...I wonder why Herbert never thought of having some Fremen just crash a few comets into the planet to at least provide some selected portion of it with water. Of course, that would have killed off all the sandworms.
Because the Fremen had enough trouble just bribing the Spacing Guild to keep them from putting up weather/surveillance satellites that would expose their way of life and their actual numbers? And of course killing of the sandworms in a short time would have killed off most of the Fremen as well with their melange addiction.
My favourite past winner is the 2003 Physics Prize: "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces". Real research... just sounds funny. Imagine being at a party "....interesting, so what kind of research do you do?" "Currently I'm investigating the frictional coefficients of sheep on different surfaces"
So, while we do, in fact, have a large global consumer footprint, we still, as a nation of plenty, have to capacity to contribute back resources.
Using just the exports tells you what the US can produce efficently, it doesn't measure in general how much is "contributed back". The US does export more agricultural products than it uses but the export surplus is worth about 3.5 billion USD (about 12 dollars per capita). (Graphics: http://www.fas.usda.gov/cmp/outlook/2006/Aug-06/08 -06b.jpg
Then you have the issue with agricultural subsidies in all the major industrialized markets (EU, Japan, USA) which skews the market as whole.
As I have pondered doing this, I had concerns about the humidity level of the wood going up and down as the case got hot, then cold, then hot again. I wondered if this would eventually crack or split the wood. What is the longevity? Is his choice of woods helpful in this regard? My chioce would have been ceder, what a great smelling computer, but it is very prone to splitting....
Guess there's better quality cedar around because you can apparently line a sauna with cedar (http://www.doityourself.com/stry/homesauna). The temperature differential in a sauna is of course much higher and as we all know (or can imagine) it's not a place where you want splintering wood.
And in general the lifespan of sauna is much longer than any computer.
Is it the gambling casinos in the states. How much money is beig channeled through the lobby system in Washington.
Wonder if any money is actually needed.... they casino reps only need to sidle up to them and point out "We're in the state and provide jobs, tax incomes etc. On-line gambling gets you nothing, Do you really want that?"
...but I have heard they would have a tough time even if they wanted to open source *nix because all the different copyright holders to individual pieces would have to agree. I don't think open sourcing *nix would be that beneficial anyway....
And then there's the very interesting question wether SCO/Caldera had the underlying copyrights to begin with (they clearly own their own code of course).
From the Novell-SCO Asset Purchase Agreement:
1.1 Purchase of Assets (a) ends with: "Notwithstanding the
foregoing, the Assets to be so purchased shall not include those assets
(the "Excluded Assets") set forth on Schedule 1.1 (b)".
And further down Schedule 1.1 (b) Excluded Assets (Page 2 of 2) contains the following:
V. Intellectual Property:
A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the trademarks UNIX and
UnixWare.
I read in the comments of the page that such a motion is only granted if it is shown that it will not make SCO bankrupt. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't understand why these motions exist then? Why would Novell get money from SCO in the first place? What has the deal with microsoft and sun to do with novell?
When SCO/Caldera bought some rights to Unix System V from Novell they couldn't/wouldn't pay enough money up front. So they agreed that of all future license there would be a 95/5 split between Novell and SCO/Calders (yes, 95% to Novell).
they can want real money, but according to the DMCA they can't have it
Guessing it's harder (but not impossible) to do against YouTube... but OTOH YouTube has to help with identifying infringers which would put as much of a wet blanket on things.
The problem is that they are supposed to be protected because they take down videos when they get a take-down notice. They also have a system that tries to prevent similar files from being re-uploaded.
Maybe that won't stop some jokers though.
I'm guessing that is a somewhat workable strategy unless some major player wants to buy it... then the content providers that are in competition with the buyer will swoop in and not only want a take-down but some real money just to make them bleed. And suddenly it's not so attractive to buy anymore.
This will be really interesting to watch. I mean, AOL has dirt on everyone - I can imagine it will be hard to have a court case against them when AOL can come back and say "Oh here you are searching for child porn, illegal song downloads, etc." Unless they don't have anything to be ashamed of I can see it being a very difficult case for the plaintiffs.
Such low blows could very well work on a singel individual... but if applying that to a whole group of people then there's bound to be one or two that will start fighting. And the cost of loosing the original lawsuit would be a mere pittance compared to the cost for making criminal accusations without being able to prove them (while trying to get out of a court case to boot)
And another reasons would be to get the users time to switch over to some of the news apps in a timely fashion (i.e. not just having them "airlifted" into a whole new set of apps and OS). That's why they also have an interrim stage where the users run OpenOffice on Windows. First the apps, then the OS... makes sense doesn't it?
Re:Not as secure as it was originally made out to
on
Brave New Ballot
·
· Score: 1
Paper ballots? How quaint!.. The Floridian "poor", you see, were disproportionatly confused by them -- much easier to have them use computers, which even a retired librarian, overseing the voting station on election day, will be able fix and to spot any and all possible tampering with...
I find this to be an excellent point. I do not understand why anyone should choose electronic ballots. For me a computerized solution only works if actually provides some kind of improvement on the paper ballot system. And just counting the votes doesn't make it a good point for me. I'm located in Sweden and with some 5 million votes getting a full count in a day or two doesn't make it any less reliable. Even if go to another magnitude like in the US it doesn't hamper speed that much (the counting on the basic ballot level is the time-consuming thing, NOT the adding on the upper levels). And add to that the fact that you'll have little problems with finding people to double check counts (just ask people working for the invovled parties to do it). Don't use machines... use plain paper ballots... no electronics and no mechanics.
You should just KISS the election process. Keep It Simple Stupid.
The use of Linux and commercial grade gear for the space program is really quite cool stuff. It makes me think that a really cool contest for NASA would be to have grad students desgn and build a rover/probe and the winner (once vetted by NASA) is actually launched into space. It is probably cost prohibitive but it would be very cool if it happened. It may be a way to break NASA groupthink, and re0invigorate designs with some fresh minds. Not that I'm critisizing NASAs robotics programs, the Mars rovers are a smashing success.
I suspect that the idea here is to cut down development costs, not the build costs for the final implementation. Commercial grade gear just wouldn't cut in space with the extrem temperature swings, cosmic radiation messing with memory or if you end up on Venus god knows what kind of weird atmosphere.
But someone could actually build a proof of concept design (like they're doing now) that could become the basis for the actual rover. I can't imagine it takes that much more work using Linux than some other solution since there's bound to be a lot of non-standard stuff going on with the rover software.
Thanks for the interesting insight. Guess we have it good here in Sweden where we have 3 providers in most areas (and a handful of virtual providers but they just buy access from the owners of the physical nets).
Ok, now you have my interest. Are you saying that pre-paid phones aren't locked into any particular band/provider? That's interesting news. I've been in situations where I'm looking at a cell tower and can't get service. I thought that AT&T would switch my Nokia phone to another provider's tower if they weren't covering me with their service. I dropped AT&T because of that incident.
With "unlocked" I mean that the SIM card can be replaced with another providers SIM card (subsidised phones are usually locked down but I guess you knew about that in some way). Sounds what you would have liked was kind of a local roaming (or national perhaps depending on where you are). I guess there's not enough people like you to drive that kind of business.
Roaming rocks though... called a friend and said I was heading his way in a day or so to he said "Kind of a bad time since I'm in Germany right now drinking beer and looking at a sunset over a lake." Damn him:)
If someone moves around (work or otherwise) in an area where the reception is splotchy then I'd guess that person might be best served by buying an unlocked phone and using prepaid calls. Not as cheap, no... but what should a buyer expect with no lock-in?
Canon EOS 350D DIGITAL and Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL are the same camera AFAIK, just differnent names for different markets. It's called 350D in Europe, Digital Rebel in the US... rest of the world I don't know.
Guess it says something about the demography of the posters though.
Some day this might very well be the next big thing. But I wouldn't take the manufacturers word as the gospel for when it's going to arrive. And it really has to be cheaper to replace flash memories en masse. Flash is good enough for phones, memory cards etc. The new tech doesn't solve any obvious fundamental flaw (100 000 read/write cycles is still enough for most applications)
Compare with SED displays. We all want them (if they're not much more expensive than our current ones). But it's been slipping a bit. For now it looks it will arrive in 2008 in the mass markets according to Canon chairman Mitarai (Canon and Toshiba is working together on this). And I don't think he's being conservative. (The reason given for the delay is that "we have not yet established the manufacturing technology for mass-producing SEDs at low cost," Source: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml?articleID=192700864.
I will be surprised if anything comes of this. If there is missing money it hasnt gone to shareholders, wth the dropping of the pda line, mp3 players and other "extras" it hasnt gone into product development, and we all know it certainly hasnt gone into customer service...
"Missing money" doesn't mean that the money was there to begin with. Just that they (if true) have misstated their income in some way. Why would a company do this? Numerous reasons: to prop up the share price... the top brass might have some bonus system that requires certain results... keeping the credit rating up... and the list goes on.
That's kind of mean, considering that the words "OSS Community" appear in the title of the post. The original poster has a good point.
Not in this this particular discussion he hasn't. It's merely a misstatement that can be used as a rhetorical device to deflect the discussion from the real issue. One of the important points of the moderation systems is to keep discussions on-topic. And putting words in the mouth of people hardly is on-topic.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to reply to my own post but I forgot the fact that the Spacing Guild obviously would be totally against any action endagering the spice supply.
My favourite past winner is the 2003 Physics Prize: "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces". Real research... just sounds funny. Imagine being at a party "....interesting, so what kind of research do you do?" "Currently I'm investigating the frictional coefficients of sheep on different surfaces"
You just might want to check out the nature of the Ig Nobel prize... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel :)
Then you have the issue with agricultural subsidies in all the major industrialized markets (EU, Japan, USA) which skews the market as whole.
And in general the lifespan of sauna is much longer than any computer.
From the Novell-SCO Asset Purchase Agreement:
1.1 Purchase of Assets (a) ends with: "Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Assets to be so purchased shall not include those assets (the "Excluded Assets") set forth on Schedule 1.1 (b)".
And further down Schedule 1.1 (b) Excluded Assets (Page 2 of 2) contains the following:
V. Intellectual Property:
A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the trademarks UNIX and UnixWare.
B. All Patents.
(Source: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031110
...you find it causes rips in the fabric itself by applying viral DRM.
And another reasons would be to get the users time to switch over to some of the news apps in a timely fashion (i.e. not just having them "airlifted" into a whole new set of apps and OS). That's why they also have an interrim stage where the users run OpenOffice on Windows. First the apps, then the OS... makes sense doesn't it?
You should just KISS the election process. Keep It Simple Stupid.
I suspect that the idea here is to cut down development costs, not the build costs for the final implementation. Commercial grade gear just wouldn't cut in space with the extrem temperature swings, cosmic radiation messing with memory or if you end up on Venus god knows what kind of weird atmosphere.
But someone could actually build a proof of concept design (like they're doing now) that could become the basis for the actual rover. I can't imagine it takes that much more work using Linux than some other solution since there's bound to be a lot of non-standard stuff going on with the rover software.
Thanks for the interesting insight. Guess we have it good here in Sweden where we have 3 providers in most areas (and a handful of virtual providers but they just buy access from the owners of the physical nets).
Roaming rocks though... called a friend and said I was heading his way in a day or so to he said "Kind of a bad time since I'm in Germany right now drinking beer and looking at a sunset over a lake." Damn him
If someone moves around (work or otherwise) in an area where the reception is splotchy then I'd guess that person might be best served by buying an unlocked phone and using prepaid calls. Not as cheap, no... but what should a buyer expect with no lock-in?
Canon EOS 350D DIGITAL and Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL are the same camera AFAIK, just differnent names for different markets. It's called 350D in Europe, Digital Rebel in the US... rest of the world I don't know.
Guess it says something about the demography of the posters though.
Some day this might very well be the next big thing. But I wouldn't take the manufacturers word as the gospel for when it's going to arrive. And it really has to be cheaper to replace flash memories en masse. Flash is good enough for phones, memory cards etc. The new tech doesn't solve any obvious fundamental flaw (100 000 read/write cycles is still enough for most applications)
t ml?articleID=192700864.
Compare with SED displays. We all want them (if they're not much more expensive than our current ones). But it's been slipping a bit. For now it looks it will arrive in 2008 in the mass markets according to Canon chairman Mitarai (Canon and Toshiba is working together on this). And I don't think he's being conservative. (The reason given for the delay is that "we have not yet established the manufacturing technology for mass-producing SEDs at low cost," Source: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jh
To get as good help as possible, please post a more detailed account of "various reasons" that the mentioned alternatives wouldn't work for you.
Might not only be helpful for you but also to others looking for a similar solution.