Seriously - after wading through Robert Jordan's (and now Brandon Sanderson's) The Wheel of Time - am I the _only_ person here that thinks Tolkien's LOTRs is practically punchy?
Moreover, Windows 7 just doesn't do some things any more that XP does. My other half has some old DOS era games she enjoys playing from time to time, but Windows 7 can't run them (without installing a whole VM and FreeDOS or something similarly dramatic). In XP, they just work. I do appreciate that Microsoft spend a lot of time and money maintaining backward compatibility for a very long time, but the fact is that they have chosen to break it in some cases in Windows 7, and that is a black-and-white loss if you happen to want to run the older stuff. Ditto for older hardware (where by older, in some cases I mean not very old at all but the vendor is an ass and never released Windows 7 drivers so you have to buy their new model instead).
MMS is just an SMS that has a link to a 'thing' (picture, video, audio etc.) on the telco operators MMS server. The phone receives the link, connects to the server and downloads the appropriate 'thing' which can be much larger than 160chars (because that limit is on the link not the thing itself).
You had/have to pay for iOS upgrades on iPod Touches right... as an 'additional cost over the cost of Device/OS'. Please explain what 'stark contrast' means.
I can see where you're coming from, but I still don't buy it. Comment inline:
Obviously it's a heuristic and not a determinant, and sometimes it will be wrong.
My assertion is that it is wrong frequently enough that it is a poor indicator of what you assert.
But consider the edge cases: If a company is expecting to totally dominate their competitors on the merits, they have basically no motive to litigate, because it's expensive and bad PR and they can get everything they want without it.
'Everything they want' is 100% market share. Very few companies have this. If suing will yield a net benefit, anynet benefit, why wouldn't they sue?
Conversely, if a company knows their competitor's product is superior and they're about to enter a death spiral, they have every incentive to litigate because they have nothing left to lose.
The implication being that suing is a last resort 'scorched earth' strategy. I think it's pretty obvious that it is much more like the status quo. Joe blogs couldn't care less that Apple are suing Samsung. I.e. the cost of suing to the company doing the suing is fairly small.
So now consider your hypothetical where the product is only slightly better and competition on the merits would yield a slight majority whereas litigation might significantly damage the competitor and yield a large majority of the market. Obviously it could play out the way you suppose, but consider the incentives again: The company with the inferior product has the greater incentive to strike first because they have a prospective 60% of the market to gain rather than only 40%. Moreover, they suffer the greater risk in keeping the status quo, because they risk the competitor with the superior product deciding to launch an ad campaign informing people about the inferior competitor's product's flaws or taking various other measures to use their superior product to expand their market share at the cost of the inferior competitor.
Absolutely - the company with an inferior product should sue the hell out of the superior company (if they can), but then so should the company with the superior product if they think it will yield a net benefit.
Again, it isn't that every time a company sues another company it's because the litigating company's product is crap. It's just that it happens that way (significantly) more often than not, because of how the incentives line up.
I think the 'It's just that it happens that way (significantly) more often than not, because of how the incentives line up.' is a personal opinion with no corroborating evidence.
*nb* I am playing Devil's advocate here to a large extent and I think my argument falls flat in the face of a company that makes it clear that it is morally superior because it isn't playing the IP patent game (i.e. my major assumption is that suing will frequently yield a net benefit).
I'm not sure I buy that argument:)
Winning (in this sense) is not a binary thing... you can 'win' by a certain amount. Imagine: product A is a little better than product B therefore product A gets 60% of the sales and product B 40%. The discerning buyer should buy product A. Company X that produces product A holds a patent that they can use to sue company Y and force them to cripple product B. Product A now has 90% of the sales and product B has 10%. The discerning buyer should still buy product A. Now, I'm certainly not asserting that you should always chose the product made buy the company doing the suing, just saying that it doesn't tell us much about the relative merits of the various products.
I was sure that Mythbusters (yeah, reliable source of information - I know) in the episode where they were testing whether a civilian could be instructed on how to land a plane by somebody in traffic control made grand claims that a plane's autopilot was capable of landing a plane without human intervention (which in my books is a little niftier than 'cruise control').
http://mythbustersresults.com/episode94
Yes, easily. Play:
Rock
Paper, Paper
Scissors, Scissors, Scissors
repeat.
I'm currently sitting at: My 38 wins, 49 ties and Veteran 3 wins... Silly computer...
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'. http://xkcd.com/552/
I think the point is, at least he wasn't run down by a drunk driver, or some such event that was completely out of his control. He was presumably a smart bloke who knew the risks of what he was doing. Obviously he didn't want to die and I'm guessing if he had time to think about it, probably didn't enjoy the very _act_ of dying. However at least he had the guts to go out there and do what he enjoyed. At least he enjoyed his life (up until the unfortunate dying bit) and wasn't ruled by fear. This is what people mean when they say "at least he died doing what he loved" it's not a statement about how he died, but rather how he lived. No one is trying to romanticize death in the slightest.
Stupid Google, ruining the word "beta". To the best of my understanding a "beta" version of something should be a feature complete program that is being tested for bugs/balance (when talking about video games). It does not mean 100% OMG we can't talk about the gfx because it's a beta and stuff will change!!! The definition of beta is somewhat fluid, and sure perhaps they'll make the graphics more shiny here, and replace a model there - but the _entire_ point about a beta is that it should be indicative of the final product and as such, it is perfectly legitimate to talk about the features and graphics of a beta product.
Back when I was a little tyke, iD software, in an interview, announced that a beta copy of Quake could be downloaded from an ftp site at 127.0.0.1... ... ...
Bastards!
I've had many CDs stolen from my car before and have lost almost 100 original, paid for by a poor student, CDs. I cannot afford to replace them, my collection was built up over the course of 7 or 8 years and the police can't/wont do squat. What I'd like to know, is:
because I have purchased the CDs before, am I allowed to jump onto Bittorrent/'P2P network of choice' and download my music back??
I'd assume that the legality of this would be decided by whether, when I purchased the CDs, I had purchased a license to the music, or if I had purchased a product (that I was free to do with as I wanted).
Personally - because I still have all the covers of my original CDs, I believe that I could make a strong case for reclaiming what I had purchased, but I think that it is a murky legal area.
Here is a paper I wrote a while back with supporting references. Sorry for dumping a large chunk of text on you guys, but I thought that it was fairly relevant to the post I'm replying to:
Account for the resurgence of anti-evolutionism in twentieth-century America.
"The jury is still out"
George W. Bush - When questioned about evolution vs. creationism [1]
Evolutionists and strict creationists have always been at loggerheads with one another for the simple reason that they espouse mutually exclusive epistemologies. Conservative Christians, have a vested interest in discrediting evolution because they believe that a child who looses faith in God also is lost to salvation. Ideological conflicts of this nature have been played out in the public eye since before the days of Huxley and Wilberforce's famed 1860s Oxford debate through to modern day, with neither side ever completely running out of steam. In the 1880s, approximately 20 years after Darwin published Origins of Species, there were only two working naturalists in North America who still staunchly stood by special creationism, yet in 1996 poll of adult Americans only 44% of them believed that the statement "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals" [12][1]. This initial comparison is somewhat misleading, for evolution has long since ceased to be a cause for wide-spread debate in the scientific community, the National Academy for Science states "Evolution pervades all biological phenomena... No other biological concept has been more extensively tested and more thoroughly corroborated than the evolutionary history or organisms" [4], yet perhaps because of its incompatibility with theological beliefs, the general public has in general been much slower in accepting the theory of evolution over any other scientific theory.
Special Creation is the doctrine that there exists a God who created the earth, man and everything else as a series of one or more special acts. Special Creationists come in two main flavours (which can be further subdivided and categorised at will). There are the Young Earth Creationists (or Strict Creationists) who believe that the universe came into being only a few thousand years ago, a very literal interpretation of Genesis, and the Old-Earth Creationists (or Progressive Creationists), who accept, for varying reasons, that the earth has been around for a very long time. Old-Earth Creationists, however, still stand by the critical tenant of Creationism - God was, and still is actively involved in the world around us.
Anti-evolution, in the 20th century, first came into the public eye in the 1920s, due, in no small part to the fervent crusading of three time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan [14]. In 1922 Bryan heard of a small movement in Kentucky calling for teachers in public schools to be banned from teaching evolution. He ardently supported this movement, optimistically predicting that it would quickly envelope the nation. With Bryan's support as "a spokesman with a national reputation, immense prestige and a loyal following" [2] he attempted to prevent a few thousand scientists establishing an oligarchy over the forty million American Christians. His efforts were not as successful as he had predicted, but they were by no means a failure, he found strong support in the South[2], a region where "masses of the people in all denominations believe the Bible from lid to lid", anti-evolution laws were discussed in at least 20 State legislatures and four States actually succumbed and banned the teaching of evolution in public schools.
It is easy to sympathise with post World War 1 America's ready willingness to wash its hands of Darwin's bloody doctrine. It was common public opinion that we had unwittingly let loose mankind's beast within when we replaced the teachings of Christ with Darwin's law of the jungle - something which unsurprisingly resulted in World War 1. Numerous publications such as Vernon Kellogg's 1917 Headquaters
I think the best way to think about the phrase "data wants to be free" is:
Data wants to be free in the same way as water wants to leak. Water doesn't sit on its back patio thinking about the good ole days before rubber seals became common place, when it was free to leak and drip as much as it wanted, even if it had to flow through miles of scalding hot pipes on its way to school. It's just, if water is free to leak - if people don't constantly try and prevent water from leaking though patching holes and creating seals, then it will. It has a natural tendency to leak, just the same as information. It has a natural tendency to want to be free.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously - after wading through Robert Jordan's (and now Brandon Sanderson's) The Wheel of Time - am I the _only_ person here that thinks Tolkien's LOTRs is practically punchy?
Moreover, Windows 7 just doesn't do some things any more that XP does. My other half has some old DOS era games she enjoys playing from time to time, but Windows 7 can't run them (without installing a whole VM and FreeDOS or something similarly dramatic). In XP, they just work. I do appreciate that Microsoft spend a lot of time and money maintaining backward compatibility for a very long time, but the fact is that they have chosen to break it in some cases in Windows 7, and that is a black-and-white loss if you happen to want to run the older stuff. Ditto for older hardware (where by older, in some cases I mean not very old at all but the vendor is an ass and never released Windows 7 drivers so you have to buy their new model instead).
http://www.dosbox.com/ ??
because it would be slow, suck, and annoyingly cause most of your incoming calls to end up going straight to voicemail
Then schedule your torrents to kick in between 1 AM and 6 AM, when your incoming calls were going to voice mail anyway.
UMTS quite happily supports multi-RAB (i.e. both voice and data at the same time) so your incoming calls shouldn't end up going straight to voicemail.
MMS is just an SMS that has a link to a 'thing' (picture, video, audio etc.) on the telco operators MMS server. The phone receives the link, connects to the server and downloads the appropriate 'thing' which can be much larger than 160chars (because that limit is on the link not the thing itself).
... you could sync like 8 songs on a Rio Diamond... Who was micro-managing what? :)
You had/have to pay for iOS upgrades on iPod Touches right ... as an 'additional cost over the cost of Device/OS'. Please explain what 'stark contrast' means.
I hope they're using UDP. I'd feel bad if they were turning donkeys around and telling them to go back carrying a NACK.
Obviously it's a heuristic and not a determinant, and sometimes it will be wrong.
My assertion is that it is wrong frequently enough that it is a poor indicator of what you assert.
But consider the edge cases: If a company is expecting to totally dominate their competitors on the merits, they have basically no motive to litigate, because it's expensive and bad PR and they can get everything they want without it.
'Everything they want' is 100% market share. Very few companies have this. If suing will yield a net benefit, any net benefit, why wouldn't they sue?
Conversely, if a company knows their competitor's product is superior and they're about to enter a death spiral, they have every incentive to litigate because they have nothing left to lose.
The implication being that suing is a last resort 'scorched earth' strategy. I think it's pretty obvious that it is much more like the status quo. Joe blogs couldn't care less that Apple are suing Samsung. I.e. the cost of suing to the company doing the suing is fairly small.
So now consider your hypothetical where the product is only slightly better and competition on the merits would yield a slight majority whereas litigation might significantly damage the competitor and yield a large majority of the market. Obviously it could play out the way you suppose, but consider the incentives again: The company with the inferior product has the greater incentive to strike first because they have a prospective 60% of the market to gain rather than only 40%. Moreover, they suffer the greater risk in keeping the status quo, because they risk the competitor with the superior product deciding to launch an ad campaign informing people about the inferior competitor's product's flaws or taking various other measures to use their superior product to expand their market share at the cost of the inferior competitor.
Absolutely - the company with an inferior product should sue the hell out of the superior company (if they can), but then so should the company with the superior product if they think it will yield a net benefit.
Again, it isn't that every time a company sues another company it's because the litigating company's product is crap. It's just that it happens that way (significantly) more often than not, because of how the incentives line up.
I think the 'It's just that it happens that way (significantly) more often than not, because of how the incentives line up.' is a personal opinion with no corroborating evidence. *nb* I am playing Devil's advocate here to a large extent and I think my argument falls flat in the face of a company that makes it clear that it is morally superior because it isn't playing the IP patent game (i.e. my major assumption is that suing will frequently yield a net benefit).
I'm not sure I buy that argument :)
Winning (in this sense) is not a binary thing... you can 'win' by a certain amount. Imagine: product A is a little better than product B therefore product A gets 60% of the sales and product B 40%. The discerning buyer should buy product A. Company X that produces product A holds a patent that they can use to sue company Y and force them to cripple product B. Product A now has 90% of the sales and product B has 10%. The discerning buyer should still buy product A. Now, I'm certainly not asserting that you should always chose the product made buy the company doing the suing, just saying that it doesn't tell us much about the relative merits of the various products.
Wouldn't the features described be more suited to a Chrome plugin (would that be feasible?) rather than a completely new browser?
I was sure that Mythbusters (yeah, reliable source of information - I know) in the episode where they were testing whether a civilian could be instructed on how to land a plane by somebody in traffic control made grand claims that a plane's autopilot was capable of landing a plane without human intervention (which in my books is a little niftier than 'cruise control'). http://mythbustersresults.com/episode94
That's impressive given that an iPhone 3G is limited to 384kbps in the uplink (doesn't support HSUPA, only R99).
Yes, easily. Play: Rock Paper, Paper Scissors, Scissors, Scissors repeat. I'm currently sitting at: My 38 wins, 49 ties and Veteran 3 wins... Silly computer...
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'. http://xkcd.com/552/
I think the point is, at least he wasn't run down by a drunk driver, or some such event that was completely out of his control. He was presumably a smart bloke who knew the risks of what he was doing. Obviously he didn't want to die and I'm guessing if he had time to think about it, probably didn't enjoy the very _act_ of dying. However at least he had the guts to go out there and do what he enjoyed. At least he enjoyed his life (up until the unfortunate dying bit) and wasn't ruled by fear. This is what people mean when they say "at least he died doing what he loved" it's not a statement about how he died, but rather how he lived. No one is trying to romanticize death in the slightest.
... maybe not "What the f..." but I sure as hell bet the programmers had a good giggle when they decided on that directory name.
They both came out after Dune 2.
Stupid Google, ruining the word "beta". To the best of my understanding a "beta" version of something should be a feature complete program that is being tested for bugs/balance (when talking about video games). It does not mean 100% OMG we can't talk about the gfx because it's a beta and stuff will change!!! The definition of beta is somewhat fluid, and sure perhaps they'll make the graphics more shiny here, and replace a model there - but the _entire_ point about a beta is that it should be indicative of the final product and as such, it is perfectly legitimate to talk about the features and graphics of a beta product.
Back when I was a little tyke, iD software, in an interview, announced that a beta copy of Quake could be downloaded from an ftp site at 127.0.0.1...
...
...
Bastards!
because I have purchased the CDs before, am I allowed to jump onto Bittorrent/'P2P network of choice' and download my music back??
I'd assume that the legality of this would be decided by whether, when I purchased the CDs, I had purchased a license to the music, or if I had purchased a product (that I was free to do with as I wanted).
Personally - because I still have all the covers of my original CDs, I believe that I could make a strong case for reclaiming what I had purchased, but I think that it is a murky legal area.
Wrong kind of compression. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compres sion
>10 Times a second.
It's a computer. Checking something at 10Hz gives a computer "ceons(1)" between each check.
(1) Ceons: Computer Eons, they're like eons, but for a computer and much shorter.
but seriously. 10 times a second - just isn't that often.
I've made it very clear to my other half that I want to be stuff and left on the couch. Preferably in an intimidating pose.
Account for the resurgence of anti-evolutionism in twentieth-century America.
"The jury is still out" George W. Bush - When questioned about evolution vs. creationism [1]
Evolutionists and strict creationists have always been at loggerheads with one another for the simple reason that they espouse mutually exclusive epistemologies. Conservative Christians, have a vested interest in discrediting evolution because they believe that a child who looses faith in God also is lost to salvation. Ideological conflicts of this nature have been played out in the public eye since before the days of Huxley and Wilberforce's famed 1860s Oxford debate through to modern day, with neither side ever completely running out of steam. In the 1880s, approximately 20 years after Darwin published Origins of Species, there were only two working naturalists in North America who still staunchly stood by special creationism, yet in 1996 poll of adult Americans only 44% of them believed that the statement "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals" [12][1]. This initial comparison is somewhat misleading, for evolution has long since ceased to be a cause for wide-spread debate in the scientific community, the National Academy for Science states "Evolution pervades all biological phenomena ... No other biological concept has been more extensively tested and more thoroughly corroborated than the evolutionary history or organisms" [4], yet perhaps because of its incompatibility with theological beliefs, the general public has in general been much slower in accepting the theory of evolution over any other scientific theory.
Special Creation is the doctrine that there exists a God who created the earth, man and everything else as a series of one or more special acts. Special Creationists come in two main flavours (which can be further subdivided and categorised at will). There are the Young Earth Creationists (or Strict Creationists) who believe that the universe came into being only a few thousand years ago, a very literal interpretation of Genesis, and the Old-Earth Creationists (or Progressive Creationists), who accept, for varying reasons, that the earth has been around for a very long time. Old-Earth Creationists, however, still stand by the critical tenant of Creationism - God was, and still is actively involved in the world around us.
Anti-evolution, in the 20th century, first came into the public eye in the 1920s, due, in no small part to the fervent crusading of three time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan [14]. In 1922 Bryan heard of a small movement in Kentucky calling for teachers in public schools to be banned from teaching evolution. He ardently supported this movement, optimistically predicting that it would quickly envelope the nation. With Bryan's support as "a spokesman with a national reputation, immense prestige and a loyal following" [2] he attempted to prevent a few thousand scientists establishing an oligarchy over the forty million American Christians. His efforts were not as successful as he had predicted, but they were by no means a failure, he found strong support in the South[2], a region where "masses of the people in all denominations believe the Bible from lid to lid", anti-evolution laws were discussed in at least 20 State legislatures and four States actually succumbed and banned the teaching of evolution in public schools.
It is easy to sympathise with post World War 1 America's ready willingness to wash its hands of Darwin's bloody doctrine. It was common public opinion that we had unwittingly let loose mankind's beast within when we replaced the teachings of Christ with Darwin's law of the jungle - something which unsurprisingly resulted in World War 1. Numerous publications such as Vernon Kellogg's 1917 Headquaters
I think the best way to think about the phrase "data wants to be free" is: Data wants to be free in the same way as water wants to leak. Water doesn't sit on its back patio thinking about the good ole days before rubber seals became common place, when it was free to leak and drip as much as it wanted, even if it had to flow through miles of scalding hot pipes on its way to school. It's just, if water is free to leak - if people don't constantly try and prevent water from leaking though patching holes and creating seals, then it will. It has a natural tendency to leak, just the same as information. It has a natural tendency to want to be free.