That was my first thought as well. I have an Ionic Breeze, and when I don't clean it regularly (once a week) it makes loud crackling noises and begins producing small electric arcs. Who is going to clean their CPU fan weekly?
I wonder how safe from this we are here in the US? To my mind DNA is the epitome of "personal effects" as covered by the fourth amendment. (I would ask any lawyers here to explain the laws around requesting DNA samples.) Don't our British friends have something parallel about what types of things require a warrant to collect? Is any judge going to issue a warrant for evidence from a five year old?
9-11 was Clinton's fault? You should know that you can't say things like that around here. 9/11 was Osama Bin Laden's fault, allowing the Middle East to continue to be a breeding ground for anti-American sentiment was both elder Bush and Clinton's fault. I say that with the acknowledgment that hindsight is 20/20.
If they don't like what we are doing, in country x all they have to do is crank the price of Oil higher. Eventually we won't be able to afford the war any more
Um you are away that's real reason we invaded Iraq right? To remake an oil rich country that is in our pocket. Of course it's not going so well, but that's not surprising given the executive's track record. I don't think the idea of having close ties to an oil rich country is a bad idea, but I think we when about it completely backwards. We were in the right when we bailed Kuwait out in Desert Storm, we dropped the ball when we didn't grow that into a lasting friendship between the US and Kuwait. A rich and powerful voice in the Middle East that had positive things to say about the US could have avoided this entire mess and had our politicians less trigger happy because of our energy vulnerabilities. But when the majority of the people in charge are in the businesses of power and guns, then their solution to every problem is going to be power and guns.
Politicians seem completely incapable of grasping the idea that it is just dumb to keep something illegal when not only is everyone doing it, but everyone is morally right to do it.
The Iraqi death toll is 1,189,173. The US death toll is around 4,000 (with another 30,000 wounded). That's 297 to 1. Which speaks highly of "all the UAVs, ECM to jam EIDs, superstrong ballistic armour on people and vehicles, digital data and comms that have all contributed to the > $1T cost." I'm no fan of the war, or the cost of the war in humans and dollars, but I would gladly have the increased debt than have the 30k wounded be 30k dead. Better still if they had all stayed home, or in Afghanistan. (US death toll 400)
Too bad here it is. Perhaps this is more to your liking?Or this. Any computer company that wants to have "elegant design" associated with their product needs to realize that plastic is unelegant. Notice how most high end cars try to hide all the plastic in the interior. Yes Apple has done some non-hideous things with white plastic, but outside of the modernism design genre plastic is bad. I would think that some of the engineered wood companies (mostly they make laminate wood flooring) could produce some quite attractive cases for reasonable cost.
The 2nd amendment is meant to ensure that MILITIAS continue to exist by giving INDIVIDUALS the right to keep weapons.
Beyond the fact of giving individuals the right to own weapons, it further gives those armed individuals to be a part of a well regulated militia. Not only are guns then protected, but so is being part of a practiced, organized, private group that trains in the effective military use of those guns. Not a hunting club or a target sport club, but a militia. What do you think the DHS would do if they found proof of the existence in the US of an actual militia that trained together regularly?
That's great news, but it is somewhat diminished by the Democrats waiting two years to start to do what they where elected for in 2006. I'm glad that "but but the TERRORISTS!" doesn't have so much sway any more.
if you want them to publish your work (which no-one is forcing you to do) then you must assign them the copyright. If you don't like it, publish in a different journal. Since the journal makes money from subscription, they don't want you to benefit from their prestige by getting the paper accepted, and then turning around and posting the content somewhere else so no-one has to subscribe to the journal.
So basically it sounds as though the pay-to-play peer review journals are on step away from being as outdated as the RIAA. Musci indistry is failing because distribution is now free, now distribution is only half of a journal's product the other half is the clout that comes with being reviewed. Umm that's pretty much free now as well. All that is needed is a carefully controlled online review system that was somewhere between slashcode and wiki, where the mods/editors were of the same caliber as at a peer reviewed journal. It wold be the Napster of the peer review industry. The clout would build up in under three years, and the information/distribution czars would out of business in yet another market. I think this is already recognized within that business and that is the real reasoning behind the Wikipedia ban. Because the only thing right now that makes Wikipedia "safe" is it current lack of serious credibility.
I wonder what one has to do to qualify as part of this music publishing business? Everyday, I pass subway musicians with decent home burned CDs for sale. I have even bought a few, in fact one of my favorite classical CDs is direct from the musician. They are a part of the "music industry" how do they go about getting their cut?
We need to know the speed of the galaxy around the... what? Basically, you are proposing the existence of a "center of the universe".
What is our speed out from the original point of the big bang? What is our speed and direction relative to the fabric of space-time?
I suppose the easy way to find out would be to send a series of transponders out into the past, and then analyse the location data you already gathered.
The whole concept relies on the idea that most roads or at least the ones commonly used will have these markers imbedded beneath the road and that is why it's not going to work for a while.
If they drop one sensor in every pothole in Manhattan, they will have all the streets on the island covered. Then they could replace, maybe a 25% (my rough estimate of the percentage of cabs that never go to the other boroughs) of the taxis with 3500 rob-u-cabs. Then we can all laugh as we watch robots try to navigate something like this. Notice at the end of the video, not only do the lanes get ignored, but there is a lady walking between the stuck cars. Anywhere that would have the population density to justify embedding the roads is going to have traffic situations like this.
Not only is solid state lighting more efficient, it's also more versatile. With one fixture you could change the feel of a room from bright and alert to cozy and romantic by using variable color temperature. RGB mixing fixtures could conceivably be hooked up to your entertainment and alter the room color to match the movie or video game.
You give good reasons why the results of their investigations should not be admitted into court, shouldn't that be enough?
NewYorkCountryLawyer also gave the reason why it shouldn't be allowed to happen in the first place: "If you were being forced to pay someone $4500 to get them not to sue you, for something you hadn't done,". That means they are threatening you before you ever enter a court. It's more of a gamble than many people want to make to stand up to a big company with many lawyers and apparent "evidence" just because they are mostly sure that the "evidence" won't be admitted. If you haven't done anything wrong, you should have to face that level of threat in the first place, that is why the licensing is at the investigation level.
Before someone whines "why does everything have to turn into Bush bashing?" Let me say that this is completely relevant. When the most powerful executive of US law regularly shows contempt for the rule of law and gets away with it every time for years, it is only logical that other rich and powerful men would follow suit and begin to treat the law as if it only marginally applies to them.
I believe that law is there to provide some parallel of fourth amendment rights in regard to investigation by non-government entities (like MediaSentry). With out this, any one with sufficient funds who disliked you could be constantly investigating you, waiting for you to make any kind of mistake that could be leveraged into a criminal charge. Having licensed investigators allow some standards to be maintained, and rules of conduct to be applied. MediaSentry's conduct is near perfect example of why this law does need to exist to protect individuals from constant investigation.
we're going to have CPUs with dozens if not hundreds of cores on them. (See Intel's 80 core technology demo as an example of where their research is going). Can you write or use general purpose software that takes advantage of that many cores?
For the average user, the first 30 or so cores will be taken up running various parts of Vista, anti-virus, and all the other support programs to make the computer ready to actually do what you want it to do. According to windows task manager I'm running 35 processes right now. Sure at the moment each little process doesn't require it's own core, but I have little doubt that many of those background processes will expand to fill the space if it is made available to them. Having remaining unused cores would at least remove much of the problem of OS bloat from the experience of the "average user", because like it or not the "average user" runs the most bloated OS out there, and will continue to do so for at least the next several years.
Yeah the problem is that they listened to some asshat Marketing VP instead of their program managers
The minimum hardware configuration was set so low that "even a piece of junk will qualify," Anantha Kancherla, a Microsoft program manager, said in an internal e-mail message among those recently unsealed, adding, "It will be a complete tragedy if we allowed it."
She was exactly right, for MS this is a complete tragedy. Any bets on if they give her a big fat rise for trying to warn them? Any bets on if they fire the senior management that pushed for dropping the hardware requirements?
I think its time for the Internet to get back in touch with reality.
The social contract that we call "government" is just an shared idea that has been realized by the efforts of very large numbers of people throughout history. Having a different shared idea embodied in the internet is no more or less "real" than the idea of government, it just doesn't have the same amount of history or communal effort put into realizing it yet. Order, Justice, Law, those things are just ideas. Reality is Gravity and Thermodynamics. I think the internet is actually more in touch with the physical realities of the universe than most of the government is.
When you look at how most people want our society to be, the internet is a more accurate reflection of that desired society than our government is namely because much larger numbers of people have a more direct and malleable input into the internet than they do of their governments. This is important because the "reality" you mention is the social contract that is what makes us a society, as opposed to a mere collection of intelligent bald apes.
Because of it's newness and sudden growth the internet partially escaped the rule of military force and the meat-space reality of scarcity. Because of this the social contract has manifest differently than in "real world", however that doesn't make it any less valid.
rather than dwell on how glossy and cool our phones look.
I think that "glossy and cool" is the aspect that will win the day for voice recognition in phones. Usable keypads have a minimum size, and that size is too large to look good in the pocket of a pair of tailored pants or a suit jacket. It will be a simple matter for marketing to make having a Blackberry "brick" clipped to your belt passé. This isn't a concern for much of the Slashdot crowd, but it will be a driving factor for a significant portion of the market.
It really isn't like that with national ID cards: you're not going to use an ID card with a picture that doesn't at least resemble you vaguely. Replacing a picture on a stolen card seems nigh to impossible to me.
I've been to smoke free restaurants in areas that did not ban smoking.
Smoke free diners? bars? Not in NYC you didn't. Yeah you could occasionally find expensive restaurants that were smoke free, but nothing affordable on a regular basis. If it really worked that owners choice would result in smoke free establishments then the number of restaurants that allowed smoking (before the ban) should have been close to the same proportion of smokers in the city, about 25%. Obviously this was not the case. There was plenty of time for restaurant owners and smokers to accommodate the 75% of the population that doesn't smoke, nothing happened. Then there was gentle regulation with non-smoking areas this was minimally or non-effective in small eateries and worthless in bars. Spending a night out meant coming home smelling like smoke until hard and fast laws were passed. Yes an outright ban is overly obtrusive on smokers, but making a nonsmokers clothing and hair reek is just as obtrusive. After years of dealing with this blasé rudeness the 75% of the population put a stop to it. Short of a cigarette that only makes smoke on the inhale and filters it all on the exhale, I doubt there will ever be a compromise that actually suits both parties.
Slashdot Mirror
That was my first thought as well. I have an Ionic Breeze, and when I don't clean it regularly (once a week) it makes loud crackling noises and begins producing small electric arcs. Who is going to clean their CPU fan weekly?
This is about totalitarianism, which is a crime.
I wonder how safe from this we are here in the US? To my mind DNA is the epitome of "personal effects" as covered by the fourth amendment. (I would ask any lawyers here to explain the laws around requesting DNA samples.) Don't our British friends have something parallel about what types of things require a warrant to collect? Is any judge going to issue a warrant for evidence from a five year old?
9-11 was Clinton's fault? You should know that you can't say things like that around here. 9/11 was Osama Bin Laden's fault, allowing the Middle East to continue to be a breeding ground for anti-American sentiment was both elder Bush and Clinton's fault. I say that with the acknowledgment that hindsight is 20/20.
If they don't like what we are doing, in country x all they have to do is crank the price of Oil higher. Eventually we won't be able to afford the war any more
Um you are away that's real reason we invaded Iraq right? To remake an oil rich country that is in our pocket. Of course it's not going so well, but that's not surprising given the executive's track record. I don't think the idea of having close ties to an oil rich country is a bad idea, but I think we when about it completely backwards. We were in the right when we bailed Kuwait out in Desert Storm, we dropped the ball when we didn't grow that into a lasting friendship between the US and Kuwait. A rich and powerful voice in the Middle East that had positive things to say about the US could have avoided this entire mess and had our politicians less trigger happy because of our energy vulnerabilities. But when the majority of the people in charge are in the businesses of power and guns, then their solution to every problem is going to be power and guns.
Politicians seem completely incapable of grasping the idea that it is just dumb to keep something illegal when not only is everyone doing it, but everyone is morally right to do it.
That only hold true if the goal of the politician is to serve the people. If the goal of the politician is to have power over the people or to serve someone who wants to have power over the people, then having the majority of the people open to prosecution at your leisure is a very useful tool. Most parking and speeding tickets are a lower level of this sort of criminalizing of the average person:"The National League of Cities says 47% of the nation's cities raised fees and fines last year. Most of the added money came from parking tickets. Revenue from these fines and fees now rivals property taxes as a major source of municipal income, says the league's Chris Hoene."Now obviously, the city governments that generate a significant portion of their income through tickets don't actully want everyone to start parking legally, nor do they want to make more legal parking easily available. They want money, just like the RIAA does.
The Iraqi death toll is 1,189,173. The US death toll is around 4,000 (with another 30,000 wounded). That's 297 to 1. Which speaks highly of "all the UAVs, ECM to jam EIDs, superstrong ballistic armour on people and vehicles, digital data and comms that have all contributed to the > $1T cost." I'm no fan of the war, or the cost of the war in humans and dollars, but I would gladly have the increased debt than have the 30k wounded be 30k dead. Better still if they had all stayed home, or in Afghanistan. (US death toll 400)
I do *not* want to see bad.
Too bad here it is.
Perhaps this is more to your liking? Or this.
Any computer company that wants to have "elegant design" associated with their product needs to realize that plastic is unelegant. Notice how most high end cars try to hide all the plastic in the interior. Yes Apple has done some non-hideous things with white plastic, but outside of the modernism design genre plastic is bad. I would think that some of the engineered wood companies (mostly they make laminate wood flooring) could produce some quite attractive cases for reasonable cost.
The 2nd amendment is meant to ensure that MILITIAS continue to exist by giving INDIVIDUALS the right to keep weapons.
Beyond the fact of giving individuals the right to own weapons, it further gives those armed individuals to be a part of a well regulated militia. Not only are guns then protected, but so is being part of a practiced, organized, private group that trains in the effective military use of those guns. Not a hunting club or a target sport club, but a militia. What do you think the DHS would do if they found proof of the existence in the US of an actual militia that trained together regularly?
The slur is on the R, we don't expect THEM to value freedom
Before the Neo-Cons, there was a time when the Republican party was actually conservative."Conservatism in the United States comprises a constellation of political ideologies including fiscal conservatism, free market or economic liberalism, social conservatism, libertarianism, bioconservatism and religious conservatism, as well as support for a strong military, small government, and states' rights." About the only aspects they still have from that old ideology is their love of a strong military, and religious conservatism.
That's great news, but it is somewhat diminished by the Democrats waiting two years to start to do what they where elected for in 2006. I'm glad that "but but the TERRORISTS!" doesn't have so much sway any more.
if you want them to publish your work (which no-one is forcing you to do) then you must assign them the copyright. If you don't like it, publish in a different journal. Since the journal makes money from subscription, they don't want you to benefit from their prestige by getting the paper accepted, and then turning around and posting the content somewhere else so no-one has to subscribe to the journal.
So basically it sounds as though the pay-to-play peer review journals are on step away from being as outdated as the RIAA. Musci indistry is failing because distribution is now free, now distribution is only half of a journal's product the other half is the clout that comes with being reviewed. Umm that's pretty much free now as well. All that is needed is a carefully controlled online review system that was somewhere between slashcode and wiki, where the mods/editors were of the same caliber as at a peer reviewed journal. It wold be the Napster of the peer review industry. The clout would build up in under three years, and the information/distribution czars would out of business in yet another market. I think this is already recognized within that business and that is the real reasoning behind the Wikipedia ban. Because the only thing right now that makes Wikipedia "safe" is it current lack of serious credibility.
I see this as their new business model.
I wonder what one has to do to qualify as part of this music publishing business? Everyday, I pass subway musicians with decent home burned CDs for sale. I have even bought a few, in fact one of my favorite classical CDs is direct from the musician. They are a part of the "music industry" how do they go about getting their cut?
We need to know the speed of the galaxy around the... what? Basically, you are proposing the existence of a "center of the universe".
What is our speed out from the original point of the big bang? What is our speed and direction relative to the fabric of space-time?
I suppose the easy way to find out would be to send a series of transponders out into the past, and then analyse the location data you already gathered.
The whole concept relies on the idea that most roads or at least the ones commonly used will have these markers imbedded beneath the road and that is why it's not going to work for a while.
If they drop one sensor in every pothole in Manhattan, they will have all the streets on the island covered. Then they could replace, maybe a 25% (my rough estimate of the percentage of cabs that never go to the other boroughs) of the taxis with 3500 rob-u-cabs. Then we can all laugh as we watch robots try to navigate something like this. Notice at the end of the video, not only do the lanes get ignored, but there is a lady walking between the stuck cars. Anywhere that would have the population density to justify embedding the roads is going to have traffic situations like this.
Not only is solid state lighting more efficient, it's also more versatile. With one fixture you could change the feel of a room from bright and alert to cozy and romantic by using variable color temperature. RGB mixing fixtures could conceivably be hooked up to your entertainment and alter the room color to match the movie or video game.
You give good reasons why the results of their investigations should not be admitted into court, shouldn't that be enough?
NewYorkCountryLawyer also gave the reason why it shouldn't be allowed to happen in the first place: "If you were being forced to pay someone $4500 to get them not to sue you, for something you hadn't done,". That means they are threatening you before you ever enter a court. It's more of a gamble than many people want to make to stand up to a big company with many lawyers and apparent "evidence" just because they are mostly sure that the "evidence" won't be admitted. If you haven't done anything wrong, you should have to face that level of threat in the first place, that is why the licensing is at the investigation level.
So much for the land of the free - it is the land of 'Get away with whatever you can, as fast as you can'.
They are just following the lead of our Executive Branch.
Before someone whines "why does everything have to turn into Bush bashing?" Let me say that this is completely relevant. When the most powerful executive of US law regularly shows contempt for the rule of law and gets away with it every time for years, it is only logical that other rich and powerful men would follow suit and begin to treat the law as if it only marginally applies to them.
I believe that law is there to provide some parallel of fourth amendment rights in regard to investigation by non-government entities (like MediaSentry). With out this, any one with sufficient funds who disliked you could be constantly investigating you, waiting for you to make any kind of mistake that could be leveraged into a criminal charge. Having licensed investigators allow some standards to be maintained, and rules of conduct to be applied. MediaSentry's conduct is near perfect example of why this law does need to exist to protect individuals from constant investigation.
we're going to have CPUs with dozens if not hundreds of cores on them. (See Intel's 80 core technology demo as an example of where their research is going). Can you write or use general purpose software that takes advantage of that many cores?
For the average user, the first 30 or so cores will be taken up running various parts of Vista, anti-virus, and all the other support programs to make the computer ready to actually do what you want it to do. According to windows task manager I'm running 35 processes right now. Sure at the moment each little process doesn't require it's own core, but I have little doubt that many of those background processes will expand to fill the space if it is made available to them. Having remaining unused cores would at least remove much of the problem of OS bloat from the experience of the "average user", because like it or not the "average user" runs the most bloated OS out there, and will continue to do so for at least the next several years.
I know correlation isn't causation, but its been shown to be a strong correlation:
Yeah the problem is that they listened to some asshat Marketing VP instead of their program managers
She was exactly right, for MS this is a complete tragedy. Any bets on if they give her a big fat rise for trying to warn them? Any bets on if they fire the senior management that pushed for dropping the hardware requirements?
The social contract that we call "government" is just an shared idea that has been realized by the efforts of very large numbers of people throughout history. Having a different shared idea embodied in the internet is no more or less "real" than the idea of government, it just doesn't have the same amount of history or communal effort put into realizing it yet. Order, Justice, Law, those things are just ideas. Reality is Gravity and Thermodynamics. I think the internet is actually more in touch with the physical realities of the universe than most of the government is.
When you look at how most people want our society to be, the internet is a more accurate reflection of that desired society than our government is namely because much larger numbers of people have a more direct and malleable input into the internet than they do of their governments. This is important because the "reality" you mention is the social contract that is what makes us a society, as opposed to a mere collection of intelligent bald apes.Because of it's newness and sudden growth the internet partially escaped the rule of military force and the meat-space reality of scarcity. Because of this the social contract has manifest differently than in "real world", however that doesn't make it any less valid.
rather than dwell on how glossy and cool our phones look.
I think that "glossy and cool" is the aspect that will win the day for voice recognition in phones. Usable keypads have a minimum size, and that size is too large to look good in the pocket of a pair of tailored pants or a suit jacket. It will be a simple matter for marketing to make having a Blackberry "brick" clipped to your belt passé. This isn't a concern for much of the Slashdot crowd, but it will be a driving factor for a significant portion of the market.
It really isn't like that with national ID cards: you're not going to use an ID card with a picture that doesn't at least resemble you vaguely. Replacing a picture on a stolen card seems nigh to impossible to me.
Not so impossible my friend.
I've been to smoke free restaurants in areas that did not ban smoking.
Smoke free diners? bars? Not in NYC you didn't. Yeah you could occasionally find expensive restaurants that were smoke free, but nothing affordable on a regular basis. If it really worked that owners choice would result in smoke free establishments then the number of restaurants that allowed smoking (before the ban) should have been close to the same proportion of smokers in the city, about 25%. Obviously this was not the case. There was plenty of time for restaurant owners and smokers to accommodate the 75% of the population that doesn't smoke, nothing happened. Then there was gentle regulation with non-smoking areas this was minimally or non-effective in small eateries and worthless in bars. Spending a night out meant coming home smelling like smoke until hard and fast laws were passed. Yes an outright ban is overly obtrusive on smokers, but making a nonsmokers clothing and hair reek is just as obtrusive. After years of dealing with this blasé rudeness the 75% of the population put a stop to it. Short of a cigarette that only makes smoke on the inhale and filters it all on the exhale, I doubt there will ever be a compromise that actually suits both parties.