I think they've just decided to acknowledge that Microsoft is not going to support open standards, Apple and Sun don't need foundations devoted to them, and BSD folks will probably support the Linux Foundation anyway.
Linux was the final piece to a completely open system; the community is vital and committed; and the name, as far as branding goes, sounds like a cross between "lean" and "sex". No recursive or double-recursive acronyms, a theme of pragmatism as the motivation for open-source development -- Linux isn't everything, but it's a good mascot for what this group is trying to do.
More likely, each competitor in the industry builds a patent portfolio around their own proprietary standards, and they all duke it out for a few years while consumers hold off on committing themselves to the new technology due to the obvious vendor lock-in. Eventually one competitor pulls ahead and enjoys near-monopoly status for a few more years, while everyone else scrambles to build interoperability with the new de-facto standard. Then next disruptive technology comes along, early adopters begin scrapping their old hardware, and the cycle begins anew.
If we're lucky, an independent committee allows these competitors to agree on a shared format before it gets out of control and a true monopoly forms. Otherwise, each company focuses on that old holy grail of guaranteed sustained revenue, vendor lock-in. That's what the MBAs heading each company learned in school, and they're certainly not going to sacrifice that opportunity just to make things easy for the competition.
References: The early Internet (prodigy, AOL, etc.), HTML/browsers, the Unix wars, Windows vs. Apple, document formats, VHS/Betamax, Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, cable TV (nearly), most things coming out of Sony,...
I imagine it's just the usual tactic of promising a product 2 years off to overshadow what the current competitor has right now. Why adopt Firefox, they'll say -- IE8 is coming up and it'll blow FF3 out of the water, according to these marketing materials. This glosses over the fact that FF4 will be available by then.
But I think this isn't going to work as well here as it did in the past. Thanks to standards (and the varying amount of attention the browser world pays to them), web browsers are fairly interchangeable; downloading one doesn't commit you to an exclusive platform the way a new operating system or office suite would.
I still haven't seen any modules I'd really want to remove (e.g. e-mail or a wysiwyg html designer, like Mozilla had), but since you asked:
Epiphany -- a lightweight spinoff for GNOME. Whenever I use it, I enjoy the speed, but I also catch myself fumbling around for little Firefox-only features all the time.
Dillo -- not a Mozilla spinoff, just a super-lightweight browser with minimal functionality. Built on Gtk+, so I suppose it could work on Windows, too.
Or at least ship the original install disk with the PC for free (MS might have to subsidize that themselves, since PC vendors sometimes charge more for that option).
The logical approach, if it weren't for the DoJ and EU's dim view of Microsoft's monopoly status, would be for MS to start designating certain PCs as crapless, in any of the following ways:
- The unbundling option.
- Just include the plain installation disk with every PC.
- Start certifying Crapless PCs as a whole, in addition to certifying the individual software components. Then OEMs would have one more shiny sticker to achieve by only including certified software on those designated PCs.
- Start up or buy an official Microsoft PC distributor -- which I suspect they're tempted to do right now, except for the obvious legal problem. And the risk of massive OEM rebellion in favor of Red Hat or Novell, which would be... interesting to watch.
Dual licensing is perfectly legal if all the authors (copyright holders) agree to both licenses. For example, Trolltech also uses a dual GPL/commercial license for Qt, and Mozilla uses a triple license of MPL, GPL and LGPL for some things.
The point is, when the obvious use of a product carries a danger -- especially when the product is what enables that behavior -- it's reasonable for the manufacturer to attach a warning to the product. You can choke/bludgeon/stab someone using just about anything, but a car is used for driving, so the maker warns the buyer about unsafe driving; liquor and alcohol ads carry warnings about unsafe drinking; fireworks carry warnings about using fireworks, unless they're shady; etc.
Personal use of copyrighted works is legal in some cases, still. Distributing copyrighted work isn't, and that's the catch of this lawsuit: By default, Kazaa shares the files you've downloaded, so mere users unwittingly become distributors.
This also brings some deeper pockets into the RIAA feud, so if Kazaa thinks they can show that the RIAA is harming a perfectly legal business of theirs, we could have a kinky little lawsuit-triangle on our hands.
c/x is differentiable but not continuous. The derivative is c/(x^2), which does have a limit from both sides, but isn't continuous, since f(0) != lim x->0 f(x) (unless you're using this guy's math, apparently). The antiderivative is c*log(x), which still has a hole at x=0 and only a directional limit (x->0+).
In summary, The limit at 0 exists if lim x->0- f(x) == lim x->0+ f(x). The function is continuous at 0 if f(0) == lim x->0 f(x).
1/0 "is" +Inf if 0 is positive and -Inf if 0 is negative, taking "is" to mean "approaches in the limit." Since 0 is neither positive nor negative, there's a problem.
The comment about using Aleph to represent different kinds of infinity is evidence that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. IIRC: Let's say there are an infinite number of integers (it's true). Call it Aleph-0. You can create rational numbers by dividing an integer by another integer -- so dividing any integer by all possible integers gives an infinity of rational numbers for each numerator; given that the choice of numerators is also infinite, you have Infinity^2 = Infinity many rational numbers. Still algebraic operations, still Aleph-0. But between any two real numbers there exists an infinite number of real numbers; this infinity of infinities gets you to Aleph-1.
The professor is trying to play the i game by describing a 2-D plane containing Nullity, +Inf and -Inf. To do this, he needs to: 1) Acknowledge that this is no longer the real number set (which he kind of is, but his explanations seem to resist the idea) 2) Define 0, Inf, and Null in terms of each other, so only one new axis is being introduced. The number i gets its own axis, and all complex numbers can be written as a + bi, where a and b are real numbers. So it looks like our guy is trying to define Inf = 1/0, -Inf = -1*Inf) [note that 1/0 = 1/(-0) -> Inf = -Inf], and Null = 0*Inf (?). So the Inf axis now looks... strange, with a either a hole or an intersection with the Real line at 0, depending on how he's defining Null.
I dunno, maybe someone could coax the Inf plane into fitting the existing axioms, but it doesn't look particularly productive to me without changing the meaning of Inf -- which would defeat the purpose of the whole exercise.
I know it's not even out of the lab yet, but for the record, using this for removable stents is sketchy. I'm picturing a design where the stent automatically expands off the catheter as it reaches body temperature, and changing the temperature of the stent again (e.g. placing another balloon catheter in there and filling it with cold water) causes it to contract back onto a catheter. Depending on body chemistry, the blood vessel usually grows around the implanted stent over time, so to be removed, either (a) the stent needs to rip out of the vessel in order to contract again, if it's made out of these polymers, or (b) the surgeon resorts to open-heart surgery (this is what's normally done if stent implantation goes awry). So attempting to remove the stent after several weeks this way is a bad idea, but it might be possible to recover if there's a minor mistake during the actual surgery -- if the stent needs to be moved, the surgeon could squeeze some cold water into the catheter and try again, without resorting to open-heart surgery.
With traditional stainless-steel stents, there's no negative effect to leaving the stent inside the vessel permanently, since the vessel eventually envelops the stent. If there's a benefit to having the stent gone after 6+ months (e.g. patient has inconvenient body chemistry and is likely to develop excessive scar tissue around the stent), it would be better to make the stent out of a bioreabsorbable material, so that it disappears on its own, rather than needing another surgery to remove it.
Y-shaped vessels have always been a problem, and a stent that can fit itself to the vessel would be useful. Right now, the approach is to use a truncated-cone-shaped stent to prop open the Y, then use a second, normal stent to address the actual problem area. Without that first stent for support, placing a stent in either of the (upper) branches of the Y causes the other branch to collapse. This situation happens frequently, and there's money to be made in finding a one-stent solution -- if it's cheaper and safer than the existing two-stent solution.
Now, what happens to a person who has one of these stents in the event of fever or hypothermia? For open-heart surgery, the patient's blood is also cooled down, and this stent's antics could add another level of complexity to the surgery. Stainless steel, optionally coated with parylene, is the material of choice for stents now. It's flexible, durable, and stable inside the body. A triple-shape plastic would have to be just as flexible, durable and stable in order to be usable for implantable devices.
For self-sealing parts, this could be good. This material would be great for creating a seal or lock that can only be opened within a certain (safe) temperature range -- I could picture it being used in airplanes, spaceships, boats and submarines, and as a safety measure for lab equipment.
Perl:
Once you know a few general-purpose programming languages, it's easy to learn more. A small shop is much more likely to let you experiment, even try mixing in other languages like Python and Ruby. I suspect you'll be in a better position to grow as a programmer at the small shop, not to mention the importance of a decent working environment. You won't learn as much about management and company politics, though. Try moving as close as you possibly can to the new office -- people generally rate their commuting time as the worst part of each day. IT job prospects are usually better in cities, too.
.NET:
Money is nice. However, there's a good reason that big companies tend to hire lots of.NET or Java programmers: Lots of them exist, and so they're easily replaceable. Management at a large company is about risk amortization, making sure the worst case is never too bad, so by choosing the most popular languages to program in and managing every project carefully, never assigning a project with too many uncertainties, it's easy to recover if someone quits, or fails to produce. As a.NET programmer, you'll be a commodity, albeit a valuable one, unless Microsoft eventually decides to make a drastic change to the system (See: Managed C++).
If you're young, there's probably more in it for you with the Perl job. Financially, you're taking more of a risk, but the company could also give you stock options. If your debt is from student loans, don't worry too much, the interest is low and you're not expected to pay it off immediately (you're supposed to be investing in skill, not cashing out at this point). You'll be closer to the company founder, which means you'll have closer connections to the startup club -- not a bad crowd to hang with. Going the small-company route generally means you'll have a lower raw salary, often some share in each company's future, and regular offers to join your buddy's startup.
But if you're in massive credit card debt, or older and caving in to the financial pressures of a family and a mortgage, it's probably time to cash in for the stability of a.NET programming job. And if you're interested in becoming a manager, there's probably an opportunity to gradually climb the ranks there, too.
Anyway, tiered pricing does make good economic sense. Universities do it with tuition; many content providers do it with licensing (individual vs. institutional licenses, e.g. libraries pay 10x as much per magazine subscription as individuals do, and even Microsoft does it for schools). It allows the seller to capitalize along more of the demand curve. Obviously there's no need to codify this as law, but the practice shouldn't be viewed with suspicion, either.
Considering Microsoft's recent price bumps for Office products, alongside WGA and this odd threat against China, I'm almost beginning to think that Microsoft no longer wants to be a monopoly. Maybe they've decided there's a higher margin in it for them if they can shake off the EU's restrictions and claim there's a viable competitor, e.g. if China jumps aboard Linux. That seems unlikely given their history, though.
Then again, maybe Mr. Tipson is just talking out of his ass.
The sick thing you see following the Abramoff story is how cheap and cheesy all these little plots are. Congress votes and committee decisions on serious issues can be bought for a few thousand dollars, a few rounds of golf, a nice present, or a quick smear against a friend's enemy. The bribes aren't glamorous, and the conspiracies aren't clever.
We've called our Congress "the best that money can buy," but now it's pretty clear that they're not even that. The U.S. is being run by bargain-bin representatives.
Given that lame, disappointing stories like this don't make good copy, Washington doesn't even need to bother with a cover story for these ridiculous ploys, until someone screws up so badly -- like Abramoff and his cabal -- that they catch our attention, if only for the 15 minutes it takes to watch them go down in flames.
Grandma: "Let's see, there must be a replacement for Word on here somewhere... OK, 'text editors' sounds about right. Now, do I want 'emacs' or 'vim'?... ooh, this one says it's 'the standard text editor'..."
Dunno, Sourceforge just doesn't seem like the right forum for offering high-profile projects as the new standard -- it's too developer-oriented. Perhaps another website. Hell, Google seems to have latent urges to it themselves, which would really be pretty appropriate.
This exploit wasn't found in the wild, it was presented without code at a hackers' conference.
And yes,/. summaries will always take into account the different development strategies for IE and Mozilla. It doesn't make financial sense for Microsoft to devote resources to fixing IE bugs until the press makes a major stink about it. And since botnets created through IE exploits affect everyone, you could say/. does a public service by adding to the stink.
According to sources found on Google, the returns did indicate Truman won by the end of the night. However, the results varied by geography back then, as they do now. In the 1948 election, the Northeastern states (whose polls would close first) voted for Dewey; the South was off doing its own thing, and the West and Midwest swung the election in favor of Truman.
News services were slower back then, and there was a press strike aggravating the situation, forcing an early decision on the headline. So the Chicago Tribune went with the early results, and cringed as the rest of the returns poured in in favor of Truman.
[I also vaguely recall an issue with the way the public-opinion polls were run then (this might have been for an earlier election): Pollsters pulled their "random" samples from vehicle registration records, and at the time, not everyone had a car. So, predictions were skewed in favor of the candidate with the wealthier supporters (in 1948, Dewey).]
In the book, they used reptile and frog DNA, some of everything, figuring the vast majority of the DNA would be the same for dinos, other reptiles, and amphibians. The movie kept it simple with, "We filled in the gaps with frog DNA..."
But according to TFA (and other discoveries of the past decade), the best choice would probably have been ostrich DNA.
Talk radio Talk radio always seems to come off as a heavy-handed, authoritative voice -- and the left, pretty much by definition, reacts against traditional authority. A single speaker telling it like it is has to choose a topic to focus on, a viewpoint, and how far that viewpoint should be carried out.
In some ways, it's almost like a sermon, and you can see where that's going.
A conservative and traditional viewpoint is easier to preach to: Things were fine before the liberals started messing around. Follow the rules. Appreciate the values we've always held, and stand by them. But there's no equivalent canon for the liberal perspective -- and once one's finally established, it's called conservative again.
Comedy TV In the U.S. in particular, the left is pretty fragmented. A hyper-conservative leadership has been in power for years (since 1994, really), and at this point, the left can all pretty much agree that what the far-right is doing is horrible -- they're numbed to it, there's no need to preach to the choir about it. All this sincerity going around -- politicians have get by on emotional appeal, and the more sincerity they heap onto any ludicrous statement, the higher they climb (see: truthiness). When the public debate is reduced to a contest of who can emote more, the only recourse is satire.
And given this, I suspect that for any political movement, compelling talk radio and sharp comedy TV are mutually exclusive.
The article's a little dubious, but I think this was the analogy the author was going for:
In the olden days, people didn't know how photocopiers worked, and foolishly trusted their own eyes better than the automated copying process.
Today, we don't know how GMail works, and (foolishly?) trust our own single hard disks over Google's redundant and geographically distributed server farms.
Of course, just because the big Web companies like Google and Yahoo have better backup systems than most home users doesn't mean the Internet is a bulletproof vault, since we care about more than just data loss, and not every online company has sane IT.
I'm using a $125 computer right now -- not the one in the article, just an older Toshiba laptop that someone was replacing. It came with Windows 2000, which I immediately replaced with Xubuntu. Firefox can be a little sluggish at times, but in general it works fine for everyday use.
As I recall, the OLPC $100 laptop was designed to not only be useful for Web browsing, programming, and general educational use, but also to serve as a wireless mesh node, wiki engine, and hammer if necessary. It's supposed to have a long battery life and a screen viewable in bright sunlight, be rechargeable without a connection to the power grid, and be unbreakable by even the mighty Kofi Annan. And it needs to be tiny and cute so that kids will like it and be able to carry it around. My $125 laptop can run Python and Gaim, but the battery is crap, and it has basically no peripherals without its docking station. Definitely not a solution for remote areas with intermittent utilities.
A side note: I have a deep appreciation for the many lightweight Linux distros out there. Switching from commercial operating systems is an excellent way to break out of the forced hardware upgrade cycle and salvage old machines.
A gentle reminder, not even the GPL requires the owner of a work to distribute it for free -- only for a reasonable cost to make up for the time and effort required. So, if the professor's lectures were somehow licensed under the GPL equivalent for an in-person performance, taking $1 profit for recording, editing and uploading the lectures to a host is still completely acceptable.
Taking it a bit further, let's calculate the value of the professor's time to provide this service -- my guess is, to break even, it's about 1-2 minutes * the number of students who pay for the download, probably a small number. For a 50 minute lecture, it takes 25-50 students paying for the download for the professor to break even, so I suspect this still falls easily within the bounds of a charitable act.
I've had a number of professors who simply refused outright to put any lecture notes online, among other dirty tricks, in order to screw anyone who skipped class without a very good reason. And they're allowed to, too. There is no reason to flip out over any of this.
At UC Davis, the service is called Classical Notes. In this program, the professor does nothing at all, and may even be completely phobic of computers. Students apply for positions as note-takers, attend the lectures in question, and sell the transcribed notes for a reasonable price through Classical Notes, a division of the student government.
Given this background, and the fact that a $1 fee on the professor's part is by no means extortion, the article looks like a non-story to me. University professors have a lot of freedom in how they conduct their classes, and little services on the side like this are absolutely nothing to have a fit about.
As far back as the public consciousness goes, diesel engines have had noticeable less torque than gas engines. Of course it's something that can be solved with a bit of R&D, but that's the public perception, at least in the U.S. Also, since diesel fuel has been aimed more at trucks and heavy machinery (i.e. farmers, union and industry), politicians had allowed much looser restrictions on the cleanliness of the fuel. Tighter restrictions on sulphur content, in particular, were introduced at the beginning of this year, but it's still going to be some time before the American public associates diesel with anything other than the filthy black clouds belched by freight trucks.
Allow me to also point out that petroleum overtook another previously dominant fuel because of economics. That fuel was... (drumroll, please)...whale oil. Once whales were noticeably overhunted and no longer worth the effort to track down and kill, we took another look at that black stuff coming out of the ground in Pennsylvania.
(BTW, I didn't bother to fact-check this on Wikipedia -- so now's your chance to pounce)
Slashdot Mirror
I think they've just decided to acknowledge that Microsoft is not going to support open standards, Apple and Sun don't need foundations devoted to them, and BSD folks will probably support the Linux Foundation anyway.
Linux was the final piece to a completely open system; the community is vital and committed; and the name, as far as branding goes, sounds like a cross between "lean" and "sex". No recursive or double-recursive acronyms, a theme of pragmatism as the motivation for open-source development -- Linux isn't everything, but it's a good mascot for what this group is trying to do.
More likely, each competitor in the industry builds a patent portfolio around their own proprietary standards, and they all duke it out for a few years while consumers hold off on committing themselves to the new technology due to the obvious vendor lock-in. Eventually one competitor pulls ahead and enjoys near-monopoly status for a few more years, while everyone else scrambles to build interoperability with the new de-facto standard. Then next disruptive technology comes along, early adopters begin scrapping their old hardware, and the cycle begins anew.
...
If we're lucky, an independent committee allows these competitors to agree on a shared format before it gets out of control and a true monopoly forms. Otherwise, each company focuses on that old holy grail of guaranteed sustained revenue, vendor lock-in. That's what the MBAs heading each company learned in school, and they're certainly not going to sacrifice that opportunity just to make things easy for the competition.
References: The early Internet (prodigy, AOL, etc.), HTML/browsers, the Unix wars, Windows vs. Apple, document formats, VHS/Betamax, Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, cable TV (nearly), most things coming out of Sony,
I imagine it's just the usual tactic of promising a product 2 years off to overshadow what the current competitor has right now. Why adopt Firefox, they'll say -- IE8 is coming up and it'll blow FF3 out of the water, according to these marketing materials. This glosses over the fact that FF4 will be available by then.
But I think this isn't going to work as well here as it did in the past. Thanks to standards (and the varying amount of attention the browser world pays to them), web browsers are fairly interchangeable; downloading one doesn't commit you to an exclusive platform the way a new operating system or office suite would.
I still haven't seen any modules I'd really want to remove (e.g. e-mail or a wysiwyg html designer, like Mozilla had), but since you asked:
Epiphany -- a lightweight spinoff for GNOME. Whenever I use it, I enjoy the speed, but I also catch myself fumbling around for little Firefox-only features all the time.
Dillo -- not a Mozilla spinoff, just a super-lightweight browser with minimal functionality. Built on Gtk+, so I suppose it could work on Windows, too.
Or at least ship the original install disk with the PC for free (MS might have to subsidize that themselves, since PC vendors sometimes charge more for that option).
The logical approach, if it weren't for the DoJ and EU's dim view of Microsoft's monopoly status, would be for MS to start designating certain PCs as crapless, in any of the following ways:
- The unbundling option.
- Just include the plain installation disk with every PC.
- Start certifying Crapless PCs as a whole, in addition to certifying the individual software components. Then OEMs would have one more shiny sticker to achieve by only including certified software on those designated PCs.
- Start up or buy an official Microsoft PC distributor -- which I suspect they're tempted to do right now, except for the obvious legal problem. And the risk of massive OEM rebellion in favor of Red Hat or Novell, which would be... interesting to watch.
Dual licensing is perfectly legal if all the authors (copyright holders) agree to both licenses. For example, Trolltech also uses a dual GPL/commercial license for Qt, and Mozilla uses a triple license of MPL, GPL and LGPL for some things.
Comment
We have a name for that:
Quote "Natural Language XML" Unquote.
Uncomment.
The point is, when the obvious use of a product carries a danger -- especially when the product is what enables that behavior -- it's reasonable for the manufacturer to attach a warning to the product. You can choke/bludgeon/stab someone using just about anything, but a car is used for driving, so the maker warns the buyer about unsafe driving; liquor and alcohol ads carry warnings about unsafe drinking; fireworks carry warnings about using fireworks, unless they're shady; etc.
Personal use of copyrighted works is legal in some cases, still. Distributing copyrighted work isn't, and that's the catch of this lawsuit: By default, Kazaa shares the files you've downloaded, so mere users unwittingly become distributors.
This also brings some deeper pockets into the RIAA feud, so if Kazaa thinks they can show that the RIAA is harming a perfectly legal business of theirs, we could have a kinky little lawsuit-triangle on our hands.
c/x is differentiable but not continuous. The derivative is c/(x^2), which does have a limit from both sides, but isn't continuous, since f(0) != lim x->0 f(x) (unless you're using this guy's math, apparently). The antiderivative is c*log(x), which still has a hole at x=0 and only a directional limit (x->0+).
In summary,
The limit at 0 exists if lim x->0- f(x) == lim x->0+ f(x).
The function is continuous at 0 if f(0) == lim x->0 f(x).
1/0 "is" +Inf if 0 is positive and -Inf if 0 is negative, taking "is" to mean "approaches in the limit." Since 0 is neither positive nor negative, there's a problem.
The comment about using Aleph to represent different kinds of infinity is evidence that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. IIRC: Let's say there are an infinite number of integers (it's true). Call it Aleph-0. You can create rational numbers by dividing an integer by another integer -- so dividing any integer by all possible integers gives an infinity of rational numbers for each numerator; given that the choice of numerators is also infinite, you have Infinity^2 = Infinity many rational numbers. Still algebraic operations, still Aleph-0. But between any two real numbers there exists an infinite number of real numbers; this infinity of infinities gets you to Aleph-1.
The professor is trying to play the i game by describing a 2-D plane containing Nullity, +Inf and -Inf. To do this, he needs to:
1) Acknowledge that this is no longer the real number set (which he kind of is, but his explanations seem to resist the idea)
2) Define 0, Inf, and Null in terms of each other, so only one new axis is being introduced. The number i gets its own axis, and all complex numbers can be written as a + bi, where a and b are real numbers. So it looks like our guy is trying to define Inf = 1/0, -Inf = -1*Inf) [note that 1/0 = 1/(-0) -> Inf = -Inf], and Null = 0*Inf (?). So the Inf axis now looks... strange, with a either a hole or an intersection with the Real line at 0, depending on how he's defining Null.
I dunno, maybe someone could coax the Inf plane into fitting the existing axioms, but it doesn't look particularly productive to me without changing the meaning of Inf -- which would defeat the purpose of the whole exercise.
I know it's not even out of the lab yet, but for the record, using this for removable stents is sketchy. I'm picturing a design where the stent automatically expands off the catheter as it reaches body temperature, and changing the temperature of the stent again (e.g. placing another balloon catheter in there and filling it with cold water) causes it to contract back onto a catheter. Depending on body chemistry, the blood vessel usually grows around the implanted stent over time, so to be removed, either (a) the stent needs to rip out of the vessel in order to contract again, if it's made out of these polymers, or (b) the surgeon resorts to open-heart surgery (this is what's normally done if stent implantation goes awry). So attempting to remove the stent after several weeks this way is a bad idea, but it might be possible to recover if there's a minor mistake during the actual surgery -- if the stent needs to be moved, the surgeon could squeeze some cold water into the catheter and try again, without resorting to open-heart surgery.
With traditional stainless-steel stents, there's no negative effect to leaving the stent inside the vessel permanently, since the vessel eventually envelops the stent. If there's a benefit to having the stent gone after 6+ months (e.g. patient has inconvenient body chemistry and is likely to develop excessive scar tissue around the stent), it would be better to make the stent out of a bioreabsorbable material, so that it disappears on its own, rather than needing another surgery to remove it.
Y-shaped vessels have always been a problem, and a stent that can fit itself to the vessel would be useful. Right now, the approach is to use a truncated-cone-shaped stent to prop open the Y, then use a second, normal stent to address the actual problem area. Without that first stent for support, placing a stent in either of the (upper) branches of the Y causes the other branch to collapse. This situation happens frequently, and there's money to be made in finding a one-stent solution -- if it's cheaper and safer than the existing two-stent solution.
Now, what happens to a person who has one of these stents in the event of fever or hypothermia? For open-heart surgery, the patient's blood is also cooled down, and this stent's antics could add another level of complexity to the surgery. Stainless steel, optionally coated with parylene, is the material of choice for stents now. It's flexible, durable, and stable inside the body. A triple-shape plastic would have to be just as flexible, durable and stable in order to be usable for implantable devices.
For self-sealing parts, this could be good. This material would be great for creating a seal or lock that can only be opened within a certain (safe) temperature range -- I could picture it being used in airplanes, spaceships, boats and submarines, and as a safety measure for lab equipment.
Perl:
Once you know a few general-purpose programming languages, it's easy to learn more. A small shop is much more likely to let you experiment, even try mixing in other languages like Python and Ruby. I suspect you'll be in a better position to grow as a programmer at the small shop, not to mention the importance of a decent working environment. You won't learn as much about management and company politics, though. Try moving as close as you possibly can to the new office -- people generally rate their commuting time as the worst part of each day. IT job prospects are usually better in cities, too.
Money is nice. However, there's a good reason that big companies tend to hire lots of
If you're young, there's probably more in it for you with the Perl job. Financially, you're taking more of a risk, but the company could also give you stock options. If your debt is from student loans, don't worry too much, the interest is low and you're not expected to pay it off immediately (you're supposed to be investing in skill, not cashing out at this point). You'll be closer to the company founder, which means you'll have closer connections to the startup club -- not a bad crowd to hang with. Going the small-company route generally means you'll have a lower raw salary, often some share in each company's future, and regular offers to join your buddy's startup.
But if you're in massive credit card debt, or older and caving in to the financial pressures of a family and a mortgage, it's probably time to cash in for the stability of a .NET programming job. And if you're interested in becoming a manager, there's probably an opportunity to gradually climb the ranks there, too.
Also, "not as loyal as Mac users" is about as informative as "not as bad as Hitler."
It doesn't need to be a law, it can be a license.
Anyway, tiered pricing does make good economic sense. Universities do it with tuition; many content providers do it with licensing (individual vs. institutional licenses, e.g. libraries pay 10x as much per magazine subscription as individuals do, and even Microsoft does it for schools). It allows the seller to capitalize along more of the demand curve. Obviously there's no need to codify this as law, but the practice shouldn't be viewed with suspicion, either.
Considering Microsoft's recent price bumps for Office products, alongside WGA and this odd threat against China, I'm almost beginning to think that Microsoft no longer wants to be a monopoly. Maybe they've decided there's a higher margin in it for them if they can shake off the EU's restrictions and claim there's a viable competitor, e.g. if China jumps aboard Linux. That seems unlikely given their history, though.
Then again, maybe Mr. Tipson is just talking out of his ass.
The sick thing you see following the Abramoff story is how cheap and cheesy all these little plots are. Congress votes and committee decisions on serious issues can be bought for a few thousand dollars, a few rounds of golf, a nice present, or a quick smear against a friend's enemy. The bribes aren't glamorous, and the conspiracies aren't clever.
We've called our Congress "the best that money can buy," but now it's pretty clear that they're not even that. The U.S. is being run by bargain-bin representatives.
Given that lame, disappointing stories like this don't make good copy, Washington doesn't even need to bother with a cover story for these ridiculous ploys, until someone screws up so badly -- like Abramoff and his cabal -- that they catch our attention, if only for the 15 minutes it takes to watch them go down in flames.
Grandma: "Let's see, there must be a replacement for Word on here somewhere... OK, 'text editors' sounds about right. Now, do I want 'emacs' or 'vim'? ... ooh, this one says it's 'the standard text editor' ..."
Dunno, Sourceforge just doesn't seem like the right forum for offering high-profile projects as the new standard -- it's too developer-oriented. Perhaps another website. Hell, Google seems to have latent urges to it themselves, which would really be pretty appropriate.
This exploit wasn't found in the wild, it was presented without code at a hackers' conference.
/. summaries will always take into account the different development strategies for IE and Mozilla. It doesn't make financial sense for Microsoft to devote resources to fixing IE bugs until the press makes a major stink about it. And since botnets created through IE exploits affect everyone, you could say /. does a public service by adding to the stink.
And yes,
According to sources found on Google, the returns did indicate Truman won by the end of the night. However, the results varied by geography back then, as they do now. In the 1948 election, the Northeastern states (whose polls would close first) voted for Dewey; the South was off doing its own thing, and the West and Midwest swung the election in favor of Truman.
News services were slower back then, and there was a press strike aggravating the situation, forcing an early decision on the headline. So the Chicago Tribune went with the early results, and cringed as the rest of the returns poured in in favor of Truman.
[I also vaguely recall an issue with the way the public-opinion polls were run then (this might have been for an earlier election): Pollsters pulled their "random" samples from vehicle registration records, and at the time, not everyone had a car. So, predictions were skewed in favor of the candidate with the wealthier supporters (in 1948, Dewey).]
In the book, they used reptile and frog DNA, some of everything, figuring the vast majority of the DNA would be the same for dinos, other reptiles, and amphibians. The movie kept it simple with, "We filled in the gaps with frog DNA..."
But according to TFA (and other discoveries of the past decade), the best choice would probably have been ostrich DNA.
Talk radio
Talk radio always seems to come off as a heavy-handed, authoritative voice -- and the left, pretty much by definition, reacts against traditional authority. A single speaker telling it like it is has to choose a topic to focus on, a viewpoint, and how far that viewpoint should be carried out.
In some ways, it's almost like a sermon, and you can see where that's going.
A conservative and traditional viewpoint is easier to preach to: Things were fine before the liberals started messing around. Follow the rules. Appreciate the values we've always held, and stand by them. But there's no equivalent canon for the liberal perspective -- and once one's finally established, it's called conservative again.
Comedy TV
In the U.S. in particular, the left is pretty fragmented. A hyper-conservative leadership has been in power for years (since 1994, really), and at this point, the left can all pretty much agree that what the far-right is doing is horrible -- they're numbed to it, there's no need to preach to the choir about it. All this sincerity going around -- politicians have get by on emotional appeal, and the more sincerity they heap onto any ludicrous statement, the higher they climb (see: truthiness). When the public debate is reduced to a contest of who can emote more, the only recourse is satire.
And given this, I suspect that for any political movement, compelling talk radio and sharp comedy TV are mutually exclusive.
The article's a little dubious, but I think this was the analogy the author was going for:
In the olden days, people didn't know how photocopiers worked, and foolishly trusted their own eyes better than the automated copying process.
Today, we don't know how GMail works, and (foolishly?) trust our own single hard disks over Google's redundant and geographically distributed server farms.
Of course, just because the big Web companies like Google and Yahoo have better backup systems than most home users doesn't mean the Internet is a bulletproof vault, since we care about more than just data loss, and not every online company has sane IT.
I'm using a $125 computer right now -- not the one in the article, just an older Toshiba laptop that someone was replacing. It came with Windows 2000, which I immediately replaced with Xubuntu. Firefox can be a little sluggish at times, but in general it works fine for everyday use.
As I recall, the OLPC $100 laptop was designed to not only be useful for Web browsing, programming, and general educational use, but also to serve as a wireless mesh node, wiki engine, and hammer if necessary. It's supposed to have a long battery life and a screen viewable in bright sunlight, be rechargeable without a connection to the power grid, and be unbreakable by even the mighty Kofi Annan. And it needs to be tiny and cute so that kids will like it and be able to carry it around. My $125 laptop can run Python and Gaim, but the battery is crap, and it has basically no peripherals without its docking station. Definitely not a solution for remote areas with intermittent utilities.
A side note: I have a deep appreciation for the many lightweight Linux distros out there. Switching from commercial operating systems is an excellent way to break out of the forced hardware upgrade cycle and salvage old machines.
A gentle reminder, not even the GPL requires the owner of a work to distribute it for free -- only for a reasonable cost to make up for the time and effort required. So, if the professor's lectures were somehow licensed under the GPL equivalent for an in-person performance, taking $1 profit for recording, editing and uploading the lectures to a host is still completely acceptable.
Taking it a bit further, let's calculate the value of the professor's time to provide this service -- my guess is, to break even, it's about 1-2 minutes * the number of students who pay for the download, probably a small number. For a 50 minute lecture, it takes 25-50 students paying for the download for the professor to break even, so I suspect this still falls easily within the bounds of a charitable act.
I've had a number of professors who simply refused outright to put any lecture notes online, among other dirty tricks, in order to screw anyone who skipped class without a very good reason. And they're allowed to, too. There is no reason to flip out over any of this.
At UC Davis, the service is called Classical Notes. In this program, the professor does nothing at all, and may even be completely phobic of computers. Students apply for positions as note-takers, attend the lectures in question, and sell the transcribed notes for a reasonable price through Classical Notes, a division of the student government.
Given this background, and the fact that a $1 fee on the professor's part is by no means extortion, the article looks like a non-story to me. University professors have a lot of freedom in how they conduct their classes, and little services on the side like this are absolutely nothing to have a fit about.
As far back as the public consciousness goes, diesel engines have had noticeable less torque than gas engines. Of course it's something that can be solved with a bit of R&D, but that's the public perception, at least in the U.S. Also, since diesel fuel has been aimed more at trucks and heavy machinery (i.e. farmers, union and industry), politicians had allowed much looser restrictions on the cleanliness of the fuel. Tighter restrictions on sulphur content, in particular, were introduced at the beginning of this year, but it's still going to be some time before the American public associates diesel with anything other than the filthy black clouds belched by freight trucks.
...whale oil. Once whales were noticeably overhunted and no longer worth the effort to track down and kill, we took another look at that black stuff coming out of the ground in Pennsylvania.
Allow me to also point out that petroleum overtook another previously dominant fuel because of economics. That fuel was... (drumroll, please)
(BTW, I didn't bother to fact-check this on Wikipedia -- so now's your chance to pounce)
I remember it as, "No one ever lost money by underestimating the taste of the American public."