So if I make some vague reference to the Constitution, will I get modded +4, Interesting too?
Do current copyright laws violate the Constitution? If not, then you don't have a leg to stand on. The law is not as simple as asking, "what would the Founding Fathers do?" You have to go with what they wrote in the Constitution. Besides, I don't the the Founding Fathers would've wanted you to watch X-men cartoons at all.
The Public Domain is the natural state of intellectual works.
Only in the sense that anarchy is the "natural state" of everything.
I agree. Did you happen to see the news video of the two female cops "shopping" during the situation in New Orleans? Not only were they not doing a damn thing to stop the looting, they were part of it.
If that's true, the the article is seriously misleading:
"Active computing accounts for only half the power Intel processors use. The other half is gobbled up by a leakage current in transistors that exists when a machine is in a low-level sleep state, Intel said."
I've never heard of the operation x = 1 described as "active computing" and x = 0 as "a low-level sleep state". What gives?
If you're running into the limits of Excel, then my advice to you is this: learn to program. Get Octave or, better yet, Scilab. If you need performance, you can use C or C++. I don't know why people use Excel for serious number crunching.
So where did they get this 1/2 figure? Wouldn't this depend strongly on how you're using your computer? If you're playing a FPS, it would be more like > 95% used for active computing and 5% wasted. Maybe that 1/2 figure is for very light usage like loading a small web page every 5 minutes.
If someone could explain to me the difference between this and a real LIBRARY I would love to hear it.
There are two main objections that publishers have to this. First, in a library, there are a limited number of copies. If a book is really popular, the library may choose to buy multiple copies so more people have a chance to check one out. To see an example of this, just try to check out a Harry Potter book around the time a new one is released, or try to check out a book that has recently been turned into a major motion picture. With books available on the web, thousands of people around the world can browse the same copy of the book at the same time. For example, there is a database with science and engineering abstracts from thousands of journals available at my school. But the company who compiles this database requires special software to be used that allows only one person to search it at once. The Uni would have to purchase multiple licenses if they wanted more people to be able to search it at once. And this database just contains abstracts.
Second is the fear that if a book is digitized, it can be copied, and then you won't have to go through the "library" to access it again. In a library with paper books, even with a photocopier, copying a book is labor intensive and costly.
What the Snopes article says is that personal information has been found on a few card keys in the past, but all of the hotel chains contacted by Snopes flatly denied putting any personal information on their cards. Furthermore, it states that according to the vendors contacted, the software to write the keys is not configured to allow hotel employees to include any personal info on the cards. So, basically, it's probably not a widespread problem, but it has happened. Also, there's no information that one of these cards has been used for identity theft. So this "urban legend" is "false" in the sense that information such as credit cards has been found on cards, but it shouldn't be a big concern (according to the non-paranoid author of the article.)
What I found more disturbing, however, was this passage by the Snopes article author:
Moreover, monitoring and logging how often (and exactly when) a particular room has been entered is much easier with a keycard system than with standard lock-and-key systems (a valuable feature when trying to investigate claims of theft from hotel rooms).
It never occurred to me that hotels might have a record of every time you opened your door.
Whoever modded this "Offtopic" is a "moran" who needs to "get a brain". Errors in spelling or grammar in the summary or title are always "Ontopic" on Slashdot. So are personal attacks on the mods, who, I'm told by a "totally reliable" source, are "a bunch of homos".
I know that I really miss the middle-click behaviour on emails when using Firefox and Thunderbird.
You can set an option in FF to open all links from external applications in a new tab in the most recently used window. That way you can just left click links in Thunderbird to get this behavior.
Bullshit alert! The author of this article is seriously confused. If fuel were only 35% burned, then we would be spewing tons of gasoline into the environment. You would be choked by the gasoline fumes. There can be problems with fuel not being completely burned, thus emitting hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide into the air. That's why MTBE or ethanol are sometimes added to gasoline, and why some places have mandatory emmissions testing. But I gaurantee you that cars completely burn much more than 35% of their fuel.
The inherent inefficiency of internal combustion engines (or any heat engines) is due to thermodynamic limitations. The maximum efficiency (defined as the ratio of mechanical work achieved to the energy released by combustion) is given by:
e = (Th - Tc)/Th
where Th is the absolute temperature of the hot reservoir (the temperature inside the combustion chamber) and Tc is the absolute temperature of the cold reservoir. If, for example, Th = 900 K and Tc = 300 K, the maximum efficiency is 2/3. While friction in the pistons and other losses contribute to the overall efficiency, even a perfect, frictionless engine that operates between these two temperatures could not exceed an efficiency of 2/3.
What do hammers, wrenches, shovels, and most of the rest have in common?
With the exception of shovels, they're designed to be used by a single hand. Gamers are used to using two hands on the same controller. For one thing, it helps stabilize the controller so you can hit the buttons faster, and control the joystick better. I wonder if it will be as easy to play with just one hand. Then again, maybe their motivation was to free the other hand so you could punch the person next to you. That certainly would bring a lot of realism to fighting games.
Re:How can you vouche for the security of this?
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
·
· Score: 1
Microsoft are going to have to get used to the fact that people will start routinely keeping computers as long as they do cars - for ten years or more. So are the hardware manufacturers, for that matter.
The reliability of hardware, however, seems to be decreasing, at least with respect to hard drives. If they keep it up, maybe the driving force for buying a new computer will be that they break after a few years.
The other thing he could have done is keep the data private. Scientists should not let valuable experimental results sit around of public servers prior to publication.
Agreed. That was foolish. Then again, in the article, they discussed the fact that trust is an important part of astronomical research.
In any case, the solution to this is simple: abstracts without supporting evidence simply should not establish priority for discoveries. If Brown had submitted a paper to Nature at the same time, well, then that would be a different matter.
Abstracts don't usually contain evidence; they contain results. The evidence to substantiate Brown's claim is that he had been collaborating with others at the time. The fact that Brown discovered it is not in dispute here.
I still have not seen any evidence that data was stolen. Ortiz used their own data, from 2003, to make their announcement. Are you saying they faked their own images? Or what are you actually suggesting happened?
Data wasn't stolen or faked, but Ortiz may have used Brown's abstract and the position of his telescope in order to determine which data of his own to examine to find the object. The fact that he allegedly did this without acknowledging it is what is being claimed to be unethical.
Given Brown's own sequence of events, it is perfectly reasonable and probable to assume that Ortiz discovered the object independently, then read the abstract, and then searched on the web for it and tried to determine whether K40506A was the same or a different object as their own. It turned out it was the same, so they decided to go public right away.
If you carefully consider the facts, I think you'll see that it is neither probable nor reasonable. One of the things that aroused suspicion was that the images used by Ortiz were two years old. It would be quite a coincidence if he just happened to notice the object on reviewing his old data right after Brown published his abstract. It would also seem unlikely that he did notice it, and decided not to publish for so long. It seems highly likely that Ortiz didn't see the object in his data until he was prompted to re-examine it by Brown's abstract.
I have small children. Wireless controllers are perfect because when they walk between me and the TV they don't trip over my cables and A) yank the cable out of the console or B) yank the console off the entertainment center.
Note the missing option:
C) fall and hurt themselves
[Brown's] abstract shouldn't have contained identifiable information, and/or he should have asked to be kept private.
Have you forgotten the purpose of an abstract? It's primary function is to allow future researchers to quickly determine if the information contained in the presentation or paper is relevant to their work. If the abstract just said, "I've discovered an object," then it wouldn't be very useful if you were searching for information on K40506A. The abstract was entirely appropriate.
Brown's behavior itself may have been an innocent mistake, or it may also have been scientific misconduct. In particular, if he submitted the abstract announcing the find without actually having all the data ready, that would constitute scientific misconduct.
It's common practice in science to submit an abstract before work is completed. If this is misconduct, then the majority of researchers are guilty of it. His telescope was pointed in that direction, so obviously he had discovered something. His mistake was using the codename of the object in publicly accessible logs of where his telescope was pointed. In the article, it says that he googled for the name contained in the abstract, and his telescope logs turned up. Foolish, yes; unethical, no.
I think the fact that the Spanish research hasn't denied the claim is very revealing. He just criticized Brown for not publishing sooner. It's like he was saying, "if you had published your data right away, then it wouldn't have been stolen."
Also, pets are killed on a daily basis in the hundreds, at least this way we're putting them to good use.
This is true. I used to volunteer at a cat shelter. Then I realized that they weren't interested in finding homes for the animals, and basicly served as a kitty death camp. They kill over a hundred cats a month sometimes. They find homes for at most a dozen a month. They've recently adopted a new policy of killing all cats they receive within 10 days. Most of the people who bring the cats there think they're doing the right thing, but I don't think they would do so if they realized that the animal was going to die by lethal injection shortly after arriving. They also won't let you get a cat if you say you're going to get it declawed. Bunch of stupid irrational hippies.
Time-Warner cable's Roadrunner service. The price is garaunteed for 1 year, after which it will probably go up to $45/mo. I downloaded the Half Life 2 demo in under a half hour.:)
Cheap? I don't know about that. I'm paying $35/mo for 100 Mbps cable Internet. Plus, people make about half as much in Oz. I'm surprised that they're charging as much as they are. Besides, there are plenty of reasons not to move to Australia:
* Kangaroo attacks
* You have to learn a new language
* It's hot
* They're all a bunch of criminals
...Hans Reiser, the author of two revolutionary Linux filesystems, Reiser3 and Reiser4.
So who authored Reiser1 and Reiser2? Was it Paul Reiser? Do you have to be named Reiser to work on the filesystem, or was it just a coincidence? Inquiring minds want to know.
Slashdot Mirror
So if I make some vague reference to the Constitution, will I get modded +4, Interesting too?
Do current copyright laws violate the Constitution? If not, then you don't have a leg to stand on. The law is not as simple as asking, "what would the Founding Fathers do?" You have to go with what they wrote in the Constitution. Besides, I don't the the Founding Fathers would've wanted you to watch X-men cartoons at all.
The Public Domain is the natural state of intellectual works.
Only in the sense that anarchy is the "natural state" of everything.
2. IPSEC protected SIP or H.323
How about IWQRTZ protected DEY or U.6298? Or if that doesn't work, you could always reverse the polarity in the dilithium crystals.
Just think, the day when we'll be able to watch television programs wirelessly is almost here. Er, wait, that happened in 1928.
I agree. Did you happen to see the news video of the two female cops "shopping" during the situation in New Orleans? Not only were they not doing a damn thing to stop the looting, they were part of it.
If that's true, the the article is seriously misleading:
"Active computing accounts for only half the power Intel processors use. The other half is gobbled up by a leakage current in transistors that exists when a machine is in a low-level sleep state, Intel said."
I've never heard of the operation x = 1 described as "active computing" and x = 0 as "a low-level sleep state". What gives?
If you're running into the limits of Excel, then my advice to you is this: learn to program. Get Octave or, better yet, Scilab. If you need performance, you can use C or C++. I don't know why people use Excel for serious number crunching.
Given the tiny fraction of book sales that authors get, I would think they would welcome any change.
So where did they get this 1/2 figure? Wouldn't this depend strongly on how you're using your computer? If you're playing a FPS, it would be more like > 95% used for active computing and 5% wasted. Maybe that 1/2 figure is for very light usage like loading a small web page every 5 minutes.
If someone could explain to me the difference between this and a real LIBRARY I would love to hear it.
There are two main objections that publishers have to this. First, in a library, there are a limited number of copies. If a book is really popular, the library may choose to buy multiple copies so more people have a chance to check one out. To see an example of this, just try to check out a Harry Potter book around the time a new one is released, or try to check out a book that has recently been turned into a major motion picture. With books available on the web, thousands of people around the world can browse the same copy of the book at the same time. For example, there is a database with science and engineering abstracts from thousands of journals available at my school. But the company who compiles this database requires special software to be used that allows only one person to search it at once. The Uni would have to purchase multiple licenses if they wanted more people to be able to search it at once. And this database just contains abstracts.
Second is the fear that if a book is digitized, it can be copied, and then you won't have to go through the "library" to access it again. In a library with paper books, even with a photocopier, copying a book is labor intensive and costly.
What I found more disturbing, however, was this passage by the Snopes article author: It never occurred to me that hotels might have a record of every time you opened your door.
Whoever modded this "Offtopic" is a "moran" who needs to "get a brain". Errors in spelling or grammar in the summary or title are always "Ontopic" on Slashdot. So are personal attacks on the mods, who, I'm told by a "totally reliable" source, are "a bunch of homos".
I know that I really miss the middle-click behaviour on emails when using Firefox and Thunderbird.
You can set an option in FF to open all links from external applications in a new tab in the most recently used window. That way you can just left click links in Thunderbird to get this behavior.
Bullshit alert! The author of this article is seriously confused. If fuel were only 35% burned, then we would be spewing tons of gasoline into the environment. You would be choked by the gasoline fumes. There can be problems with fuel not being completely burned, thus emitting hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide into the air. That's why MTBE or ethanol are sometimes added to gasoline, and why some places have mandatory emmissions testing. But I gaurantee you that cars completely burn much more than 35% of their fuel.
The inherent inefficiency of internal combustion engines (or any heat engines) is due to thermodynamic limitations. The maximum efficiency (defined as the ratio of mechanical work achieved to the energy released by combustion) is given by:
e = (Th - Tc)/Th
where Th is the absolute temperature of the hot reservoir (the temperature inside the combustion chamber) and Tc is the absolute temperature of the cold reservoir. If, for example, Th = 900 K and Tc = 300 K, the maximum efficiency is 2/3. While friction in the pistons and other losses contribute to the overall efficiency, even a perfect, frictionless engine that operates between these two temperatures could not exceed an efficiency of 2/3.
Maybe they named it "Revolution" because they expected it to cause bloodshed.
What do hammers, wrenches, shovels, and most of the rest have in common?
With the exception of shovels, they're designed to be used by a single hand. Gamers are used to using two hands on the same controller. For one thing, it helps stabilize the controller so you can hit the buttons faster, and control the joystick better. I wonder if it will be as easy to play with just one hand. Then again, maybe their motivation was to free the other hand so you could punch the person next to you. That certainly would bring a lot of realism to fighting games.
Microsoft are going to have to get used to the fact that people will start routinely keeping computers as long as they do cars - for ten years or more. So are the hardware manufacturers, for that matter.
The reliability of hardware, however, seems to be decreasing, at least with respect to hard drives. If they keep it up, maybe the driving force for buying a new computer will be that they break after a few years.
The other thing he could have done is keep the data private. Scientists should not let valuable experimental results sit around of public servers prior to publication.
Agreed. That was foolish. Then again, in the article, they discussed the fact that trust is an important part of astronomical research.
In any case, the solution to this is simple: abstracts without supporting evidence simply should not establish priority for discoveries. If Brown had submitted a paper to Nature at the same time, well, then that would be a different matter.
Abstracts don't usually contain evidence; they contain results. The evidence to substantiate Brown's claim is that he had been collaborating with others at the time. The fact that Brown discovered it is not in dispute here.
I still have not seen any evidence that data was stolen. Ortiz used their own data, from 2003, to make their announcement. Are you saying they faked their own images? Or what are you actually suggesting happened?
Data wasn't stolen or faked, but Ortiz may have used Brown's abstract and the position of his telescope in order to determine which data of his own to examine to find the object. The fact that he allegedly did this without acknowledging it is what is being claimed to be unethical.
Given Brown's own sequence of events, it is perfectly reasonable and probable to assume that Ortiz discovered the object independently, then read the abstract, and then searched on the web for it and tried to determine whether K40506A was the same or a different object as their own. It turned out it was the same, so they decided to go public right away.
If you carefully consider the facts, I think you'll see that it is neither probable nor reasonable. One of the things that aroused suspicion was that the images used by Ortiz were two years old. It would be quite a coincidence if he just happened to notice the object on reviewing his old data right after Brown published his abstract. It would also seem unlikely that he did notice it, and decided not to publish for so long. It seems highly likely that Ortiz didn't see the object in his data until he was prompted to re-examine it by Brown's abstract.
I have small children. Wireless controllers are perfect because when they walk between me and the TV they don't trip over my cables and A) yank the cable out of the console or B) yank the console off the entertainment center.
Note the missing option:
C) fall and hurt themselves
[Brown's] abstract shouldn't have contained identifiable information, and/or he should have asked to be kept private.
Have you forgotten the purpose of an abstract? It's primary function is to allow future researchers to quickly determine if the information contained in the presentation or paper is relevant to their work. If the abstract just said, "I've discovered an object," then it wouldn't be very useful if you were searching for information on K40506A. The abstract was entirely appropriate.
Brown's behavior itself may have been an innocent mistake, or it may also have been scientific misconduct. In particular, if he submitted the abstract announcing the find without actually having all the data ready, that would constitute scientific misconduct.
It's common practice in science to submit an abstract before work is completed. If this is misconduct, then the majority of researchers are guilty of it. His telescope was pointed in that direction, so obviously he had discovered something. His mistake was using the codename of the object in publicly accessible logs of where his telescope was pointed. In the article, it says that he googled for the name contained in the abstract, and his telescope logs turned up. Foolish, yes; unethical, no.
I think the fact that the Spanish research hasn't denied the claim is very revealing. He just criticized Brown for not publishing sooner. It's like he was saying, "if you had published your data right away, then it wouldn't have been stolen."
Also, pets are killed on a daily basis in the hundreds, at least this way we're putting them to good use.
This is true. I used to volunteer at a cat shelter. Then I realized that they weren't interested in finding homes for the animals, and basicly served as a kitty death camp. They kill over a hundred cats a month sometimes. They find homes for at most a dozen a month. They've recently adopted a new policy of killing all cats they receive within 10 days. Most of the people who bring the cats there think they're doing the right thing, but I don't think they would do so if they realized that the animal was going to die by lethal injection shortly after arriving. They also won't let you get a cat if you say you're going to get it declawed. Bunch of stupid irrational hippies.
You'll have to move this post to the "Free Speech Forum", or your account will be deleted.
Time-Warner cable's Roadrunner service. The price is garaunteed for 1 year, after which it will probably go up to $45/mo. I downloaded the Half Life 2 demo in under a half hour. :)
Cheap? I don't know about that. I'm paying $35/mo for 100 Mbps cable Internet. Plus, people make about half as much in Oz. I'm surprised that they're charging as much as they are. Besides, there are plenty of reasons not to move to Australia:
* Kangaroo attacks
* You have to learn a new language
* It's hot
* They're all a bunch of criminals
...Hans Reiser, the author of two revolutionary Linux filesystems, Reiser3 and Reiser4.
So who authored Reiser1 and Reiser2? Was it Paul Reiser? Do you have to be named Reiser to work on the filesystem, or was it just a coincidence? Inquiring minds want to know.
What Wiki? I couldn't find it. Can I get a link, please?