If the world's population keeps increasing exponentially, no source of energy will be sufficient.
The world's population growth rate has been slowing, as the number of children the average woman is having has decreased significantly worldwide. The world population may peak at around 10 billion.
The media companies have it wrong by not rewarding past customers who have already bought similar music/videos/you name it
At Best Buy today, I saw a Pocohantas DVD with a $7 discount for anyone who sent in the proof of purchase from their VHS version. (I think the DVD itself was $20.)
It's quite a smart decision on Disney's part. Most people won't by the DVD for something they already have the tape for, but some of those who wouldn't, would feel justified in making a VCD or (once it is possible) making a DVD-R copy.
...who thinks that the latest ICANN decisions seemed designed to milk money out of those who can most afford to pay?
No, you're not. While the $ might serve to discourage spurious registration, it bears no relation to the actual cost of services provided. How wonderful! Get your monopoly created by legislative fiat!
Identical twins and clones do have completely identical DNA, especially the twins.
My understanding was that there are almost always small transcription errors, rates possibly around 1 in a billion but non-zero; so even identical twins would have minute differences.
One thing not mentioned is, if different copies of a given piece of music have different watermarks, you can "blend" their digitizations together to make an effectively unwatermarked copy.
I'd heard the same thing. However, if you do a search of "DVD region code New Zealand" at google or the like, you'll find sites based in NZ that talk about region coding and how it affects them (since they don't get movies in theatres until after USians already have it on video.) So I think it's bunk.
And of course there's the fact that the sort of thing which this company might end up being paid for is hugely boring, and open source doesn't do boring.
Their goal was 1% of government projects. I would think in the vast pool of potential projects, they could find at least a few percent that are generally interesting.
One of the large Linux companies should consider setting up a Linux DNS, with instructions on how to access it. Then every Linux-related project wouldn't have to register linuxvideo.com, etc. and shovel yet more money to NSI. Instead, they'd register video.linux with VA, and there's no conflict with the TLDs as even proposed by ICANN.
It is simple. Just treat the client as part of the player when you design the server.
For FPSes, this would require the server to render the scene and send the rendered data to each client (to avoid things like the transparent wall cheat.) Not very practical, I'm afraid.
I would have thought you could eliminate the spike cheat by placing a limit on the bounds of the model geometry, although presumably the cheater could hack that.
932 vs 89 - are you guys like old men or something?
89 is his message ID, not his user ID. In Slashdot terms, I'm definitely a geezer, however.
A spell-checker would probably be a turn-on, turn-off kind of thing, meant for making it easier for companies to review their sites and find the most egregious errors. Given Slashdot's "creative" spelling, making it easier to do this is a Good Thing.
I'd like a similar button for displaying/not displaying images. That would have utility not just for webmasters (who could more easily review their site for utility for the blind), but also for speeding up page views.
Any chance we could make a version of Mozilla with a Word-style system such that it underlines misspelled words? I think this would be a good thing in general. Any site could have a special dictionary file with site-specific terms that wouldn't get so underlined.
Is there a universally recognized format for Unicode that parallels (but hopefully isn't as inconsistent as -- Mac, Unix, and PC all use different end of line indications) ASCII?
Why would businesses pay to have their computers recycled?
Read the story header again. If a business dumps machines straight in the trash, they may end liable for fines many times greater than $30 a machine. Moreover, facilities for doing this make it easier for governments to consider imposing even stricter controls requiring recycling.
It may just be me, but like I said in the title, "Is this really an issue?"
I think it is, but games aren't necessarily the driving issue.
It used to be that CG in commercials and the like was done for creation of impossible scenes: boxing Listerine bottles, smiling ants, and the like. But more recently, CG has been used in subtle ways to the point that we don't know it's CG. Instead of being used to create the impossible, it's used to create the possible, it's just cheaper.
Realistic cloth would help with this, and it might also help with online shopping, as you could get a realistic representation of an outfit with different colors, fabrics, and combinations thereof.
Section 101.191 also appears to apply only to manual ballots.
I direct your attention to 101.27 (3):
(3) The order in which the voting machine ballot is arranged shall as nearly as practicable conform to the requirements of the form of the paper ballot for that election.
---
I think it's pretty clear that the disputed ballots fail that test. Frankly, I see this as a good argument for eliminating winner-take-all in state elections, rarely would more than a single electoral vote be in dispute if electoral votes were distributed to the candidates based on percentage of the vote received.
It is indeed nice to have the actual statutes, as opposed to vague references from news folk.
Ballot requirements.--... (6) Voting squares may be placed in front of or in back of the names of candidates
Note that a lawyer might find room to object here. In the disputed ballots, squares were in front of *and* in back of the names; one might argue that it needs to be one or the other, but not both. Seems a bit tenuous though.
The "order of names" issue also seems only to be in the manual ballots section; the ordering is done based on the results of the last governor's race. (See 101.151.4)
However, you should also check out 101.191, which as far as I can tell applies to all ballots; the disputed ballot is quite dissimilar from it. I don't have the time to read further and investigate whether it does not in fact apply to machine-counted ballots; it does talk about marking an X though.
From http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57142-2 000Nov9.html:
Florida law offers aggrieved candidates and voters broad opportunities to challenge the results of elections. The relevant state Supreme Court case, a 1998 opinion in a disputed county sheriff race, says election results can be thrown out, even without evidence of fraud or intentional misconduct by election officials, if there is "reasonable doubt" about whether the officially certified results "expressed the will of the voters."
And...
For example, under Florida law, voters are supposed to be able to make a mark in a box immediately to the right of a candidate's name, but some of the punch holes on the Palm Beach ballots were placed to the left. The law also calls for the Democratic ticket to be listed right after the Republican ticket. On Palm Beach's butterfly ballot, the names of Al Gore and Joseph I. Lieberman appeared directly beneath those of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney, but the Gore-Lieberman punch hole was third in line, below the one corresponding to Reform Party nominees Patrick J. Buchanan and Ezola Foster.
Because of these illegalities, the argument goes, the ballots were so confusing that more than 20,000 voters either accidentally voted for the wrong candidate or marked two candidates, thus disenfranchising these voters.
"There was no animus," said attorney Mark Cullen, who filed one of two lawsuits pending before the Palm Beach County Circuit Court on behalf of aggrieved Gore voters. "It was just a boneheaded move that resulted in people being denied their right to vote."
An interesting tidbit is that legal challenges can only be made to certified election results, so legal action really couldn't start until Tuesday.
And I'm sure other people are capable of following directions correctly or at least asking for help or clarification instead of randomly punching holes, then magically realising your mistake hours later.
People "magically" realized their mistake when they heard that they were only supposed to punch one hole instead of two, and recalled that they punched two. Given that a staggering 19,000 people in a single county made that mistake, there are going to be quite a few who realize this.
Or do you think there are a lot of people who go vote just because they like punching holes/flipping levers/completing arrows, and thus punch more than one?
I didn't, and most comp. sci. grad students don't. Instead they get some sort of assistanceship or fellowship. If it is a research assistanceship, they help work on a professor's project for ostensibly 20 hours a week, and do schooling in the rest of their time.
In this case, it is quite reasonable for the work done on assistanceship time for the research project to be considered "work for hire", where by default ownership automatically transfers to the hirer. I believe this is the default for U.S. employment.
Note, however, this is completely unrelated to being a student, or work done outside the sphere of the specific research assistanceship project. The sole claim the university may have to that is if its facilities are used for that work, and that's a much more tenuous claim.
Do students get cash for writing this programs, or do they have to pay less for the school if they code for the school ?
As a graduate student, I had the possibility of a teaching assistanceship, a research assistanceship, or a fellowship. Any of the three would pay my tuition plus a (low, but livable) stipend (effectively, a salary.)
Undergraduate students rarely if ever get paid, although tuition can be reduced or free from various scholarships.
Credit where credit's due... my posting was quoted from Eric Zorn's article, "GORE'S INTERNET LINK IS NOTHING TO JOKE ABOUT" dated August 22, 2000, published in the Chicago Tribune.
Let me see, the Internet was invented in 1969, when Gore was, what, 21 years old? Really, a big responsibility for a guy of that age!
In June 1986, back when there were fewer than 5,000 network host sites (there are tens of millions today) available to a comparative handful of knowledgeable users, Gore, then a senator from Tennessee, introduced the Supercomputer Network Study Act in response to fears in the research community that the U.S. was dangerously lagging in this area.
Then in October 1988, Gore introduced the National High-Performance Computer Technology Act. After it died, he reintroduced it in May of the following year. It called for more ambitious funding to improve and expand the connections between universities, libraries and other institutions. Both before and after the act passed in 1991, Gore spoke frequently of "the information superhighway," a phrase he is widely credited with coining and that recalled the key role his late father, also a U.S. senator, played in building (figuratively, of course!) the interstate highway system.
Computer scientist Vinton Cerf, sometimes called "The Father of the Internet," was co-designer of the communications protocol that forms the backbone of the Internet and a pioneer in the academic/military computer networks from which the Internet sprung. In a statement sent to me Monday by MCI WorldCom, where he is now senior vice president of Internet Architecture and Technology, Cerf wrote:
"Gore's support for the research agencies... helped to shape the development of the NSFNET--a national network with international connections that took up where its predecessor, the ARPANET, left off.... By the mid-late 1980s, then-Senator Gore had become a visible proponent of NSFNET, which enthusiasm and insight continued and grew with his election to the Vice Presidency. For having seen the potential in these technologies, and for having pursued and argued for legislation and administration support for research in these areas... I think it is entirely fitting that the Vice President take some credit for helping to create an environment in which [the] Internet could thrive."
Slashdot Mirror
If the world's population keeps increasing exponentially, no source of energy will be sufficient.
The world's population growth rate has been slowing, as the number of children the average woman is having has decreased significantly worldwide. The world population may peak at around 10 billion.
The media companies have it wrong by not rewarding past customers who have already bought similar music/videos/you name it
At Best Buy today, I saw a Pocohantas DVD with a $7 discount for anyone who sent in the proof of purchase from their VHS version. (I think the DVD itself was $20.)
It's quite a smart decision on Disney's part. Most people won't by the DVD for something they already have the tape for, but some of those who wouldn't, would feel justified in making a VCD or (once it is possible) making a DVD-R copy.
...who thinks that the latest ICANN decisions seemed designed to milk money out of those who can most afford to pay?
No, you're not. While the $ might serve to discourage spurious registration, it bears no relation to the actual cost of services provided. How wonderful! Get your monopoly created by legislative fiat!
Identical twins and clones do have completely identical DNA, especially the twins.
My understanding was that there are almost always small transcription errors, rates possibly around 1 in a billion but non-zero; so even identical twins would have minute differences.
One thing not mentioned is, if different copies of a given piece of music have different watermarks, you can "blend" their digitizations together to make an effectively unwatermarked copy.
I'd heard the same thing. However, if you do a search of "DVD region code New Zealand" at google or the like, you'll find sites based in NZ that talk about region coding and how it affects them (since they don't get movies in theatres until after USians already have it on video.) So I think it's bunk.
And of course there's the fact that the sort of thing which this company might end up being paid for is hugely boring, and open source doesn't do boring.
Their goal was 1% of government projects. I would think in the vast pool of potential projects, they could find at least a few percent that are generally interesting.
It'll be an interesting experiment, anyway.
One of the large Linux companies should consider setting up a Linux DNS, with instructions on how to access it. Then every Linux-related project wouldn't have to register linuxvideo.com, etc. and shovel yet more money to NSI. Instead, they'd register video.linux with VA, and there's no conflict with the TLDs as even proposed by ICANN.
Dang, I was all set to register flewthe.coop...
It is simple. Just treat the client as part of the player when you design the server.
For FPSes, this would require the server to render the scene and send the rendered data to each client (to avoid things like the transparent wall cheat.) Not very practical, I'm afraid.
I would have thought you could eliminate the spike cheat by placing a limit on the bounds of the model geometry, although presumably the cheater could hack that.
932 vs 89 - are you guys like old men or something?
89 is his message ID, not his user ID. In Slashdot terms, I'm definitely a geezer, however.
A spell-checker would probably be a turn-on, turn-off kind of thing, meant for making it easier for companies to review their sites and find the most egregious errors. Given Slashdot's "creative" spelling, making it easier to do this is a Good Thing.
I'd like a similar button for displaying/not displaying images. That would have utility not just for webmasters (who could more easily review their site for utility for the blind), but also for speeding up page views.
CmdrTaco not being able to spell
Any chance we could make a version of Mozilla with a Word-style system such that it underlines misspelled words? I think this would be a good thing in general. Any site could have a special dictionary file with site-specific terms that wouldn't get so underlined.
Is there a universally recognized format for Unicode that parallels (but hopefully isn't as inconsistent as -- Mac, Unix, and PC all use different end of line indications) ASCII?
Why would businesses pay to have their computers recycled?
Read the story header again. If a business dumps machines straight in the trash, they may end liable for fines many times greater than $30 a machine. Moreover, facilities for doing this make it easier for governments to consider imposing even stricter controls requiring recycling.
Who's going to pay to get their computer recycled?
Businesses.
This site disagrees, and claims various bits of supporting evidence from DOE, municipal governments, and other sources.
Don't just dogmatize your beliefs, investigate them!
It may just be me, but like I said in the title, "Is this really an issue?"
I think it is, but games aren't necessarily the driving issue.
It used to be that CG in commercials and the like was done for creation of impossible scenes: boxing Listerine bottles, smiling ants, and the like. But more recently, CG has been used in subtle ways to the point that we don't know it's CG. Instead of being used to create the impossible, it's used to create the possible, it's just cheaper.
Realistic cloth would help with this, and it might also help with online shopping, as you could get a realistic representation of an outfit with different colors, fabrics, and combinations thereof.
A spelling flame contained:
" In the meantime finish reading a sentance [...]"
Et tu, Brute?
Section 101.191 also appears to apply only to manual ballots.
I direct your attention to 101.27 (3):
(3) The order in which the voting machine ballot is arranged shall as nearly as practicable conform to the requirements of the form of the paper ballot for that election.
---
I think it's pretty clear that the disputed ballots fail that test. Frankly, I see this as a good argument for eliminating winner-take-all in state elections, rarely would more than a single electoral vote be in dispute if electoral votes were distributed to the candidates based on percentage of the vote received.
It is indeed nice to have the actual statutes, as opposed to vague references from news folk.
... (6) Voting squares may be placed in front of or in back of the names of candidates
Ballot requirements.--
Note that a lawyer might find room to object here. In the disputed ballots, squares were in front of *and* in back of the names; one might argue that it needs to be one or the other, but not both. Seems a bit tenuous though.
The "order of names" issue also seems only to be in the manual ballots section; the ordering is done based on the results of the last governor's race. (See 101.151.4)
However, you should also check out 101.191, which as far as I can tell applies to all ballots; the disputed ballot is quite dissimilar from it. I don't have the time to read further and investigate whether it does not in fact apply to machine-counted ballots; it does talk about marking an X though.
As long as we're talking Florida law...
2 000Nov9.html:
From http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57142-
Florida law offers aggrieved candidates and voters broad opportunities to challenge the results of elections. The relevant state Supreme Court case, a 1998 opinion in a disputed county sheriff race, says election results can be thrown out, even without evidence of fraud or intentional misconduct by election officials, if there is "reasonable doubt" about whether the officially certified results "expressed the will of the voters."
And...
For example, under Florida law, voters are supposed to be able to make a mark in a box immediately to the right of a candidate's name, but some of the punch holes on the Palm Beach ballots were placed to the left. The law also calls for the Democratic ticket to be listed right after the Republican ticket. On Palm Beach's butterfly ballot, the names of Al Gore and Joseph I. Lieberman appeared directly beneath those of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney, but the Gore-Lieberman punch hole was third in line, below the one corresponding to Reform Party nominees Patrick J. Buchanan and Ezola Foster.
Because of these illegalities, the argument goes, the ballots were so confusing that more than 20,000 voters either accidentally voted for the wrong candidate or marked two candidates, thus disenfranchising these voters.
"There was no animus," said attorney Mark Cullen, who filed one of two lawsuits pending before the Palm Beach County Circuit Court on behalf of aggrieved Gore voters. "It was just a boneheaded move that resulted in people being denied their right to vote."
An interesting tidbit is that legal challenges can only be made to certified election results, so legal action really couldn't start until Tuesday.
And I'm sure other people are capable of following directions correctly or at least asking for help or clarification instead of randomly punching holes, then magically realising your mistake hours later.
People "magically" realized their mistake when they heard that they were only supposed to punch one hole instead of two, and recalled that they punched two. Given that a staggering 19,000 people in a single county made that mistake, there are going to be quite a few who realize this.
Or do you think there are a lot of people who go vote just because they like punching holes/flipping levers/completing arrows, and thus punch more than one?
A grad student pays to go to school...
I didn't, and most comp. sci. grad students don't. Instead they get some sort of assistanceship or fellowship. If it is a research assistanceship, they help work on a professor's project for ostensibly 20 hours a week, and do schooling in the rest of their time.
In this case, it is quite reasonable for the work done on assistanceship time for the research project to be considered "work for hire", where by default ownership automatically transfers to the hirer. I believe this is the default for U.S. employment.
Note, however, this is completely unrelated to being a student, or work done outside the sphere of the specific research assistanceship project. The sole claim the university may have to that is if its facilities are used for that work, and that's a much more tenuous claim.
(All this is U.S. only, YMMV)
Do students get cash for writing this programs, or do they have to pay less for the school if they code for the school ?
As a graduate student, I had the possibility of a teaching assistanceship, a research assistanceship, or a fellowship. Any of the three would pay my tuition plus a (low, but livable) stipend (effectively, a salary.)
Undergraduate students rarely if ever get paid, although tuition can be reduced or free from various scholarships.
Credit where credit's due... my posting was quoted from Eric Zorn's article, "GORE'S INTERNET LINK IS NOTHING TO JOKE ABOUT" dated August 22, 2000, published in the Chicago Tribune.
Let me see, the Internet was invented in 1969, when Gore was, what, 21 years old? Really, a big responsibility for a guy of that age!
... helped to shape the development of the NSFNET--a national network with international connections that took up where its predecessor, the ARPANET, left off. ... By the mid-late 1980s, then-Senator Gore had become a visible proponent of NSFNET, which enthusiasm and insight continued and grew with his election to the Vice Presidency. For having seen the potential in these technologies, and for having pursued and argued for legislation and administration support for research in these areas ... I think it is entirely fitting that the Vice President take some credit for helping to create an environment in which [the] Internet could thrive."
In June 1986, back when there were fewer than 5,000 network host sites (there are tens of millions today) available to a comparative handful of knowledgeable users, Gore, then a senator from Tennessee, introduced the Supercomputer Network Study Act in response to fears in the research community that the U.S. was dangerously lagging in this area.
Then in October 1988, Gore introduced the National High-Performance Computer Technology Act. After it died, he reintroduced it in May of the following year. It called for more ambitious funding to improve and expand the connections between universities, libraries and other institutions. Both before and after the act passed in 1991, Gore spoke frequently of "the information superhighway," a phrase he is widely credited with coining and that recalled the key role his late father, also a U.S. senator, played in building (figuratively, of course!) the interstate highway system.
Computer scientist Vinton Cerf, sometimes called "The Father of the Internet," was co-designer of the communications protocol that forms the backbone of the Internet and a pioneer in the academic/military computer networks from which the Internet sprung. In a statement sent to me Monday by MCI WorldCom, where he is now senior vice president of Internet Architecture and Technology, Cerf wrote:
"Gore's support for the research agencies