you 10 ms to set them up, which means that you'll be less likely to use any one of those 10 accounts for activity that might result in the account being cancelled within the hour.
While the effectiveness of current implementations might be subject to debate, these things certainly can contribute to the prevention of widespread malicious activity. The other factor is how quickly the malicious accounts can be detected and removed. For freemail accounts that are used to send spam, that is very easy.
Now, whether malicious activity can be eliminated is a different question entirely, and one that can be easily answered: No.
As for your version of CAPTCHA, I think it'll be far more effective than any type of text-based system. But the two drawbacks are the need for an enormous database of unambigious images of a variety of common or at least well-known subjects.
Don't feel too offended. Being the good hypocrite that I am, I must admit that my post was largely filled with superficial information too. BTW, wikipedia will definitely offer more specific information on vector and raster graphics, especially with regards to the different standards and types for both.
As I might have hinted, my interest in this area lies in why these two formats, being completely opposite in nature, would also end up complementing each other so perfectly, and of course, how to maximize the results of such a pairing--except, on a much more abstract level.
Well, no need to bore you with details, but to give a better example of how these two are completely opposing in nature, note that where one is discrete, the other is continuous, and vice versa. Vector graphics use curves defined by mathematical functions to generate an image (known as rendering). Yet, every element is discretely defined, as is the nature of curves from mathematical functions.
On the other hand, raster graphics are comprised of discrete pixels that, when put together, form a coherent image. Yet, the elements within the image are continuous--that is, there is no absolute position where one can assert that an element in the picture ends and another begins.
Yet only through combining the two forms in the manner I previous described can CG achieve an accurate visual representation of reality.
This kind of thinking, unfortunately, is at best ungeeky, and tends to bore or amuse more than interest.
What I find particularly funny is that the summary is almost begging for the homepage to be slashdotted. If everyone knew what inkscape was beforehand, it would make sense that they'd all go to the sourceforge site to download the binaries first. After all, given the number of people who RTFA here, it'd make more sense that everyone would go to the homepage to troubleshoot their problems only after trying out the program first.
Perhaps it was written by a politician after all.
I can't help but note a strange karma whoring smell. I don't mean to encourage these types of posts (which, while related, only provide superficial information an a subject that almost everyone knows about), I do wish to point out one thing with which I cannot come to terms.
Vector graphics is not an alternative to raster graphics. Raster graphics and vector graphics have two mutually exclusive applications, even though both offer visual sensory input as an end result.
Using only the Adobe product names for the two different digital graphic forms, it is not difficult to recognize this. Photoshop's specialty is manipulating raster images, and the main application would be photos. For example, PS is great for doing things like white balancing and color filtering, i.e. post processing of captured images. Illustrator, on the other hand, is great for creating scaleable and animated visual medium (cartoon-like illustrations like clipart, or flash movies).
The tradeoff is realism. BTW, one subset of vector graphics is in fact 3D modeling, and this relation becomes especially apparent with NURBS. 3D models aren't very realistic plainly rendered, even with simple materials. They require textures, which are bitmaps (rasters), to create the illusion of continuity.
Finally, on a tangent, it should be noted that vector graphics are mathematically intensive to render, whereas raster graphics tend to be memory intensive to render.
It says to grab your package, not somebody else's.
I would hazard a guess that it's some strange form of cheer equivalent to the more common form of clapping one's hand. Perhaps it's symbolic of male fertility.
What I don't understand is why we're cheering for Windows, unless it's actually an insult not unlike the middle finger, in which case I'd wonder if this was not written by a BSD fan.
And once NASA's sent a probe to Uranus, a few lucky scientists might just have the chance to hear those sounds.
It really depends.
The controller can mess things up. But, if it supports something like 51 or 15 (one is more redundant than the other BTW), especially over multiple controllers, the amount of redundancy in there probably could survive anything except for the physical destruction of several HDD's (four and up, depending on the number of mirrors).
That's the beauty of RAID. It can be scaled to any level of redundancy necessary. RAID 1 (mirroring) can be performed multiple times across RAID 5. And, it can be done over separate controllers. And, with network speeds reaching the gigabit, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody offered a solution to do it over multiple privately networked machines, in multiple locations.
The drawback to RAID (from a small business standpoint) is that to take full advantage of it, you need HDD's that offer exactly the same number of bytes of storage. That's usually the most difficult part. I'd assume that RAID controllers automatically scale to the HDD with the lowest capacity, thus wasting whatever's left over, and thus requiring the backup drives to hold the most bytes in the general capacity area (18GB, 36GB, 72GB, 100GB, 120GB, 180GB, 200GB, 250GB, etc.). Some people suggest buying from the same batch, but that actually is begging for problems, since RAID was not designed to recover from happening upon a defective batch in which all share the same defect (for example, the same sectors in every drive is weak or corrupted). For companies that can afford server farms, which probably have several layers of data redundancy (RAID, tape, backup servers, etc.), this isn't a problem, but for a person who only uses RAID for redundancy, well, you can imagine the horror of having lost everything.
And to answer your question, RAID controllers won't fail logically (causing data corruption) from wear and tear, unless it is used in an extreme environment. It's like wondering whether your modem would eventually fail and corrupt your packets (the answer is not likely--I still have a 9600 baud ISA modem that is still chugging along on an old IBM AT). Usually, manufacturing defects or poor design result in bad controllers, and these are almost immediately noticeable. Now, a good and properly-configured controller and RAID setup should be able to take over a failed controller seamlessly. Unfortunately, having to replace controllers really defeats the true purpose of RAID, which is to be able to recover from hardware (specifically HDD) failures without powering down the machine.
Oh BTW, RAID for homes is very basic, very watered-down. It's been relegated to little more than a fancy way to mirror HDD's. Very few home systems support hot-swapping, which means the machine will have to be brought down to replace the defective HDD anyway. The largest advantage comes in performance gains (taking about half the time to read for RAID 1, and half the time to write too for RAID 0). Most other RAID levels actually induce a performance decrease when it comes to writing.
OK, enough ranting.
...I like this guide better.
Yes, it's a little old. But, I found it to be very comprehensive, especially for its day (remember, RAID 0 and RAID 1 were only beginning to show its face in the consumer market when the guide was written). It's actually a mirror of another page, but since I stumbled upon this one first, I don't remember where the original is or what it might have been called, or, for that matter, which pages/paragraphs were in the original and which ones were not.
"'Periodically revisiting the Patriot Act is a good thing,' said Rep. Martin Meehan, D-Massachusetts. 'The Patriot Act was an effort to answer the most difficult question a democracy faces: How much freedom are we willing to give up to feel safe?'"
The answer to that question should be none. We cannot give up any freedom just to feel safe, or, for that matter, to even be safe.
On the other hand, it's about time people start realizing freedom is something they'll have to fight for--if they even want it anymore that is.