I've owned several D-Link routers, either through no fault of my own or pressed for time and had to buy it. In all of the years I've had to deal with them, I've learned this:
D-Link is Shit. Buy Linksys.
I've owned several Linksys routers and learned the exact opposite. My D-Link router is stable and does not need constant reboots. My Linksys routers needed constant babysitting. The straw that broke the camel's back was when I found my Linksys routers would not route WOL packets. I looked for a firmware upgrade (official or otherwise), found none and said "screw Linksys."
First of all, amusing to see this position on/. -- and to see it upmodded! Installing software on a device you actually own and then restoring it before calling support is fraud?
There's nothing surprising with the position voiced.
There's the legal aspect and there's the ethical aspect. The two are not equal. It is possible for someone to consider an act which is illegal to be ethical or an act which is legal to be unethical.
Installing on a device a firmware not approved by the manufacturer typically relieves the manufacturer from having to provide a warranty. The manufacturer can still provide warranty-covered service for the device but they do not have to. Reinstalling the original firmware does not reinstate the original obligations of the warranty. Trying to get service on warranty while at the same time hiding the fact that the firmware was at one point replaced with unauthorized firmware is illegal.
But you can still argue it is not unethical. This may be the position some of the people on Slashdot would want to take.
It is not a lie and you have not demonstrated otherwise. Jailbreaking does void the warranty.
Apple will not service a Jailbroken phone - but that doesn't mean they will not service a phone that has been restored to the original OS, an operation that takes about five minutes. Once restored Apple cannot tell if it was ever Jailbroken or not.
The scenario you are talking about here is a case where the user has voided the warranty by jailbreaking the phone and then hides that fact. That's an act of deception on the part of the user. Restoring the original OS does not unvoid the warranty.
What if the VPS provider burns down or suffers any other serious hardware failure which results in data loss? Actually, hardware failures are more likely than buildings burning down. I've never been in a house fire but I've had quite a few HDs fail on me.
Given that affordable VPS providers do not make guarantees about preserving the data stored on a VPS, I don't think having the data on a VPS is safer. I actually do have a VPS for my web site and back up elsewhere the data stored in my VPS because if a catastrophe were to strike my VPS provider, there is no guarantee as to my data.
And before you start pointing out other possible "issues", rest assured that I've considered everything and I know where I traded off. Data storage is not a matter of absolutes but a balancing act between convenience, security and price. At the end of the day, the fact remains that I do not trust the people who run VPSes with my data. No amount of argument is going to convince me that they are trustworthy.
I've looked into this in the past. There is nothing better than Duplicity.
I eventually gave up and started backing up my data to servers that I do trust.
I came to the same conclusion. All the solutions out there required me to compromise on things I did not want to compromise on.
You should too. You can rent a VPS for only $20 per month. It's just easier and *know* that you're the only one who has root access (assuming that you keep updating your system, of course).
Hmm... on a VPS you are not the only one with root access. Those who provide you the VPS can do anything to it. So I do not consider this to be "trusted" by any stretch of the imagination. I solved my problem by building myself a NAS. Contrarily to the usual suggestion of reusing an old computer, I bought new, power-efficient hardware to keep the electricity consumption down. It sits in my house. I'm the only one with root access.
Granted that there's an inherent complexity which will never go away, even with "XML pixie dust".
However, if a system came out which did what LaTeX did and used XML markup for input, there would be advantages which LaTeX never had and never will have unless it becomes something else than LaTeX.
1. An XML document can very easily be transformed by means of XSLT or other tools.
2. Getting third-party tools to process an XML document is easier than doing the same with LaTeX.
I keep my resume in home-brewed XML markup precisely because of the two points above. I can easily from one XML document produce a text version, a PDF version and an XHTML version.
The one big downside is that XML markup is much heavier than LaTeX markup.
LaTeX is the pinnacle of "what you did 10 years ago will work beautifully today". If you are installing new packages willy-nilly, something is horribly wrong.
If a minimal installation of LaTeX does everything you need, then good for you. For some of us, additional packages are absolutely required.
Don't take your experience as universal.
If you learned it in 1995, you know it now.
If you ever had to typeset Chinese or Sanskrit in LaTeX, you'd know the above statement is not true.
Given that it's railing against a central tenet of TeX, I would expect some explanation other than "truth by assertion".
That's a funny statement considering your method of argumentation.
This is in no way restricted to the internet. It's called Rhetoric, and some people are very, very good at it.
A well practiced Rhetorician can hold firm to their position and outright win any debate no matter what that position is. It's a spectacle as breathtaking as it is devastating. You cannot win, not with your training and experience, i.e. which is probably next to none.
Hmm... I've seen those rhetoricians at work and "breathtaking" is not the word that comes to mind. "Mentally deranged" seems more appropriate. Their strategy hinges on requesting the application of Aristotelian logic to the debate and then proceed to ignore those rules. At this point, if someone points out that they are violating their own rules, they scream accusations tu quoque or ad hominem or some other nonsense.
Truly, arguing with those clowns is just as worthwhile as arguing with mentally insane people.
I have to say this "inside story" just sounds like somebody is laying out the groundwork for a defense. Other comments have made a parallel with the Reiser trial. Rightly so, I think.
I agree with Bandman. I recently went through the process of deciding how I would solve my backup problem and decided that a pre-built NAS device was not a good idea. Here's why:
1. They typically are shipping with lame firmware. So you'll have to hack it to get it to do what you want.
2. The companies which manufacture those NASes are not happy about people hacking them. You can find web sites on the internet where enthusiast detail how to hack those machines and replace the firmware but these comes with huge caveats, which I'm now going to list:
a) By hacking the NAS you automatically void your warranty. In theory if there is a hardware fault and you can demonstrate that the problem is hardware and not your replacement of the firmware with your own, you could maybe convince a legal arbiter that the warranty should apply but do you want to have to **fight** for your warranty? I know I don't.
b) It is easy to brick a NAS while hacking it. See point a) above.
c) A good deal of the cheap NASes are built for architectures on which Linux and other OSes do run. However, these architectures are not the ones **primarily** supported by the Linux (or FreeBSD or what-have-ya) community. For instance, I've seen NASes which ran on ARM chips. There is support for Linux on ARM but not all software will compile properly on that architecture. I've seen **recent** posts in forums where someone tried to compile encryption software on an ARM and the compilation failed. They asked around and no one had a solution. Eventually, it was found that the problem was specific to ARM. Probably fixable, but I'm not interested in porting software.
3. The hardware for pre-built NASes is often limited in functionality. For instance, most of the NASes I investigated did not have wake-on-lan support or any support to automatically turn on the NAS only as much as needed.
For all those reasons, I decided to build a mini-itx system and use that as a NAS. It was more expensive than the cheapest NAS I saw but then again that's not an apple-to-apple comparison because my machine does more than those cheap NASes. My system has a VIA C7 Eden processor which is a x86 clone (basically) so I can just install a regular old server edition of Ubuntu. Debian or Red Hat would work just as well. Everything is under warranty. I don't have to fight the manufacturer. I don't risk bricking it and everything which runs on my laptop runs on the backup server.
There's still no one tool that replaces everything that HyperCard did. The genius of HyperCard was that it brought application development to the masses.
HyperCard did not bring application development to the masses by any means. I've programmed extensively in HyperCard back in the day when it was still relevant so I know what it offered.
Application development is much much more than having a cutesy IDE and a programming language which looks like English. I've provided software development services to people in the natural sciences and the humanities. People who understood how to design applications were able to design no matter what language they had to deal with. People who did not understand how to design applications, even if they had no problem understanding the language at hand, typically were not able to conceptualize software that required more than a few functions. Their problem was not primarily with the language but with designing the software they wanted. And I'm not talking about anything terribly sophisticated but even things like merging and sorting lists efficiently was baffling to them. Efficiently is the key word here because they could get something together which did what they wanted but it came at a serious cost in execution time. And that's the thing: it does not matter what language you use. If you can't figure out what algorithms you need, the language won't fill in the blanks for you.
It sounds like you pulled that from your ass. American languages, for instance, are perfectly capable of expressing "This is a red apple" (in Lakhota, it would be "Le thaspan sha", literally "this apple red"--and before you complain about it missing the copula verb "is", please note that Russian does the same thing). In any case, it makes no sense to analyze another language by using English-language sentences without any further explanation. To add to your observation. We can also mention Latin and Sanskrit where the copula is optional. A sentence without copula is not considered strange or bad. Considering that those languages have been used for fairly complex science and philosophy, they surely can't be primitive.
Chinese is a very prominent, in no way primitive, modern language. English itself is fairly isolating when compared to its Germanic origins--for example, it has lost case markings in preference for isolative mechanisms such as prepositions or use of word order to distinguish roles (which is why you can say "I gave him the book" and know it means "I gave the book to him" and not "I gave him to the book"). And by the way, the actual way of saying "This is an apple" in Mandarin Chinese is "Zhe shi yige pingguo", which happens to be identical with the English sentence in structure. Your observation is correct. However, the person you are replying to might have had in mind Classical Chinese in which predication "A is B" is of the form "A B ye". The "ye" particle however is not really a copula because it is also used in non-predicative sentences to emphasize the definitiveness of the statement.
I wonder how much you have to take for beta blockers to feel like weed. Or maybe it is a metabolism thing. I've taken them for many years (100mg daily) and they've never had any noticeable effect on my mood. They've had effects on my energy levels: I have less energy on beta blockers than off.
It's hard for me to see them as enhancing anything. My doctor lowered my dose to 50mg a few months ago and I have not noticed any decrease in mental acumen or any mood effect.
And I've smoked weed when I was in my teens so I know how that feels. I've also taken Xanax for a few months years ago. That definitely had an effect on my mood: it made me apathetic.
Sounds good in theory but I don't think that's quite how it works. Even CEOs who would be considered to have failed end up being hired pretty easily somewhere else. The way CEO performance is measured goes like this. When the company the CEO is heading does well, the CEO gets the credit. When the company the CEO is heading goes down the tubes, there's an excuse like "bad economic climate", "piracy" or something else.
After quitting or being fired from their previous position they are hired with little regard to what their previous performance was because there's always an excuse. Ok, if a CEO does something mind boggingly stupid that will probably have some impact. But run-of-the-mill poor performance won't be enough to make them unemployable.
I agree with most of your point except that I don't think the rationale used by the board in case of failure would be "the CEO was successful at company X so we had a good reason to hire him." I think the rationale is more like "the CEO was labeled with the sacred seal of corporate infallibility, the three-letter acronym "CEO", so we had a good reason to hire him."
Thanks. That's exactly what I'm asking for. It is okay to criticize but without some relevant data or a substantial argument to back up the criticism, it is just pointless.
Is there a good response to the fact that Bill Clinton signed the DMCA into law? That's the part I think is informative.
You complain that the comment was marked informative but you don't present evidence that it should not have been so marked. Is it perhaps that you don't have a case?
Have you thought of AbeBooks? Did you ever check them out and found that it was not a good place for you? I'm asking because to tell you the truth Barnes and Noble has become a non-entity as far as I'm concerned. I tend to check on AbeBooks and Amazon and sometimes bookfinder if I feel I should expand the search. I can't remember the last time I ordered anything from Barnes and Noble. I would say that AbeBooks is my number one destination.
I fully agree. I read the introduction and conclusions of the two linked articles and found that the summary exaggerates the conclusions. There's no doubt that the price/performance ratio of Quad SLI makes it unappealing for the vast majority of people who play games, and I think the two articles do state that. However, NVIDIA did not "drastically miss the mark" (to paraphrase the wording of the summary). They just released a technology which most people won't want to use. It seems to me that this keeps happening now and then. Some GPU company decides to significantly push the envelope but the end result does not have mass appeal. So what? I don't see this as harming the PC gaming market, except perhaps in really roundabout ways. Someone could argue that NVIDIA might have better spent their R&D somewhere else but then again that needs to be demonstrated.
But it's ugly hacks like that which drove me away from Java in the first place. I'd rather duck-type it properly, like I do in Ruby. If it claims to have a working [] operator, and has methods like size() or length(), either it's an array, or it's pretending to be one, so treat it like an array.
This is all nice and well until someone misses the fact that a function which was expecting an array was expecting a specific kind of array. Something which has [] and size() and/or length() methods could be a regular old array in which elements are indexed by number and which iterates over elements in order of their numerical index. Or it could be an hash table which iterates over elements in an order appearing arbitrary from outside the implementation of the table. Then if the function expects a certain order of iteration, you're screwed.
At this point someone will interject "testing! testing!". Okay, but when using significant software written by third parties in python or Ruby or similar languages I've experienced several cases of exceptions being raised because one part of the software passed an unexpected object to another part. So I guess the testing did not catch that, now, did it?
I've written software used in a production environment (i.e. the business depended on the software working well) in both python and Java. So I'm used to both duck-typing and the strict kind of typing Java does. I don't think one is better than the other in any kind of absolute sense (i.e. irrespective of context). For scripting, I almost always use python. For bigger apps, it depends.
It seems to me that if the goal is to get the box to configure itself based on who's in front of the TV there ought to be other solutions out there that would be more robust and cheaper than facial recognition. More importantly, there ought to be solutions that have less potential for invasion of privacy.
It could be done by manually hitting a button on the remote to change configuration.
It could be done automatically by wearing a radio device that the cable box detects.
Granted, these are not as "convenient" as perfectly working facial recognition. In the first case you have to press a button and in the second case if you forget your radio device somewhere else, it does not work.
You're talking about Zeno's paradoxes, I presume.
Nice way to generalize cultural differences. For sure, being in the US for all of two years makes you an expert on how US schools are run and your encounter with two Indian students surely makes you an expert on Indian culture too. Because, as we all know Indian culture is a big monolithic bloc, Indian individuals really have no individuality and a sample size of two is statistically representative.
Fortunately for you, I'm not going to judge you as a person or decide what Europe is like just based on your post.
You are interpreting the argument "you cannot patent an idea" too broadly. That does not mean "you cannot patent something which has any kind of intellectual content to it" because then as you point out, nothing would be patentable. Rather, it means "you cannot patent a *mere* idea". Of course in a patentable invention there are going to be ideas but you also should be required to implement those ideas in a concrete system. (Note that I say you *should*. I doubt that the PTO is very zealous in that area given all the crap that successfully passes through their system.) Basically, if you want a patent, you should be able to demonstrate that can implement what you want to patent.
To your second point, I will answer: THAT is why it is ridiculous. If someone shoots you, does it really matter to you (or society, for that matter) WHY it was done? As far as punishment is concerned, that is. Historically, in order to find someone guilty it was sufficient to show motivation... it was not important what that motivation was. It is already a capital crime. Why should you, as a minority (hypothetically speaking of course) be able to punish your attacker more than I, a member of the majority? Are you worth more to society than I? Who says so?
The criminal justice system is not about the victim punishing the criminal but about society containing the threat posed by a criminal. There is a punitive aspect to that and also a corrective aspect (i.e. ideally the criminal should change his anti-social behavior) but containing the threat is first and foremost. I do see a difference between Joe beating Bob because Bob insulted him and Joe beating Bob because Bob is black. In the latter case you have a significant proportion of the population which because of genetics which they do not control are likely targets of Joe's violence. In the first case violence erupts because someone insulted Joe. The trigger "insulting Joe" is highly contingent on circumstances. That is, there is no individual in society for which "insulting Joe" is true all the time. In the second case violence erupts because there was a black guy around to beat on. The trigger "being black" is not contingent. There are several individuals in society for which "being black" is true all the time. I do think that if Joe happily beats black people, he's more of a threat to society than if he just happens to beat someone (no matter what their race is). I hold this true whatever races are involved in the scenario: white, black; black, white; white, white; black, black. (Yep, you can totally hate on your own race.) Other non-contingent conditions could also be considered like if someone beats other people because they are: male, fat, have blond hair, handicapped, homeless, etc. (Some of these are contingent in the long term but not in the short term. It is possible to stop insulting someone if they threaten you but you can't suddenly stop being fat or homeless.)
Slashdot Mirror
I've owned several D-Link routers, either through no fault of my own or pressed for time and had to buy it. In all of the years I've had to deal with them, I've learned this:
D-Link is Shit. Buy Linksys.
I've owned several Linksys routers and learned the exact opposite. My D-Link router is stable and does not need constant reboots. My Linksys routers needed constant babysitting. The straw that broke the camel's back was when I found my Linksys routers would not route WOL packets. I looked for a firmware upgrade (official or otherwise), found none and said "screw Linksys."
First of all, amusing to see this position on /. -- and to see it upmodded! Installing software on a device you actually own and then restoring it before calling support is fraud?
There's nothing surprising with the position voiced.
There's the legal aspect and there's the ethical aspect. The two are not equal. It is possible for someone to consider an act which is illegal to be ethical or an act which is legal to be unethical.
Installing on a device a firmware not approved by the manufacturer typically relieves the manufacturer from having to provide a warranty. The manufacturer can still provide warranty-covered service for the device but they do not have to. Reinstalling the original firmware does not reinstate the original obligations of the warranty. Trying to get service on warranty while at the same time hiding the fact that the firmware was at one point replaced with unauthorized firmware is illegal.
But you can still argue it is not unethical. This may be the position some of the people on Slashdot would want to take.
Jailbreaking DOES void the warranty
Repeating a lie doesn't make it true.
It is not a lie and you have not demonstrated otherwise. Jailbreaking does void the warranty.
Apple will not service a Jailbroken phone - but that doesn't mean they will not service a phone that has been restored to the original OS, an operation that takes about five minutes. Once restored Apple cannot tell if it was ever Jailbroken or not.
The scenario you are talking about here is a case where the user has voided the warranty by jailbreaking the phone and then hides that fact. That's an act of deception on the part of the user. Restoring the original OS does not unvoid the warranty.
What if the VPS provider burns down or suffers any other serious hardware failure which results in data loss? Actually, hardware failures are more likely than buildings burning down. I've never been in a house fire but I've had quite a few HDs fail on me.
Given that affordable VPS providers do not make guarantees about preserving the data stored on a VPS, I don't think having the data on a VPS is safer. I actually do have a VPS for my web site and back up elsewhere the data stored in my VPS because if a catastrophe were to strike my VPS provider, there is no guarantee as to my data.
And before you start pointing out other possible "issues", rest assured that I've considered everything and I know where I traded off. Data storage is not a matter of absolutes but a balancing act between convenience, security and price. At the end of the day, the fact remains that I do not trust the people who run VPSes with my data. No amount of argument is going to convince me that they are trustworthy.
I've looked into this in the past. There is nothing better than Duplicity.
I eventually gave up and started backing up my data to servers that I do trust.
I came to the same conclusion. All the solutions out there required me to compromise on things I did not want to compromise on.
You should too. You can rent a VPS for only $20 per month. It's just easier and *know* that you're the only one who has root access (assuming that you keep updating your system, of course).
Hmm... on a VPS you are not the only one with root access. Those who provide you the VPS can do anything to it. So I do not consider this to be "trusted" by any stretch of the imagination. I solved my problem by building myself a NAS. Contrarily to the usual suggestion of reusing an old computer, I bought new, power-efficient hardware to keep the electricity consumption down. It sits in my house. I'm the only one with root access.
Granted that there's an inherent complexity which will never go away, even with "XML pixie dust".
However, if a system came out which did what LaTeX did and used XML markup for input, there would be advantages which LaTeX never had and never will have unless it becomes something else than LaTeX.
1. An XML document can very easily be transformed by means of XSLT or other tools.
2. Getting third-party tools to process an XML document is easier than doing the same with LaTeX.
I keep my resume in home-brewed XML markup precisely because of the two points above. I can easily from one XML document produce a text version, a PDF version and an XHTML version.
The one big downside is that XML markup is much heavier than LaTeX markup.
LaTeX is the pinnacle of "what you did 10 years ago will work beautifully today". If you are installing new packages willy-nilly, something is horribly wrong.
If a minimal installation of LaTeX does everything you need, then good for you. For some of us, additional packages are absolutely required.
Don't take your experience as universal.
If you learned it in 1995, you know it now.
If you ever had to typeset Chinese or Sanskrit in LaTeX, you'd know the above statement is not true.
Given that it's railing against a central tenet of TeX, I would expect some explanation other than "truth by assertion".
That's a funny statement considering your method of argumentation.
Hmm... I've seen those rhetoricians at work and "breathtaking" is not the word that comes to mind. "Mentally deranged" seems more appropriate. Their strategy hinges on requesting the application of Aristotelian logic to the debate and then proceed to ignore those rules. At this point, if someone points out that they are violating their own rules, they scream accusations tu quoque or ad hominem or some other nonsense.
Truly, arguing with those clowns is just as worthwhile as arguing with mentally insane people.
I have to say this "inside story" just sounds like somebody is laying out the groundwork for a defense. Other comments have made a parallel with the Reiser trial. Rightly so, I think.
I agree with Bandman. I recently went through the process of deciding how I would solve my backup problem and decided that a pre-built NAS device was not a good idea. Here's why:
1. They typically are shipping with lame firmware. So you'll have to hack it to get it to do what you want.
2. The companies which manufacture those NASes are not happy about people hacking them. You can find web sites on the internet where enthusiast detail how to hack those machines and replace the firmware but these comes with huge caveats, which I'm now going to list:
a) By hacking the NAS you automatically void your warranty. In theory if there is a hardware fault and you can demonstrate that the problem is hardware and not your replacement of the firmware with your own, you could maybe convince a legal arbiter that the warranty should apply but do you want to have to **fight** for your warranty? I know I don't.
b) It is easy to brick a NAS while hacking it. See point a) above.
c) A good deal of the cheap NASes are built for architectures on which Linux and other OSes do run. However, these architectures are not the ones **primarily** supported by the Linux (or FreeBSD or what-have-ya) community. For instance, I've seen NASes which ran on ARM chips. There is support for Linux on ARM but not all software will compile properly on that architecture. I've seen **recent** posts in forums where someone tried to compile encryption software on an ARM and the compilation failed. They asked around and no one had a solution. Eventually, it was found that the problem was specific to ARM. Probably fixable, but I'm not interested in porting software.
3. The hardware for pre-built NASes is often limited in functionality. For instance, most of the NASes I investigated did not have wake-on-lan support or any support to automatically turn on the NAS only as much as needed.
For all those reasons, I decided to build a mini-itx system and use that as a NAS. It was more expensive than the cheapest NAS I saw but then again that's not an apple-to-apple comparison because my machine does more than those cheap NASes. My system has a VIA C7 Eden processor which is a x86 clone (basically) so I can just install a regular old server edition of Ubuntu. Debian or Red Hat would work just as well. Everything is under warranty. I don't have to fight the manufacturer. I don't risk bricking it and everything which runs on my laptop runs on the backup server.
HyperCard did not bring application development to the masses by any means. I've programmed extensively in HyperCard back in the day when it was still relevant so I know what it offered.
Application development is much much more than having a cutesy IDE and a programming language which looks like English. I've provided software development services to people in the natural sciences and the humanities. People who understood how to design applications were able to design no matter what language they had to deal with. People who did not understand how to design applications, even if they had no problem understanding the language at hand, typically were not able to conceptualize software that required more than a few functions. Their problem was not primarily with the language but with designing the software they wanted. And I'm not talking about anything terribly sophisticated but even things like merging and sorting lists efficiently was baffling to them. Efficiently is the key word here because they could get something together which did what they wanted but it came at a serious cost in execution time. And that's the thing: it does not matter what language you use. If you can't figure out what algorithms you need, the language won't fill in the blanks for you.
I wonder how much you have to take for beta blockers to feel like weed. Or maybe it is a metabolism thing. I've taken them for many years (100mg daily) and they've never had any noticeable effect on my mood. They've had effects on my energy levels: I have less energy on beta blockers than off.
It's hard for me to see them as enhancing anything. My doctor lowered my dose to 50mg a few months ago and I have not noticed any decrease in mental acumen or any mood effect.
And I've smoked weed when I was in my teens so I know how that feels. I've also taken Xanax for a few months years ago. That definitely had an effect on my mood: it made me apathetic.
But I would include all CxO positions, CEO, CIO, CTO, CFO and even senior VPs.
Agreed!
Sounds good in theory but I don't think that's quite how it works. Even CEOs who would be considered to have failed end up being hired pretty easily somewhere else. The way CEO performance is measured goes like this. When the company the CEO is heading does well, the CEO gets the credit. When the company the CEO is heading goes down the tubes, there's an excuse like "bad economic climate", "piracy" or something else.
After quitting or being fired from their previous position they are hired with little regard to what their previous performance was because there's always an excuse. Ok, if a CEO does something mind boggingly stupid that will probably have some impact. But run-of-the-mill poor performance won't be enough to make them unemployable.
I agree with most of your point except that I don't think the rationale used by the board in case of failure would be "the CEO was successful at company X so we had a good reason to hire him." I think the rationale is more like "the CEO was labeled with the sacred seal of corporate infallibility, the three-letter acronym "CEO", so we had a good reason to hire him."
Heh... I guess I'm more cynical or something.
Thanks. That's exactly what I'm asking for. It is okay to criticize but without some relevant data or a substantial argument to back up the criticism, it is just pointless. Is there a good response to the fact that Bill Clinton signed the DMCA into law? That's the part I think is informative.
You complain that the comment was marked informative but you don't present evidence that it should not have been so marked. Is it perhaps that you don't have a case?
Have you thought of AbeBooks? Did you ever check them out and found that it was not a good place for you? I'm asking because to tell you the truth Barnes and Noble has become a non-entity as far as I'm concerned. I tend to check on AbeBooks and Amazon and sometimes bookfinder if I feel I should expand the search. I can't remember the last time I ordered anything from Barnes and Noble. I would say that AbeBooks is my number one destination.
I fully agree. I read the introduction and conclusions of the two linked articles and found that the summary exaggerates the conclusions. There's no doubt that the price/performance ratio of Quad SLI makes it unappealing for the vast majority of people who play games, and I think the two articles do state that. However, NVIDIA did not "drastically miss the mark" (to paraphrase the wording of the summary). They just released a technology which most people won't want to use. It seems to me that this keeps happening now and then. Some GPU company decides to significantly push the envelope but the end result does not have mass appeal. So what? I don't see this as harming the PC gaming market, except perhaps in really roundabout ways. Someone could argue that NVIDIA might have better spent their R&D somewhere else but then again that needs to be demonstrated.
This is all nice and well until someone misses the fact that a function which was expecting an array was expecting a specific kind of array. Something which has [] and size() and/or length() methods could be a regular old array in which elements are indexed by number and which iterates over elements in order of their numerical index. Or it could be an hash table which iterates over elements in an order appearing arbitrary from outside the implementation of the table. Then if the function expects a certain order of iteration, you're screwed.
At this point someone will interject "testing! testing!". Okay, but when using significant software written by third parties in python or Ruby or similar languages I've experienced several cases of exceptions being raised because one part of the software passed an unexpected object to another part. So I guess the testing did not catch that, now, did it?
I've written software used in a production environment (i.e. the business depended on the software working well) in both python and Java. So I'm used to both duck-typing and the strict kind of typing Java does. I don't think one is better than the other in any kind of absolute sense (i.e. irrespective of context). For scripting, I almost always use python. For bigger apps, it depends.
It seems to me that if the goal is to get the box to configure itself based on who's in front of the TV there ought to be other solutions out there that would be more robust and cheaper than facial recognition. More importantly, there ought to be solutions that have less potential for invasion of privacy.
It could be done by manually hitting a button on the remote to change configuration.
It could be done automatically by wearing a radio device that the cable box detects.
Granted, these are not as "convenient" as perfectly working facial recognition. In the first case you have to press a button and in the second case if you forget your radio device somewhere else, it does not work.
You're talking about Zeno's paradoxes, I presume. Nice way to generalize cultural differences. For sure, being in the US for all of two years makes you an expert on how US schools are run and your encounter with two Indian students surely makes you an expert on Indian culture too. Because, as we all know Indian culture is a big monolithic bloc, Indian individuals really have no individuality and a sample size of two is statistically representative. Fortunately for you, I'm not going to judge you as a person or decide what Europe is like just based on your post.
You are interpreting the argument "you cannot patent an idea" too broadly. That does not mean "you cannot patent something which has any kind of intellectual content to it" because then as you point out, nothing would be patentable. Rather, it means "you cannot patent a *mere* idea". Of course in a patentable invention there are going to be ideas but you also should be required to implement those ideas in a concrete system. (Note that I say you *should*. I doubt that the PTO is very zealous in that area given all the crap that successfully passes through their system.) Basically, if you want a patent, you should be able to demonstrate that can implement what you want to patent.
The criminal justice system is not about the victim punishing the criminal but about society containing the threat posed by a criminal. There is a punitive aspect to that and also a corrective aspect (i.e. ideally the criminal should change his anti-social behavior) but containing the threat is first and foremost. I do see a difference between Joe beating Bob because Bob insulted him and Joe beating Bob because Bob is black. In the latter case you have a significant proportion of the population which because of genetics which they do not control are likely targets of Joe's violence. In the first case violence erupts because someone insulted Joe. The trigger "insulting Joe" is highly contingent on circumstances. That is, there is no individual in society for which "insulting Joe" is true all the time. In the second case violence erupts because there was a black guy around to beat on. The trigger "being black" is not contingent. There are several individuals in society for which "being black" is true all the time. I do think that if Joe happily beats black people, he's more of a threat to society than if he just happens to beat someone (no matter what their race is). I hold this true whatever races are involved in the scenario: white, black; black, white; white, white; black, black. (Yep, you can totally hate on your own race.) Other non-contingent conditions could also be considered like if someone beats other people because they are: male, fat, have blond hair, handicapped, homeless, etc. (Some of these are contingent in the long term but not in the short term. It is possible to stop insulting someone if they threaten you but you can't suddenly stop being fat or homeless.)