Actually, a better use for this sort of fast-charging, high-capacity technology would be in hybrids. The batteries used in hybrids today have high current output, which is good for acceleration. But, their ability to accept current (i.e., recharge) is much slower than for capacitors. This means that batteries are a poor medium for quickly absorbing energy, like with regenerative braking. With a capacitor bank, it might be possible to have a car that can stop on a dime using only regenerative braking. Imagine that kind of power - the whole kinetic energy of a moving vehicle sucked up by a capacitor in a few seconds!
Now think of the amount of energy it would take to travel cross country in a car - about the amount that can be extracted from a few tankfuls of gasoline. Now consider the kind of power you would need to transfer that energy into a battery/capacitor bank in 5-10 seconds. I'm guessing it is on the order of tens of megawatts. It might be possible someday, but I doubt that that kind of electric car will ever be possible.
The promise of replacing your computer battery with a capacitor that recharges in a few seconds probably can't happen all that time soon.
Some math to back this up:
My work laptop, a Dell Latitude D610, has a 53 WHr battery. My home laptop, an Apple 12" Powerbook, has a 46 WHr battery. These aren't huge laptops, mind, and battery capacity is only on the rise as consumers demand more.
Let's use the Dell example, 53 WHr. Change hours to seconds, that's 53 * 3600 = 190,800 Watt-seconds (more usually known as Joules). 191 kJ - that's a fair bit of electrical energy to store, either in battery or in capacitor form. Let's ignore losses that occur in the charger and energy storage device - assume everything is 100% efficient for a moment.
What if we wanted to charge up that 191 kJ capacitor in, say, 10 seconds. That would require a 191 kJ / 10 s = 19.1 kW power supply. Hmmmm, don't think we'll be seeing one of those in a laptop bag anytime soon.
Laptop batteries are a particularly high-energy example, but it illustrates the kind of power increases you'd need to accommodate if instead of charging in hours, you charged in seconds. If you had a battery that used to charge in, say, one hour (cellphone, PDA, whatever), and you instead wanted to charge it in (again, for example) 10 seconds, the charging power supply would need to put out 360x more power. Even to charge it in a minute would require a 60-fold increase in power. That'd be an amazing and fascinating power electronics problem to consider - how to make such charging devices as compact as today's.
No, but it does mean that Apple's margin's will grow slightly larger. I'm sure that as a loyal Apple-user that will warm your heart.
Well, the mac owner in me may not be especially pleased (a price cut might make me purchase that next mac all the sooner).
On the other hand, the mac stock owner in me would rejoice if Apple's margins increase. One hundred shares bought back in January '05 for about $34. Today that stock has almost doubled in value.
I call bullshit if you are living in the United States and make less than $200k a year.
According to a report released at the end of last year by the Congressional Budget Office (congresses book-keepers), the effective federal tax rate for the United States (averaged across all households) was 20%. For the middle 20% of Americans making about $52k/household (pretax, 44.5k aftertax), the federal tax rate was less than 15%.
For the fourth quintile, average income $77k, the tax rate was 18.7%. It is not until you get up to the top quintile, whose average income is $180k/household, that the effective tax rate gets to wham-o 25%.
Let's say, to be generous to your argument, that the state also takes 15%, that's only 30% of your total income. In fact, the state tax rates are substantially less than that - New Hampshire, Nevada, and Alaska don't even have state income taxes.
Of the rest, your take-home pay, which is still 70% of your gross income, you start paying out things like property taxes, sales taxes, and gas taxes. In order for those additional taxes to take away an additional 20% of your gross income (so that your total taxes = 15% + 15% + 20% = 50%), the tax rate on your after-tax dollars would need to be 20%/70% = 28.5%. In other words, if all of the taxes applied to your take-home income had a rate of 28.5% (or a weighted average of them all), then that would make up an additional 20% of your gross income that had been taxed away.
I don't know about you, but the sales tax around here isn't anywhere near 28.5%. Neither is the gas tax, alcohol tax, property tax, or any other kind of tax that I can think of. And if each of those smaller taxes are less than 28.5%, the effective tax rate on your take-home income doesn't exceed 28.5%
Are they ever going to repeal income tax which was only supposed to be 2% max? Many of us pay over 50% in taxes if you include gas tax, sales tax, income tax, property tax, etc etc.
You're counting things in two different and incomparible ways to make your argument. Way back when they first introduced the income tax, there were still a whole lot of other taxes in effect, just as there are today. You are comparing the 2% to 50%, but income tax (as you noted) is only one component of all the taxes you pay. What did people pay out in total taxes back then? I don't know. I'll grant you it is certainly less than today.
Bear in mind, however, that back when the income tax was still very low, the government didn't do nearly as much as it does today. I'm not just talking about pork-barrel politics - there was plenty of government corruption back then, too - I'm talking about things like having the world's foremost military, an impressive tax-backed national infrastructure, and social welfare programs.
If you would rather be susceptible to invasion, have no roads or bridges, your parents and in-laws stay with you when they grow old, and out-of-work beggars at your door, then by all means advocate the libertarian viewpoint. Just be sure your math is correct, though.
My college has no keypad. You just swipe your card. That's a huge security risk. Imagine if some sexual predator got access to a dorm. That's scary!
The irony of this statement, in the case of my alma mater, is that they prox card system was implemented largely out of fear of sexual predators. There were a few incidents where an unidentified male, not a student, was found lurking in a women's bathroom/shower in one of the dorms. Previously, all of the dorms were left unlocked during daylight hours during the academic calendar. Ground floor women's bathrooms had keypads.
So they bring in this two-million dollar system, replace everyone's old ID cards with RFID-based ones, and implemented a security policy where all the dorms are locked all the time. Depending on a person's access privelages, undergrads can get into all the dorms, grads can only get into the dorm they live in (if they're on campus), and the academic buildings (except the libraries) get locked at night to anyone who doesn't have a reason to be there.
But, there are two significant problems with the system, as with any security system:
1) The system can be hacked. As this article points out, it only takes some specialized, but easily gotten, equipment and a little practice.
2) Human factors. My college isn't located in an urban center. There is little crime in the area, and the students are pretty nice outgoing people. If someone that looks remotely like a student were to hang around one of the doors, claiming that they'd lost their card, I'd guess 75% of the students would let them into the building.
If I was lucky enough to have moderator points today, I'd mod that up for a well-placed geek cultural reference.
On a more serious note, I think that your comment has more going for it than just that. Considering the people who will be using these devices, I almost think that it should have something along those lines. After all, all the laptops in the world can only be of so much use - one needs ways to educate people on their use as well. Sure, there'll be the precocious ones out there who will tinker around with the laptop and learn it front to back within a year or two without anyone teaching them.
Most, like the rest of us mere mortals, will need some help and instruction along the way. Are there enough teachers in the wide world to go along with these laptops? I don't know. Bundling them with a sort of interactive and adaptive user's manual (not just for the computer, but for a total education) wouldn't be such a bad idea.
Aiming it towards the empowerment of women in the third world would go a long way, too, I think.
Consider it computing using a sliding price scale - just like many medical care centers use. The people with great insurance or who pay in full outright, because they have the means to do so, effectively subsidize the care for those who can't pay as much, or anything.
Actually, if we are talking about cellular phones, putting it all in the ".mob" TLD wouldn't be such a bad idea. Most people pick and use their cellphones without much independent thought, anyway, more of a mob mentality.
I'm not sure if I always agree with this statement, but it seems particular apt in this case. Guns don't kill people; people kill people.
There are any number of examples out there of a tool, or technology, having multiple uses. Many are legitimate, and some are illegal. Should we ban the use of knives everywhere, essntial tools of every chef on the planet, because they can be used to injure or kill people?
There are many cases where a double-edged (no pun intended) tool or technology requires licensing, or is not generally available, or the use/possession of it is illegal for most folks. For instance, there are many weapons out there that only the military is permitted to use. Explosive can be used by terrorists, but are also essential for mining and legitimate demolition. Access to nuclear technology, which can power cities or destroy them, is heavily restricted by international law and the threat of war.
But something so universally used and depended upon as sysadmin tools? This law sounds like the cyber equivalent of drug paraphenalia laws, which restrict access to syringes and bongs. In this case, however, is more like trying to criminalize automobiles, which everyone uses and depends upon, but could be used for things like robberies, help criminals flee the law, and cause tens of thousands of deaths per year.
I reiterate: tools are not the problem, nor is criminalizing them the solution. It is what one makes of those tools that can be the problem, and what should be sanctioned.
Can anyone give me more information about what Apple means by a "glossy display?" The press release and website are quite short on details. As a matter of fact, on the MacBook's product page, there is even a hyperlink referring to the glossy display. Alas, it takes me to the Design page which, while cool and informative, doesn't have any information about the display.
I assume the glossy display is meant to improve the contrast and sharpen things up in general, getting away from the flat matte of most LCD screens. I'll probably have to wait a few weeks for pictures of this new laptop sitting side by side with an iBook to tell the difference (there is no Apple store in my remote viscinity).
I am a little wary of it, however. I have encountered laptops with what I would have called "glossy" screens. Instead of the matte surface finish of a typical LCD, it looked like the LCD was encased in glass. No doubt this improved the screen clarity and contrast in darkened environments, but the screens were about as reflective as, well, plate glass.
I trust apple to not go with something that flawed. Does anyone have more info?
A lot of the spam that's been sent my way by persons unknown have many random snippets of legitimate text in them, presumably to fool spam filters. I have had whole pages of The Hobbit quoted to me recently. I occassionally open one up to look at it (no attachments or images, just the plain text) and get entertained with very ethereal poetry. For example:
In a trice without warning the face of nature
grew sullen Black angry mouths, the clouds
swallowed up the sun The air was dense with
suppressed excitement For him there was a
little mattress of straw and woollen blankets
The wind howled through the long corridors
and sobbed and whispered in the secret recesses
Shakespeare himself never wrote a finer sonnet!
[the literary purists out there will be quick to point out that there are specific, technical definitions of what constitute a haiku or sonnet. I know these spams don't qualify as either; it's just a useful name to give them]
Setting the substance of the decision aside, was anyone else intrigued by the tone of the article? Was this meant as an editorial piece? It is far from straight reporting. The Register's taxonomy categorized this article in The Register Internet and Law Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs.
The article starts off colorlessly enough:
Plans for an area of the internet dedicated to pornography were killed last night in a vote by overseeing organisation ICANN. In a split 9-5 board decision, the organisation acted ruthlessly, against its own previous position, in order to put an end to an increasingly difficult and controversial issue - the approval of a.xxx top-level domain.
True enough. But then the writer begins adding statements that have not been established:
1. The US government, despite its constant denials, has been the driving force in preventing the.xxx registry from being approved thanks to a campaign of right-wing Christians with close links to the current administration.
2. The company behind.xxx, ICM Registry, has done all that has been asked of it in order to answer people's concerns, but has had its efforts ignored or misrepresented by those opposed to the registry....
What happened behind the scenes was that the US administration told ICANN chairman Vint Cerf and head Paul Twomey that it did not approve of the domain.... [T]here has been a carefully co-ordinated effort to kill the registry through delay.
If this is meant to be straight reporting, I would expect some substantiation of these claims, such as references to public statements made by the administration or ICANN officials, when and in what form the administration acted "behind the scenes", and whose "carefully co-ordinated effort" was this, anyway? Do you think Woodward and Berstien could've broken the Nixon administration with this kind of reporting?
If this is meant to be editorializing, I would still expect something more than inflamatory and unsubstantiated statements interspersed with the known facts of the article - it would make for a much more persuasive argument. I would also expect an editorial to be labeled as such.
I'm not trolling here - I actually think the.xxx TLD should have gone through - I'm just trying to take a more critical look at the sole article the submitter linked to. Couldn't the submitter have found additional, more substantive, and less soapboxing articles to link to?
they used this during the Apollo program, ostensibly to allow the astronauts to practice landing the LEM while still on Earth. They called it the flying beadstead. It was damn near a death-trap. Neil Armstrong - the guy who piloted the first real LEM landing (and subsequently, first man on the moon) - had to eject himself from it when it went out of control and crashed in a small fireball. I believe I heard that the "out of control" part was from the guidance system being unable to keep the jet propulsion always pointing down (acting against gravity).
Oh, I don't know, the handwriting recognition of a paper pad can sometimes be quite atrocious, especially when you are trying to pass information among people!
One thing that people often overlook is that, in addition to the big freakin magnet (1.5 or 3 Tesla is typical, although some research units can reach 8 ot 10 T), MRI scanners pump out huge amounts of radio power. In each of the X, Y, and Z axes, they pulse about 1-2 kW of RF power at 50-100 MHz. Even if it isn't at the frequency that the RFID tag responds at, it's still enough power to fry it instantly.
My personal favorite example of that showed up in "Enemy of the State." Based solely on a single, stationary surveillance camera from a lingerie store, the bad guys were able to pan around some guy to see what he was slipping Will Smith.
On the other hand, the Faraday cage that Gene Hackman had for blocking signals was pretty cool.
Second, it could very well be that the FISA law itself is the unconstitutional component here. Just because a weak president (Carter) signs FISA in 1978 on the heels of Watergate doesn't mean the a) it is Constitutional and b) that a future president can't take that power back.
One cannot so simply dismiss the FISA law. It is a law on the books, and cannot be dismissed. Just because someone - ESPECIALLY THE PRESIDENT - thinks it is unconstitutional does not give them license to disregard it. The only ones empowered to set aside a law is Congress, who can do so by passing another law, and the Judiciary, by declaring it unconstitutional. It is my opinion, and the opinion of many in Congress and legal scholars, that the president has willfully circumvented the FISA law.
The president argues that Congress set aside FISA by their anti-terrorist-in-Afghanistan resolution, even though the powers in Congress say otherwise. They wrote the law, they specifically left out a portion that would have explicity given the president these powers, yet the president goes ahead anyway. As for constitutional arguments, the president can make them, but his office, nor anyone who works for him, is empowered to make those arguments the official law of the land - only the Supreme Court can. The executive branch is not the arbiter of constitutionality in our government.
So, I say, let's air this issue out like yesterday's laundry. There are enough constitutional questions attached to this issue that it MUST be heard out in court at the highest level.
As the targets of the program are terrorist or their affiliates, no reasonable person could argue that an enemy combatant, using domestic communications of the enemy they wish to harm, would expect that no one would listen.
So you say, so the President says, so the Attorney General says. However, no court has ever had a chance to examine who these people are, and what probable cause the NSA may have for investigating them. If the president is able to wiretap people with no judicial or congressional oversight, how do we know he is not abusing this power and investigating us? Maybe you trust G.W. that far, but I trust NO president that far. The framers of the Constitution didn't trust the presidency that far, either.
Ah, but at least this way, you have some law on the books that you could use to combat this. The law doesn't speak directly to this kind of coercion, but having it in place allows a good lawyer and a receptive judiciary to have the law interpreted that way.
There have been all kinds of cases where a company asks employees to do all sorts of "non-mandatory" things, but the implied penalties for noncompliance are very high. Consider an incident of sexual harassment - have sex with me or I'll make your professional life hell. That is another sort of non-mandatory request/demand/policy, but one that has been made illegal, so you have at least have some recourse against it.
I'll admit, "Non-mandatory" chipping isn't quite the same as sexual harassment. The primary difference, as you've noted, is that companies will make the argument that it is a reasonable demand for the company's security, whereas sexual harassment is about someone being a predatory jackass. But, it does serve as one example.
Aluminum is NOT transparent to X-Rays. In truth, nothing is completely transparent to X-Rays except for a vaccum. X-Ray transparency is largely a function of material density and the thickness of the object itself. The transparency of various materials used in X-Ray equipment is often compared relative to an aluminum standard, but that aluminum standard is a 1mm-thick plate. If you were to take a chest X-Ray with a 1mm aluminum plate in the beam path, it would show up nearly opaque compared to human tissues. In an automobile there is a whole lot more than 1 mm of aluminum between the cylinders and you. Your notion that most engine blocks are made of aluminum these days is also flawed - it is increasingly prevalent, but hasn't replaced steel.
Unless you have more than a vaguely-worded theory, such as hard evidence or calculations based on scientific principals, please keep you paranoia to yourself. Out of curiosity, do you own an automobile?
Finally, since this is a discussion about biodiesel, I'll remind you that, in a diesel engine, there are no sparkplugs. The combustion in a diesel engine happens spontaneously due to the compression in the cylinder.
I don't think that the FCC's role in regulating bandwidth has become outdated, nor is it unconstitutional. Without that sort of regulation, the spectrum would become a free-for-all, and whoever has the biggest transmitter wins. Since transmitters cost money, the person with the most money would be able to have a louder voice than everyone else. If you think Rupert Murdoch has control over information now, consider what would happen if he could effectively drown out everyone else's transmitters. How about Clear Channel Radio drowning out every small transmitter in America. You don't think they would, if they got the chance? Free speech doesn't just mean free for whoever has the largest bullhorn.
Consider this as well, licensing and regulating spectrum bandwidth ensures that people that really need clear spectrum - such as police and emergency services - can have it. Would you like the local anarchist to be able to create enough interference that no police or fireman's radio withing 50 miles can work? I think that that kind of regulation falls under the "promote the general welfare" portion of the Constitution.
I'm not necessarily making the argument that the FCC, in its current form, is effective or fair in how it carries out these two functions. I am simply arguing that there needs to be someone at the helm. DRM is not in the purview of the FCC's charter. As for the other stuff that the FCC involves itself with, I have no comment.
I agree that not providing DVI support will certainly dampen this product's future.
However, I have a practical question: is there enough room on the back of a standard PCI card for three DVI ports side-by-side? My workstation graphics card has dual DVI outputs, plus an S-Video port. Even if you took the S-Video port off, there doesn't appear to be enough room for a third DVI connector. I suppose you could do it with mini-DVI ports, such as they have on some laptops (e.g., iBooks) but then you'd need a mini-to-DVI adapter for each screen, and that adds to the cost.
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Actually, a better use for this sort of fast-charging, high-capacity technology would be in hybrids. The batteries used in hybrids today have high current output, which is good for acceleration. But, their ability to accept current (i.e., recharge) is much slower than for capacitors. This means that batteries are a poor medium for quickly absorbing energy, like with regenerative braking. With a capacitor bank, it might be possible to have a car that can stop on a dime using only regenerative braking. Imagine that kind of power - the whole kinetic energy of a moving vehicle sucked up by a capacitor in a few seconds!
Now think of the amount of energy it would take to travel cross country in a car - about the amount that can be extracted from a few tankfuls of gasoline. Now consider the kind of power you would need to transfer that energy into a battery/capacitor bank in 5-10 seconds. I'm guessing it is on the order of tens of megawatts. It might be possible someday, but I doubt that that kind of electric car will ever be possible.
The promise of replacing your computer battery with a capacitor that recharges in a few seconds probably can't happen all that time soon.
Some math to back this up: My work laptop, a Dell Latitude D610, has a 53 WHr battery. My home laptop, an Apple 12" Powerbook, has a 46 WHr battery. These aren't huge laptops, mind, and battery capacity is only on the rise as consumers demand more.
Let's use the Dell example, 53 WHr. Change hours to seconds, that's 53 * 3600 = 190,800 Watt-seconds (more usually known as Joules). 191 kJ - that's a fair bit of electrical energy to store, either in battery or in capacitor form. Let's ignore losses that occur in the charger and energy storage device - assume everything is 100% efficient for a moment.
What if we wanted to charge up that 191 kJ capacitor in, say, 10 seconds. That would require a 191 kJ / 10 s = 19.1 kW power supply. Hmmmm, don't think we'll be seeing one of those in a laptop bag anytime soon.
Laptop batteries are a particularly high-energy example, but it illustrates the kind of power increases you'd need to accommodate if instead of charging in hours, you charged in seconds. If you had a battery that used to charge in, say, one hour (cellphone, PDA, whatever), and you instead wanted to charge it in (again, for example) 10 seconds, the charging power supply would need to put out 360x more power. Even to charge it in a minute would require a 60-fold increase in power. That'd be an amazing and fascinating power electronics problem to consider - how to make such charging devices as compact as today's.
On the other hand, the mac stock owner in me would rejoice if Apple's margins increase. One hundred shares bought back in January '05 for about $34. Today that stock has almost doubled in value.
It can hardly qualify as a flash protest if you announce it to the world days in advance.
What, no one's posted a link to the famous Apple Product Cycle yet?
First thing that came to my mind. Not that I agree with the article (pretty far from it, actually), but it seemed an obvious link to post here.
I call bullshit if you are living in the United States and make less than $200k a year. According to a report released at the end of last year by the Congressional Budget Office (congresses book-keepers), the effective federal tax rate for the United States (averaged across all households) was 20%. For the middle 20% of Americans making about $52k/household (pretax, 44.5k aftertax), the federal tax rate was less than 15%.
For the fourth quintile, average income $77k, the tax rate was 18.7%. It is not until you get up to the top quintile, whose average income is $180k/household, that the effective tax rate gets to wham-o 25%. Let's say, to be generous to your argument, that the state also takes 15%, that's only 30% of your total income. In fact, the state tax rates are substantially less than that - New Hampshire, Nevada, and Alaska don't even have state income taxes.
Of the rest, your take-home pay, which is still 70% of your gross income, you start paying out things like property taxes, sales taxes, and gas taxes. In order for those additional taxes to take away an additional 20% of your gross income (so that your total taxes = 15% + 15% + 20% = 50%), the tax rate on your after-tax dollars would need to be 20%/70% = 28.5%. In other words, if all of the taxes applied to your take-home income had a rate of 28.5% (or a weighted average of them all), then that would make up an additional 20% of your gross income that had been taxed away.
I don't know about you, but the sales tax around here isn't anywhere near 28.5%. Neither is the gas tax, alcohol tax, property tax, or any other kind of tax that I can think of. And if each of those smaller taxes are less than 28.5%, the effective tax rate on your take-home income doesn't exceed 28.5%
Are they ever going to repeal income tax which was only supposed to be 2% max? Many of us pay over 50% in taxes if you include gas tax, sales tax, income tax, property tax, etc etc.
You're counting things in two different and incomparible ways to make your argument. Way back when they first introduced the income tax, there were still a whole lot of other taxes in effect, just as there are today. You are comparing the 2% to 50%, but income tax (as you noted) is only one component of all the taxes you pay. What did people pay out in total taxes back then? I don't know. I'll grant you it is certainly less than today.
Bear in mind, however, that back when the income tax was still very low, the government didn't do nearly as much as it does today. I'm not just talking about pork-barrel politics - there was plenty of government corruption back then, too - I'm talking about things like having the world's foremost military, an impressive tax-backed national infrastructure, and social welfare programs.
If you would rather be susceptible to invasion, have no roads or bridges, your parents and in-laws stay with you when they grow old, and out-of-work beggars at your door, then by all means advocate the libertarian viewpoint. Just be sure your math is correct, though.
My college has no keypad. You just swipe your card. That's a huge security risk. Imagine if some sexual predator got access to a dorm. That's scary!
The irony of this statement, in the case of my alma mater, is that they prox card system was implemented largely out of fear of sexual predators. There were a few incidents where an unidentified male, not a student, was found lurking in a women's bathroom/shower in one of the dorms. Previously, all of the dorms were left unlocked during daylight hours during the academic calendar. Ground floor women's bathrooms had keypads.
So they bring in this two-million dollar system, replace everyone's old ID cards with RFID-based ones, and implemented a security policy where all the dorms are locked all the time. Depending on a person's access privelages, undergrads can get into all the dorms, grads can only get into the dorm they live in (if they're on campus), and the academic buildings (except the libraries) get locked at night to anyone who doesn't have a reason to be there.
But, there are two significant problems with the system, as with any security system:
1) The system can be hacked. As this article points out, it only takes some specialized, but easily gotten, equipment and a little practice.
2) Human factors. My college isn't located in an urban center. There is little crime in the area, and the students are pretty nice outgoing people. If someone that looks remotely like a student were to hang around one of the doors, claiming that they'd lost their card, I'd guess 75% of the students would let them into the building.
If I was lucky enough to have moderator points today, I'd mod that up for a well-placed geek cultural reference.
On a more serious note, I think that your comment has more going for it than just that. Considering the people who will be using these devices, I almost think that it should have something along those lines. After all, all the laptops in the world can only be of so much use - one needs ways to educate people on their use as well. Sure, there'll be the precocious ones out there who will tinker around with the laptop and learn it front to back within a year or two without anyone teaching them.
Most, like the rest of us mere mortals, will need some help and instruction along the way. Are there enough teachers in the wide world to go along with these laptops? I don't know. Bundling them with a sort of interactive and adaptive user's manual (not just for the computer, but for a total education) wouldn't be such a bad idea.
Aiming it towards the empowerment of women in the third world would go a long way, too, I think.
Consider it computing using a sliding price scale - just like many medical care centers use. The people with great insurance or who pay in full outright, because they have the means to do so, effectively subsidize the care for those who can't pay as much, or anything.
Actually, if we are talking about cellular phones, putting it all in the ".mob" TLD wouldn't be such a bad idea. Most people pick and use their cellphones without much independent thought, anyway, more of a mob mentality.
I'm not sure if I always agree with this statement, but it seems particular apt in this case. Guns don't kill people; people kill people.
There are any number of examples out there of a tool, or technology, having multiple uses. Many are legitimate, and some are illegal. Should we ban the use of knives everywhere, essntial tools of every chef on the planet, because they can be used to injure or kill people?
There are many cases where a double-edged (no pun intended) tool or technology requires licensing, or is not generally available, or the use/possession of it is illegal for most folks. For instance, there are many weapons out there that only the military is permitted to use. Explosive can be used by terrorists, but are also essential for mining and legitimate demolition. Access to nuclear technology, which can power cities or destroy them, is heavily restricted by international law and the threat of war.
But something so universally used and depended upon as sysadmin tools? This law sounds like the cyber equivalent of drug paraphenalia laws, which restrict access to syringes and bongs. In this case, however, is more like trying to criminalize automobiles, which everyone uses and depends upon, but could be used for things like robberies, help criminals flee the law, and cause tens of thousands of deaths per year.
I reiterate: tools are not the problem, nor is criminalizing them the solution. It is what one makes of those tools that can be the problem, and what should be sanctioned.
Can anyone give me more information about what Apple means by a "glossy display?" The press release and website are quite short on details. As a matter of fact, on the MacBook's product page, there is even a hyperlink referring to the glossy display. Alas, it takes me to the Design page which, while cool and informative, doesn't have any information about the display.
I assume the glossy display is meant to improve the contrast and sharpen things up in general, getting away from the flat matte of most LCD screens. I'll probably have to wait a few weeks for pictures of this new laptop sitting side by side with an iBook to tell the difference (there is no Apple store in my remote viscinity).
I am a little wary of it, however. I have encountered laptops with what I would have called "glossy" screens. Instead of the matte surface finish of a typical LCD, it looked like the LCD was encased in glass. No doubt this improved the screen clarity and contrast in darkened environments, but the screens were about as reflective as, well, plate glass.
I trust apple to not go with something that flawed. Does anyone have more info?
A lot of the spam that's been sent my way by persons unknown have many random snippets of legitimate text in them, presumably to fool spam filters. I have had whole pages of The Hobbit quoted to me recently. I occassionally open one up to look at it (no attachments or images, just the plain text) and get entertained with very ethereal poetry. For example:
In a trice without warning the face of nature
grew sullen Black angry mouths, the clouds
swallowed up the sun The air was dense with
suppressed excitement For him there was a
little mattress of straw and woollen blankets
The wind howled through the long corridors
and sobbed and whispered in the secret recesses
Shakespeare himself never wrote a finer sonnet!
[the literary purists out there will be quick to point out that there are specific, technical definitions of what constitute a haiku or sonnet. I know these spams don't qualify as either; it's just a useful name to give them]
Setting the substance of the decision aside, was anyone else intrigued by the tone of the article? Was this meant as an editorial piece? It is far from straight reporting. The Register's taxonomy categorized this article in The Register Internet and Law Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs.
.xxx top-level domain.
.xxx registry from being approved thanks to a campaign of right-wing Christians with close links to the current administration. .xxx, ICM Registry, has done all that has been asked of it in order to answer people's concerns, but has had its efforts ignored or misrepresented by those opposed to the registry. ...
.xxx TLD should have gone through - I'm just trying to take a more critical look at the sole article the submitter linked to. Couldn't the submitter have found additional, more substantive, and less soapboxing articles to link to?
The article starts off colorlessly enough:
Plans for an area of the internet dedicated to pornography were killed last night in a vote by overseeing organisation ICANN. In a split 9-5 board decision, the organisation acted ruthlessly, against its own previous position, in order to put an end to an increasingly difficult and controversial issue - the approval of a
True enough. But then the writer begins adding statements that have not been established:
1. The US government, despite its constant denials, has been the driving force in preventing the
2. The company behind
What happened behind the scenes was that the US administration told ICANN chairman Vint Cerf and head Paul Twomey that it did not approve of the domain.... [T]here has been a carefully co-ordinated effort to kill the registry through delay.
If this is meant to be straight reporting, I would expect some substantiation of these claims, such as references to public statements made by the administration or ICANN officials, when and in what form the administration acted "behind the scenes", and whose "carefully co-ordinated effort" was this, anyway? Do you think Woodward and Berstien could've broken the Nixon administration with this kind of reporting?
If this is meant to be editorializing, I would still expect something more than inflamatory and unsubstantiated statements interspersed with the known facts of the article - it would make for a much more persuasive argument. I would also expect an editorial to be labeled as such.
I'm not trolling here - I actually think the
they used this during the Apollo program, ostensibly to allow the astronauts to practice landing the LEM while still on Earth. They called it the flying beadstead. It was damn near a death-trap. Neil Armstrong - the guy who piloted the first real LEM landing (and subsequently, first man on the moon) - had to eject himself from it when it went out of control and crashed in a small fireball. I believe I heard that the "out of control" part was from the guidance system being unable to keep the jet propulsion always pointing down (acting against gravity).
Oh, I don't know, the handwriting recognition of a paper pad can sometimes be quite atrocious, especially when you are trying to pass information among people!
One thing that people often overlook is that, in addition to the big freakin magnet (1.5 or 3 Tesla is typical, although some research units can reach 8 ot 10 T), MRI scanners pump out huge amounts of radio power. In each of the X, Y, and Z axes, they pulse about 1-2 kW of RF power at 50-100 MHz. Even if it isn't at the frequency that the RFID tag responds at, it's still enough power to fry it instantly.
My personal favorite example of that showed up in "Enemy of the State." Based solely on a single, stationary surveillance camera from a lingerie store, the bad guys were able to pan around some guy to see what he was slipping Will Smith.
On the other hand, the Faraday cage that Gene Hackman had for blocking signals was pretty cool.
Second, it could very well be that the FISA law itself is the unconstitutional component here. Just because a weak president (Carter) signs FISA in 1978 on the heels of Watergate doesn't mean the a) it is Constitutional and b) that a future president can't take that power back.
One cannot so simply dismiss the FISA law. It is a law on the books, and cannot be dismissed. Just because someone - ESPECIALLY THE PRESIDENT - thinks it is unconstitutional does not give them license to disregard it. The only ones empowered to set aside a law is Congress, who can do so by passing another law, and the Judiciary, by declaring it unconstitutional. It is my opinion, and the opinion of many in Congress and legal scholars, that the president has willfully circumvented the FISA law.
The president argues that Congress set aside FISA by their anti-terrorist-in-Afghanistan resolution, even though the powers in Congress say otherwise. They wrote the law, they specifically left out a portion that would have explicity given the president these powers, yet the president goes ahead anyway. As for constitutional arguments, the president can make them, but his office, nor anyone who works for him, is empowered to make those arguments the official law of the land - only the Supreme Court can. The executive branch is not the arbiter of constitutionality in our government.
So, I say, let's air this issue out like yesterday's laundry. There are enough constitutional questions attached to this issue that it MUST be heard out in court at the highest level.
As the targets of the program are terrorist or their affiliates, no reasonable person could argue that an enemy combatant, using domestic communications of the enemy they wish to harm, would expect that no one would listen.
So you say, so the President says, so the Attorney General says. However, no court has ever had a chance to examine who these people are, and what probable cause the NSA may have for investigating them. If the president is able to wiretap people with no judicial or congressional oversight, how do we know he is not abusing this power and investigating us? Maybe you trust G.W. that far, but I trust NO president that far. The framers of the Constitution didn't trust the presidency that far, either.
Ah, but at least this way, you have some law on the books that you could use to combat this. The law doesn't speak directly to this kind of coercion, but having it in place allows a good lawyer and a receptive judiciary to have the law interpreted that way.
There have been all kinds of cases where a company asks employees to do all sorts of "non-mandatory" things, but the implied penalties for noncompliance are very high. Consider an incident of sexual harassment - have sex with me or I'll make your professional life hell. That is another sort of non-mandatory request/demand/policy, but one that has been made illegal, so you have at least have some recourse against it.
I'll admit, "Non-mandatory" chipping isn't quite the same as sexual harassment. The primary difference, as you've noted, is that companies will make the argument that it is a reasonable demand for the company's security, whereas sexual harassment is about someone being a predatory jackass. But, it does serve as one example.
Aluminum is NOT transparent to X-Rays. In truth, nothing is completely transparent to X-Rays except for a vaccum. X-Ray transparency is largely a function of material density and the thickness of the object itself. The transparency of various materials used in X-Ray equipment is often compared relative to an aluminum standard, but that aluminum standard is a 1mm-thick plate. If you were to take a chest X-Ray with a 1mm aluminum plate in the beam path, it would show up nearly opaque compared to human tissues. In an automobile there is a whole lot more than 1 mm of aluminum between the cylinders and you. Your notion that most engine blocks are made of aluminum these days is also flawed - it is increasingly prevalent, but hasn't replaced steel.
Unless you have more than a vaguely-worded theory, such as hard evidence or calculations based on scientific principals, please keep you paranoia to yourself. Out of curiosity, do you own an automobile?
Finally, since this is a discussion about biodiesel, I'll remind you that, in a diesel engine, there are no sparkplugs. The combustion in a diesel engine happens spontaneously due to the compression in the cylinder.
I don't think that the FCC's role in regulating bandwidth has become outdated, nor is it unconstitutional. Without that sort of regulation, the spectrum would become a free-for-all, and whoever has the biggest transmitter wins. Since transmitters cost money, the person with the most money would be able to have a louder voice than everyone else. If you think Rupert Murdoch has control over information now, consider what would happen if he could effectively drown out everyone else's transmitters. How about Clear Channel Radio drowning out every small transmitter in America. You don't think they would, if they got the chance? Free speech doesn't just mean free for whoever has the largest bullhorn.
Consider this as well, licensing and regulating spectrum bandwidth ensures that people that really need clear spectrum - such as police and emergency services - can have it. Would you like the local anarchist to be able to create enough interference that no police or fireman's radio withing 50 miles can work? I think that that kind of regulation falls under the "promote the general welfare" portion of the Constitution.
I'm not necessarily making the argument that the FCC, in its current form, is effective or fair in how it carries out these two functions. I am simply arguing that there needs to be someone at the helm. DRM is not in the purview of the FCC's charter. As for the other stuff that the FCC involves itself with, I have no comment.
What does this love-fest have to do with the substance and premise of the article?
I didn't notice at first that this was an external dongle for existing graphics cards. Nevermind.
I agree that not providing DVI support will certainly dampen this product's future.
However, I have a practical question: is there enough room on the back of a standard PCI card for three DVI ports side-by-side? My workstation graphics card has dual DVI outputs, plus an S-Video port. Even if you took the S-Video port off, there doesn't appear to be enough room for a third DVI connector. I suppose you could do it with mini-DVI ports, such as they have on some laptops (e.g., iBooks) but then you'd need a mini-to-DVI adapter for each screen, and that adds to the cost.