Plastics do generally melt at low temperatures, although avoiding combustion can be a bit tricky. Of course, I'm no plastics expert, perhaps the molten plastic cannot be reconstituted into a desirable form, since the macro-structure of the molecules would have changed (perhaps even the molecules themselves).
Quite a bit of glass does melt at a reasonable temperature by foundry standards. Pure silicon dioxide does not, but that should be one of the last things left, and should be fairly easily separable from anything else that does not melt.
That timescale already exists. It is called TIA. It is identical to UTC except for having no leap seconds, and an initial deviation of exactly 10 seconds. The second ticks occur at exactly the same time as UTC. It is always an exact number of seconds off from UTC, that delta increases or decreases as leap seconds are inserted in UTC. It is currently offset by exactly 34 seconds.
And the plastics cannot be separated by weight/density or melting-point/dissolving-point, or any other mechanical means? I find that a bit hard to believe. Perhaps nobody has yet set up a good process for separating plastics, but it should be possible.
That sounds like a very sane idea. The layers will be imperfect, and some materials with have similar densities, so will end up mixed in a single layer.
There is a relatively easy solution for that though, namely heat the resulting mixture up slowly. At various points the different components will melt, and can be drained out, and end up in different containers based on the type.
The biggest problem with such a system though is that all glass colors will get mixed, so you will end up with odd color glass, which could really only be made into brown glass. A similar issue would occur with colored plastics.
I've personally found that it is working, since it detects the temporary files that Firefox has created on occasion that contain code for an exploit in say IE. So I would have been safe anyway, but it still caught the code.
Of course, I've always found it almost comical how it scans just about every file archival format known to man, including several not native to windows. It scans the obvious ones, like zip, rar, 7z, cab, and the like. It scans those that we often don't think of as archive formats like CHM. It scans ISO disk images. It scans RPM and DEBs. It scans the expanded form of UPX'd executables. And so on.
So you occasionally see strange things like it scanning the contents of RPM files in an ISO image. It was even more comical when it did that back when it was just Windows Defender, with only non-viral malware signatures.
There is no plug computer with POE, but there is one device that comes pretty close. Chip-PC's Jack PC was the size of a wall-wart, but was deigned to be resessed into the wall, and used as a thin client, using POE. It is a rather old product though, and their newer products do not seem to support using POE, which is unfortunate. See http://www.hightech-edge.com/ethernet-wall-socket-pc/626/ for more on this system (including links to the manufacturer).
Well there is more to say. The transparency requirements are a very good thing. This may indicate that they need to provide information about the bandwidth of the limiting router, and the number of people using it, which gives useful information. They would need to indicate any ports that they filter, whether they drop any packets by type. (There are some that block ICMP traceroute packets for no good reason, despite permitting ping packets. (They can differentiate by the much lower TTL values on the traceroute packets)). All of that s very good.
The "Lawful" qualifier on content is questionable. The only remotely legitimate use I can think of is filtering known child pornography sites. But that s dangerous precedent. They may start to filter "obscene" sites. [1]
The wireless exclusions are definately less than ideal, but there is some good reason for it. The consumer protections allow any equipment to be connected to the network for wired broadband. But wireless providers feel the need to differentiate between use of data by a phone, and use by a computer, be it by tethering or by a separate cellular modem card. There is some reason for this. Cell phones tend to use less data than a computer. So a cell-pone only data-plan is cheaper. If they could not differentiate between the two, because of the severe bandwidth limitations, they would need to charge the computer data rate to everybody. But that rate is high enough that it is unreasonable for somebody who wants a data plan only for the phone. However, I would argue that a better solution would be to offer multiple tiered plans, with different bandwidth caps, but let you use any device with any plan.
Reasonable network management does need to be permitted. The BGP/IGP packets probably should have higher priority than other packets. That is because the flow of those packets can result in changes to a networks internal routing to help alleviate the congestion. It might also be reasonable to assign higher priorities to packets that benefit from lower latency, and let those packets like bittorrent where even doubling the latency makes only a very small difference have a lower priority, at least when the network is not congested enough that packets are being dropped.[2] However some further details about what is and isn't reasonable would be a good thing.
Additional Online Services is supposed to cover things like Phone or Television services that share the data line. What should be permissible is for the company to have phone or TV packets get higher priority than all Internet packets. In that case the internet service they provide is basically selling the unused bandwidth on a cable that is primarily a phone or TV cable, even if IP packets are how the TV or phone service is encapsulated. Thus what they are selling is not logically VOIP service, but merely phone service, or not IPTV, but merely TV. The fact that they use VOIP or IPTV technologies would be irrelevant. What they would not be permitted to do is degrade VOIP or IPTV services. They would get equal footing with anything else on the internet. Thus if they prioritize the Additional Online Services too highly, the internet service would be of poor quality and they would be shooting themselves in the foot.
Footnotes:
[1] Laws against obscenity are idiotic. Quite a bit of fetish material out there would be ruled obscene if tested in a court. But there is no good reason to actually ban the material. I agree that there should be some limits on what can be displayed publicly in real life so we don't have things like explicit pronography plastered on billboards. I would also agree that for that sort of purpose the "community standards" system may work well. Some communities may feel that one image is inappropriate for public display that a different community has no issue with. But to make the material unlawful even in a private setting has no benefit.
[2] When you need to start dropping packets, what you really want is for any given packet to have exactly the same chan
You bring up a very good point. What exactly is the difference between a simulation and a game?
On one end you have games that don't simulate reality in any way.
Most games partially simulate reality with deliberate modificatons to make things entertaining.
Then on the the other hand you have simulations that try to simulate the real thing as closely as possible within the constraints of the environment or programmers. Are those games?
That is tricky. Flight simulators often fall into that category, yet are considered games.
But even if you exclude that, most people would consider serious simulations of real life games to be games. A serious simulation of a Formula-1 race would be considered a game by most people. A serious golf simulator is also generally considered a game.
In some sense any serious simulation that allows you to try out things you might want to do in real life if you could do so without the consequences is a game. A serious simulation of a high speed pursuit by cops, where you control the fugitive is definitely a game. The objective? You decide, but an obvious one is to last as long as you can before they cuff (or shoot) you.
But a serious simulation of an abacus? I'm pretty sure nobody would think that was a game.
Physists diagree about that. After all the mass of the neutron exceeds the mass of the proton and electron and the antineutrino. One could say the mass that disappears is merely potential energy being registered as mass, but physicists do not do that.
Physicists see only a vector of mass-energy whose magnitude is the same in all inertial reference frames, but the angle can differ. In any given reference frame in all reactions the sum of all mass-energy vectors in the system is conserved.
Let us remember what that vector looks like. E^2=(mc^2)+(pc)^2 is how we calculate the magnitude of the mass-energy vector. So the two components are the energy of the rest-mass and the energy of momentum.
Now how do we account for the fundamental forces? Let us consider one of them. Let us consider the electro-magnetic force, and two particles of opposite charge. At first they are at rest in this reference frame. But then they move towards each other. Since they started moving they both now have momentum. But that momentum means they now have a momentum component to the mass-energy vector.
But if they kept their original rest mass then the additional momentum means that both now have larger mass-energy vectors. But they are the only two particles in our imaginary closed system, so there are no other mass-energy vectors whose magnitudes could have decreased to compensate. The only way to conserve mass-energy is for the rest mass to have decreased.
Therefore the rest-mass in this reference frame must be accounting for any potential energy caused by the fundamental forces.
The actual script was posted in a comment. It sends the name of the product (I think this is "ubuntu", "xubuntu", or "kubuntu" as appropriate, but I have not checked this), the release version of the OS, what distribution channel (i.e. installed by end user using ship-it cd's, or which OEM installation (for OEM installations this may give information about the model of computer used)), and finally the count of ping attempts so far, which is also approximately with the number of calendar days the product OS has run in total.
I quote from the summary: "Unfortunately users will still see the updating progress bar on load, but this is an implementation issue as opposed to a [user interface] one".
They want to make it totally invisible, but it does not sound like they have gotten there yet. It does not chane the fact that it will still use the same setting underneath.
Slight nit. Ten numeric digits on the Military Grid Reference system only identifies a location to the square meter, not the square centimeter, which is not possible using the system as designed, but it could be extended to use 14 digits to identify a location to the square centimeter.
You do realize that Firefox already has the feature in question? Look in Firefox's setting window, in the "updates" tab of the "advanced" pane. In there is the option to prompt or to automatically install updates.
If you do the latter, they will download in the background when you browse, and the next time you start the browser, it will show a progress bar for a bit, and then the browser will open. I have the option set, so on occasion I see this.
All Mozilla is doing is changing the default for this setting. You can change it back if you want.
External as in external access. That is to distinguish them from the ancient 5.25 bays without external access used for really old hard-drives. Just as There are internal 3.5 bays, which are normally used for hard-drives, and also the external ones that 3.5 inch floppy drives used.
Windows 7 apparently does support 5.25 drives, and has even better drive image for it, at least if you set large icon sizes. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8gGHKALIYI
That depends entirely on the grammatical rules of the dialect you use. I use a dialect that is very similar to en-US-x-Hixie, although with some slight differences. Logical placement of punctuation is one of the unchanged rules.
A few of my difference: such as using "belief" and "faith" in a more general sense, similar to his definition of "trust". The word "Y'all" is never permitted. Both "gray" and "grey" are acceptable spellings, but "grey" has a slightly darker connotation in my mind, but not particularly significant.
There is a very, very good reason why we changed from having to mark every copyrighted work, to having works covered by default.
The system you propose is mandatory registration for protection, which is even worse. Under this system if you write some freeware program, you are not likely to register it, but that means somebody else can tage it, swap out your name, and claim it as their own. (Remember the united states does not have "moral rights" seperate from copyright).
Say you write a song for your small band. Many independent composers tend to underestimate the quality of their work, so you may feel the song is not good enough to be worth registering. (after all, composers for small bands tend to write many songs, and it would be unreasonable to register all of them). A few years later, buys a tape of the band performing the song, thinks it is good, and sends it on to a record company. It turns out the song is commercially viable (but your band's performance does not do it justice), and it gets recorded and widely sold. Because you underestimated the value of the song, you get no compensation for the song.
Sound like a far fetched story? Perhaps, but if such a system were in place, I would bet the labels would have people listening to the works of small bands and checking the registry. They keep at it, and they are bound to find some really good songs that they could professionally re-record and sell, but which were never registered, or were registered but only for a a year or two, which are now past.
There is also the burden of having to initially register the work within some time window of first publication, and having to remember to register again every year, or losing protection. (Keep in mind that several big companies have forgotten to re-register their domain names, so forgetting to reregister a copyright on some major item could definitely happen.)
Some of these issues could be solved by having some short, but reasonable period of time for which works are protected, like perhaps a 7 year span, but the exact number is not particularly relevant. At the end of the term, they work either becomes public domain, or the holder can register for an extension, each year, using something like the scheme you describe. This would help with the orphaned works situation, since you can check if it is more than 7 years from publication. If it is, then you check the extensions database. If it is there, you have the information needed to contact the rights holder. Otherwise you know you don't need to contact the holder.
Now, combine this understanding with the fact that most copyrighted products generate most of their income in the first few years after publication, or even less, and you realise that a copyright term of more than a few years has no benefits to society. It almost exclusively does harm, by preventing values to be produced for free.
I would have little problem with a 14 year copyright term. The worry with short copyright terms is that too many people may just wait until the term expired, so that they could get the work for free. Consider a shorter term of 7 years. It is feasible in some media, books especially, to wait 7 years to buy and read the book. Commercial exploitation of a franchise in a different media can often wait that long, such as a filmmaker waiting to adapt a book into a movie if it let them completely cut the book's authors out of the equation.
But 14 years is long enough that in the vast majority of media few people would find it worth waiting, if they could afford to buy it. Futhermore, by 14 years works in almost every medium have all but exhausted their profit making potential.
Music is actually the odd one out here, considering the money songs from the 80's or earlier can still bring in, be it by royalties by the "oldies" stations, and continual sales of albums. Granted though that even here, the overwhelming majority of the profit should have been made in the first year or so, when the song was popular, so cutting off the revenue at 14 years is still within reason.
It is interesting to think about what would be now be in the public domain for computers/tech with a 14 year copyright limit. The clasic NES-era video games would be in the public domain, as well as many of the 16-bit era classics. Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 (but just barely, so Microsoft could withhold the patches later released for both OS's, if they wanted), and thus also MS-DOS and the older Windows. Pretty much all the software for older historic machines, be it the VAX, or the C64. All the classic UNIXs,.... The list is just astounding.
True, but a better set of heuristics could slightly improve the current system.
A construct where there is a full stop in the middle of the word and at the end could be presumed to be an acronym, and not be considered the end of the sentence. However, if the word and the final period are in different fonts or styles, then assume it is the end of the sentence, like in the following case: "Open the file named {\tt settings.bak}."
More heuristics like those may be detrimental though, since people we rely on them, and never think to check the spacing (unless they are typography obsessed), and thus the cases where the heuristics fail may be forgotten.
The problem with two spaces is that there is not two spaces between a sentence logically. Professional typography uses one single space that is longer than the inter-word space, but shorted than a double inter-word space. Let your typesetting system determine the where the sentence ends, and adjust the space properly. TeX and LaTeX, are happy to do that.
Nonsense, Land in the Commonwealth realms is owned by the Crown, not the Queen. You probably realize this, but saying the Queen where the Crown is intended is a common mistake. In many cases, both are equally accurate, but not in this one. If Queen Elizabeth II owned the land, she could leave it to whoever she wanted, but she cannot. The land will be inherited by the next Monarch in accordance with the the Constitutions of the realms.
But is he an automotive engineer, or a civil engineer who realized that he could get better pay if he was walling to risk his neck driving unspecified race cars (stock-appearance cars? actually-stock cars? F1 cars? drag racing? oval racing? crash derby "racing"? "monster truck" "racing"? out-running the cops "racing"?...)?
A proper explanation of primer requires numbering each copy of each person, or providing creative nicknames for each copy, or similar tricks, or else your explanation is far too simple.
The above timeline is better than some, worse than others. Your best bet is to beat Shane (the author) up until he gives you his personal notes, then finish beeting him. Then climb into a box with the unconscious version of him, which you have been running for an hour or so, so that you can force him to watch you beating him up. Then you beat him up again for good measure.
Under Article 3 of the Uniform Commercial Code, which is a law that has been passed switch only minor modifications in every State of the US, the following are the sole criteria to be a valid negotiable instrument:
It must have an unconditional promise or order to pay.
The document must list a specific amount, except that it may an amount plus interest
The document must have a specific date of payment, or be payable on demand.
The document must be "payed to order of $SOME_NAME" (meaning in the way specified by the named recipient) or must be payable to bearer. This makes it negotiable, allowing me to use the $20 check addressed to me from Bob to pay Joe. This feature is very important but only the banks normally ever use it, behind the scenes.
the document does not promise that the payer perform any act other than paying the specified money
The document is not marked "Canceled", or "Nonnegotiable", or one of a few other methods used to void a negotiable instrument.[1]
A check is any negotiable instrument drawn on a bank (or legal equivalent, like a credit union).
If you give anybody any document that meets all those requirements, they can cash it, deposit it, offer it as payment to a third party, etc. Of course, the account in question may have insufficient funds, etc, but that doe not make it non-negotiable. But nobody is required to accept a check, since they are not legal tender. One can reject a check for any reason, including not liking the picture on it!
While I am not a lawyer I have read excerpts of the relevant law, and am fairly confident in the overall accuracy of my statements, although one or more may be incorrect on a minor technicality, the underlying message should still be valid.
[1] The law here implies that banknotes might also be rendered worthless if you write nonnegotiable on them, although the law in question does not actually cover banknotes.
Actually this is not a troll. Take a look in the C:\windows\help\tours\mmtour folder of a new windows XP 32-bit installation and you will find that the tour is SWF based.
Among other dlls pre-installed on the system is a flash 3 or flash 4, or some similar early version dll (I forget the version or exact file name, but a search for 'flash' or 'swf' in file names on a brand new XP install (you might need to run the tour first to have it appear) should probably find it. I don't believe the browser plug-in ever came pre-installed, but the core DLL most definitely did.
Slashdot Mirror
Plastics do generally melt at low temperatures, although avoiding combustion can be a bit tricky. Of course, I'm no plastics expert, perhaps the molten plastic cannot be reconstituted into a desirable form, since the macro-structure of the molecules would have changed (perhaps even the molecules themselves).
Quite a bit of glass does melt at a reasonable temperature by foundry standards. Pure silicon dioxide does not, but that should be one of the last things left, and should be fairly easily separable from anything else that does not melt.
That timescale already exists. It is called TIA. It is identical to UTC except for having no leap seconds, and an initial deviation of exactly 10 seconds. The second ticks occur at exactly the same time as UTC. It is always an exact number of seconds off from UTC, that delta increases or decreases as leap seconds are inserted in UTC. It is currently offset by exactly 34 seconds.
And the plastics cannot be separated by weight/density or melting-point/dissolving-point, or any other mechanical means? I find that a bit hard to believe. Perhaps nobody has yet set up a good process for separating plastics, but it should be possible.
That sounds like a very sane idea. The layers will be imperfect, and some materials with have similar densities, so will end up mixed in a single layer.
There is a relatively easy solution for that though, namely heat the resulting mixture up slowly. At various points the different components will melt, and can be drained out, and end up in different containers based on the type.
The biggest problem with such a system though is that all glass colors will get mixed, so you will end up with odd color glass, which could really only be made into brown glass. A similar issue would occur with colored plastics.
I've personally found that it is working, since it detects the temporary files that Firefox has created on occasion that contain code for an exploit in say IE. So I would have been safe anyway, but it still caught the code.
Of course, I've always found it almost comical how it scans just about every file archival format known to man, including several not native to windows. It scans the obvious ones, like zip, rar, 7z, cab, and the like. It scans those that we often don't think of as archive formats like CHM. It scans ISO disk images. It scans RPM and DEBs. It scans the expanded form of UPX'd executables. And so on.
So you occasionally see strange things like it scanning the contents of RPM files in an ISO image. It was even more comical when it did that back when it was just Windows Defender, with only non-viral malware signatures.
There is no plug computer with POE, but there is one device that comes pretty close. Chip-PC's Jack PC was the size of a wall-wart, but was deigned to be resessed into the wall, and used as a thin client, using POE. It is a rather old product though, and their newer products do not seem to support using POE, which is unfortunate. See http://www.hightech-edge.com/ethernet-wall-socket-pc/626/ for more on this system (including links to the manufacturer).
Well there is more to say. The transparency requirements are a very good thing. This may indicate that they need to provide information about the bandwidth of the limiting router, and the number of people using it, which gives useful information. They would need to indicate any ports that they filter, whether they drop any packets by type. (There are some that block ICMP traceroute packets for no good reason, despite permitting ping packets. (They can differentiate by the much lower TTL values on the traceroute packets)). All of that s very good.
The "Lawful" qualifier on content is questionable. The only remotely legitimate use I can think of is filtering known child pornography sites. But that s dangerous precedent. They may start to filter "obscene" sites. [1]
The wireless exclusions are definately less than ideal, but there is some good reason for it. The consumer protections allow any equipment to be connected to the network for wired broadband. But wireless providers feel the need to differentiate between use of data by a phone, and use by a computer, be it by tethering or by a separate cellular modem card. There is some reason for this. Cell phones tend to use less data than a computer. So a cell-pone only data-plan is cheaper. If they could not differentiate between the two, because of the severe bandwidth limitations, they would need to charge the computer data rate to everybody. But that rate is high enough that it is unreasonable for somebody who wants a data plan only for the phone. However, I would argue that a better solution would be to offer multiple tiered plans, with different bandwidth caps, but let you use any device with any plan.
Reasonable network management does need to be permitted. The BGP/IGP packets probably should have higher priority than other packets. That is because the flow of those packets can result in changes to a networks internal routing to help alleviate the congestion. It might also be reasonable to assign higher priorities to packets that benefit from lower latency, and let those packets like bittorrent where even doubling the latency makes only a very small difference have a lower priority, at least when the network is not congested enough that packets are being dropped.[2] However some further details about what is and isn't reasonable would be a good thing.
Additional Online Services is supposed to cover things like Phone or Television services that share the data line. What should be permissible is for the company to have phone or TV packets get higher priority than all Internet packets. In that case the internet service they provide is basically selling the unused bandwidth on a cable that is primarily a phone or TV cable, even if IP packets are how the TV or phone service is encapsulated. Thus what they are selling is not logically VOIP service, but merely phone service, or not IPTV, but merely TV. The fact that they use VOIP or IPTV technologies would be irrelevant. What they would not be permitted to do is degrade VOIP or IPTV services. They would get equal footing with anything else on the internet. Thus if they prioritize the Additional Online Services too highly, the internet service would be of poor quality and they would be shooting themselves in the foot.
Footnotes:
[1] Laws against obscenity are idiotic. Quite a bit of fetish material out there would be ruled obscene if tested in a court. But there is no good reason to actually ban the material. I agree that there should be some limits on what can be displayed publicly in real life so we don't have things like explicit pronography plastered on billboards. I would also agree that for that sort of purpose the "community standards" system may work well. Some communities may feel that one image is inappropriate for public display that a different community has no issue with. But to make the material unlawful even in a private setting has no benefit.
[2] When you need to start dropping packets, what you really want is for any given packet to have exactly the same chan
You bring up a very good point. What exactly is the difference between a simulation and a game?
On one end you have games that don't simulate reality in any way.
Most games partially simulate reality with deliberate modificatons to make things entertaining.
Then on the the other hand you have simulations that try to simulate the real thing as closely as possible within the constraints of the environment or programmers. Are those games?
That is tricky. Flight simulators often fall into that category, yet are considered games.
But even if you exclude that, most people would consider serious simulations of real life games to be games. A serious simulation of a Formula-1 race would be considered a game by most people. A serious golf simulator is also generally considered a game.
In some sense any serious simulation that allows you to try out things you might want to do in real life if you could do so without the consequences is a game. A serious simulation of a high speed pursuit by cops, where you control the fugitive is definitely a game. The objective? You decide, but an obvious one is to last as long as you can before they cuff (or shoot) you.
But a serious simulation of an abacus? I'm pretty sure nobody would think that was a game.
Physists diagree about that. After all the mass of the neutron exceeds the mass of the proton and electron and the antineutrino. One could say the mass that disappears is merely potential energy being registered as mass, but physicists do not do that.
Physicists see only a vector of mass-energy whose magnitude is the same in all inertial reference frames, but the angle can differ. In any given reference frame in all reactions the sum of all mass-energy vectors in the system is conserved.
Let us remember what that vector looks like. E^2=(mc^2)+(pc)^2 is how we calculate the magnitude of the mass-energy vector. So the two components are the energy of the rest-mass and the energy of momentum.
Now how do we account for the fundamental forces? Let us consider one of them. Let us consider the electro-magnetic force, and two particles of opposite charge. At first they are at rest in this reference frame. But then they move towards each other. Since they started moving they both now have momentum. But that momentum means they now have a momentum component to the mass-energy vector.
But if they kept their original rest mass then the additional momentum means that both now have larger mass-energy vectors. But they are the only two particles in our imaginary closed system, so there are no other mass-energy vectors whose magnitudes could have decreased to compensate. The only way to conserve mass-energy is for the rest mass to have decreased.
Therefore the rest-mass in this reference frame must be accounting for any potential energy caused by the fundamental forces.
The actual script was posted in a comment. It sends the name of the product (I think this is "ubuntu", "xubuntu", or "kubuntu" as appropriate, but I have not checked this), the release version of the OS, what distribution channel (i.e. installed by end user using ship-it cd's, or which OEM installation (for OEM installations this may give information about the model of computer used)), and finally the count of ping attempts so far, which is also approximately with the number of calendar days the product OS has run in total.
I quote from the summary: "Unfortunately users will still see the updating progress bar on load, but this is an implementation issue as opposed to a [user interface] one".
They want to make it totally invisible, but it does not sound like they have gotten there yet. It does not chane the fact that it will still use the same setting underneath.
Slight nit. Ten numeric digits on the Military Grid Reference system only identifies a location to the square meter, not the square centimeter, which is not possible using the system as designed, but it could be extended to use 14 digits to identify a location to the square centimeter.
You do realize that Firefox already has the feature in question? Look in Firefox's setting window, in the "updates" tab of the "advanced" pane. In there is the option to prompt or to automatically install updates.
If you do the latter, they will download in the background when you browse, and the next time you start the browser, it will show a progress bar for a bit, and then the browser will open. I have the option set, so on occasion I see this.
All Mozilla is doing is changing the default for this setting. You can change it back if you want.
External as in external access. That is to distinguish them from the ancient 5.25 bays without external access used for really old hard-drives. Just as There are internal 3.5 bays, which are normally used for hard-drives, and also the external ones that 3.5 inch floppy drives used.
Windows 7 apparently does support 5.25 drives, and has even better drive image for it, at least if you set large icon sizes. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8gGHKALIYI
That depends entirely on the grammatical rules of the dialect you use. I use a dialect that is very similar to en-US-x-Hixie, although with some slight differences. Logical placement of punctuation is one of the unchanged rules.
A few of my difference: such as using "belief" and "faith" in a more general sense, similar to his definition of "trust". The word "Y'all" is never permitted. Both "gray" and "grey" are acceptable spellings, but "grey" has a slightly darker connotation in my mind, but not particularly significant.
There is a very, very good reason why we changed from having to mark every copyrighted work, to having works covered by default.
The system you propose is mandatory registration for protection, which is even worse.
Under this system if you write some freeware program, you are not likely to register it, but that means somebody else can tage it, swap out your name, and claim it as their own. (Remember the united states does not have "moral rights" seperate from copyright).
Say you write a song for your small band. Many independent composers tend to underestimate the quality of their work, so you may feel the song is not good enough to be worth registering. (after all, composers for small bands tend to write many songs, and it would be unreasonable to register all of them). A few years later, buys a tape of the band performing the song, thinks it is good, and sends it on to a record company. It turns out the song is commercially viable (but your band's performance does not do it justice), and it gets recorded and widely sold. Because you underestimated the value of the song, you get no compensation for the song.
Sound like a far fetched story? Perhaps, but if such a system were in place, I would bet the labels would have people listening to the works of small bands and checking the registry. They keep at it, and they are bound to find some really good songs that they could professionally re-record and sell, but which were never registered, or were registered but only for a a year or two, which are now past.
There is also the burden of having to initially register the work within some time window of first publication, and having to remember to register again every year, or losing protection. (Keep in mind that several big companies have forgotten to re-register their domain names, so forgetting to reregister a copyright on some major item could definitely happen.)
Some of these issues could be solved by having some short, but reasonable period of time for which works are protected, like perhaps a 7 year span, but the exact number is not particularly relevant. At the end of the term, they work either becomes public domain, or the holder can register for an extension, each year, using something like the scheme you describe. This would help with the orphaned works situation, since you can check if it is more than 7 years from publication. If it is, then you check the extensions database. If it is there, you have the information needed to contact the rights holder. Otherwise you know you don't need to contact the holder.
Now, combine this understanding with the fact that most copyrighted products generate most of their income in the first few years after publication, or even less, and you realise that a copyright term of more than a few years has no benefits to society. It almost exclusively does harm, by preventing values to be produced for free.
I would have little problem with a 14 year copyright term. The worry with short copyright terms is that too many people may just wait until the term expired, so that they could get the work for free. Consider a shorter term of 7 years. It is feasible in some media, books especially, to wait 7 years to buy and read the book. Commercial exploitation of a franchise in a different media can often wait that long, such as a filmmaker waiting to adapt a book into a movie if it let them completely cut the book's authors out of the equation.
But 14 years is long enough that in the vast majority of media few people would find it worth waiting, if they could afford to buy it. Futhermore, by 14 years works in almost every medium have all but exhausted their profit making potential.
Music is actually the odd one out here, considering the money songs from the 80's or earlier can still bring in, be it by royalties by the "oldies" stations, and continual sales of albums. Granted though that even here, the overwhelming majority of the profit should have been made in the first year or so, when the song was popular, so cutting off the revenue at 14 years is still within reason.
It is interesting to think about what would be now be in the public domain for computers/tech with a 14 year copyright limit. The clasic NES-era video games would be in the public domain, as well as many of the 16-bit era classics. Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 (but just barely, so Microsoft could withhold the patches later released for both OS's, if they wanted), and thus also MS-DOS and the older Windows. Pretty much all the software for older historic machines, be it the VAX, or the C64. All the classic UNIXs, .... The list is just astounding.
True, but a better set of heuristics could slightly improve the current system.
A construct where there is a full stop in the middle of the word and at the end could be presumed to be an acronym, and not be considered the end of the sentence.
However, if the word and the final period are in different fonts or styles, then assume it is the end of the sentence, like in the following case: "Open the file named {\tt settings.bak}."
More heuristics like those may be detrimental though, since people we rely on them, and never think to check the spacing (unless they are typography obsessed), and thus the cases where the heuristics fail may be forgotten.
The problem with two spaces is that there is not two spaces between a sentence logically. Professional typography uses one single space that is longer than the inter-word space, but shorted than a double inter-word space. Let your typesetting system determine the where the sentence ends, and adjust the space properly. TeX and LaTeX, are happy to do that.
Nonsense, Land in the Commonwealth realms is owned by the Crown, not the Queen. You probably realize this, but saying the Queen where the Crown is intended is a common mistake. In many cases, both are equally accurate, but not in this one. If Queen Elizabeth II owned the land, she could leave it to whoever she wanted, but she cannot. The land will be inherited by the next Monarch in accordance with the the Constitutions of the realms.
But is he an automotive engineer, or a civil engineer who realized that he could get better pay if he was walling to risk his neck driving unspecified race cars (stock-appearance cars? actually-stock cars? F1 cars? drag racing? oval racing? crash derby "racing"? "monster truck" "racing"? out-running the cops "racing"? ...)?
I refer you to the following discredited timeline, which is not an unreasonable attempt: http://neuwanstein.fw.hu/primer_timeline.html
A proper explanation of primer requires numbering each copy of each person, or providing creative nicknames for each copy, or similar tricks, or else your explanation is far too simple.
The above timeline is better than some, worse than others. Your best bet is to beat Shane (the author) up until he gives you his personal notes, then finish beeting him. Then climb into a box with the unconscious version of him, which you have been running for an hour or so, so that you can force him to watch you beating him up. Then you beat him up again for good measure.
Under Article 3 of the Uniform Commercial Code, which is a law that has been passed switch only minor modifications in every State of the US, the following are the sole criteria to be a valid negotiable instrument:
A check is any negotiable instrument drawn on a bank (or legal equivalent, like a credit union).
If you give anybody any document that meets all those requirements, they can cash it, deposit it, offer it as payment to a third party, etc. Of course, the account in question may have insufficient funds, etc, but that doe not make it non-negotiable. But nobody is required to accept a check, since they are not legal tender. One can reject a check for any reason, including not liking the picture on it!
While I am not a lawyer I have read excerpts of the relevant law, and am fairly confident in the overall accuracy of my statements, although one or more may be incorrect on a minor technicality, the underlying message should still be valid.
[1] The law here implies that banknotes might also be rendered worthless if you write nonnegotiable on them, although the law in question does not actually cover banknotes.
Actually this is not a troll. Take a look in the C:\windows\help\tours\mmtour folder of a new windows XP 32-bit installation and you will find that the tour is SWF based.
Among other dlls pre-installed on the system is a flash 3 or flash 4, or some similar early version dll (I forget the version or exact file name, but a search for 'flash' or 'swf' in file names on a brand new XP install (you might need to run the tour first to have it appear) should probably find it. I don't believe the browser plug-in ever came pre-installed, but the core DLL most definitely did.