I prefer to celebrate Pie day.
I decide when Pie day is. (As often as possible.)
(beer: goes well with Pie, or pasties.)
6077 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
" After all, government already does spy in the real world: That's what the police is for, traditionally."
No. Traditionally and currently, the police are for upholding the law and protecting citizens from criminals. (The cynical among you might start laughing at this point.) Government spying is a totaly different function and a different organisation.
If the ultracapacitor has enough energy storage capability and can respond well to transient charge/discharge, this could also be useful for storing large charging surges that the Li-ion would be incapable of accepting efficiently. (e.g regenerative braking surges, etc?). Despite this apparent advanatge, it doesn't seem to make sense to integrate the ultracapacitor, with monitoring and control electronics, as part of the battery housing, unless you're very sure you have a mass-market application which is well understood and for which the control electronics, ultracapacitor size and battery capacity have been 'tuned'.
" ... the creator of Bitcoin – whoever he or she is – has by public record amassed a $400m stash in the virtual currency ..."
Is this because the visible structure of the data shows an origin point and an associated amount before a new 'mining' operation started? Additionaly, does it also show that the first amount of Bitcoins were never transfered to a different wallet? Does this have implications for anonymity if enough computing power is applied to analysis of the Bitcoin 'ecosystem'?
I installed Linux (Mint 13 LTS) last May as dual boot with Win7 and spent 3-4 weeks getting used to it. After that, I used Win7 less and less and then got rid of it by fitting my laptop with a shiny new 60GB SSD and Linux Mint. I never looked back since then. I also put the same Linux on my old desktop, old laptop and old netbook. There is a learning curve and a swearing curve but I'd recommend it.
Before you try it, read the Linux Mint forums and other forums to get an idea of the problems that people have and how they work around them.
The MP3 compression algorithm is just a mathematical formula but is patented and a licence is needed to encode audio to MP3. The argument is that a lot of work went into inital studies and testing to find a suitable set of weighting factors to give a balance between compression ratio, ease of operation and fidelity. The MP3 encoding technique (and just about all codecs) is based on decades old mathematical research that is free for everyone to use (the formulae), but you'd better not copy the mix of methods and the internal weighting factors of a well known one, or you will be sued.
It sounds like the Twinkle Twins have copied the basic technique (time varying, multi dimensional weighted averages, whatever...) and I'm sure they did a lot of original work and much testing before they hit upon their own unique weighting parameters.
" ...the Chinese government has tried to intervene by persuading Redmond to continue support for the legacy OS."
Did they intervene, in any useful way, to prevent the use of pirated XP installations?
(I am not a Windows fanboi and I do know how easy it was/is to clone an XP installation or get a key.)
I've been a Linux-at-home user for 9 months now and it was a stressful time for two weeks (serious swearing) then a bit stressful (mild swearing) for two weeks; then it was fine. I used MS-DOS then Windows for 25 years and I haven't touched Windows since last November; I don't have it anymore except on the old spinning rust disk in a bag in my desk drawer. (SSD all the way now). I've tried MATE and Cinnamon and XFCE and a couple of weird lightweight ones and I've settled on MATE. Whatever you choose will work for you, because that's the reason you choose it - duh.
I don't startup my newish laptop, or desktop, or netbook, or 8 year old laptop (yes, it's great, with PATA SSD) so that I can admire MATE's system panel or the way it presents notifications. I startup my computer so I can run a browser, or an e-mail client or GIMP or splice audio files or play some music. I did spend some time setting up my pop-out panels and loading them with drawers and the drawers with apps and folder locations etc. - but then I started using my computer to do work. (Also, the great thing is that I can migrate/clone my MATE desktop environment over to another computer).
As for the Windows fanbois talking about 'fragmentation'; it's 'choice' and it's free :) I install Thunderbird or the latest GIMP from the same source whatever DE is used. If for some strange reason, I want to try Cinnamon again (I didn't like it), I can load it up and start in Cinnamon (Linix startup gives you that choice at a button click) and it still runs the same installed programs.
I don't use the Contacts functionality on my Android phone, since I know they will be sniffed and copied by Google and many other apps on there. Many apps need permission to access your contacts in order to work - god alone (and the developers) know why. I use ColorNote which has the ability to recognise a phone number in a Note and highlight it and push it into the dialer for you. Interestingly, Evernote used to have that capability, but it was removed with an update about a year ago.
How do I know that Colornote won't sniff the phone numbers in my Notes? I don't, but at least it's only one organisation to trust, instead of many.
This is effectively 'proof by induction', where you say (sort of): if it's true for this, it must be true for that, and I've just shown it for this, so it must be true for all that. It works if you dig deeper into it. Proof by induction can get messy because you have to show (sometimes laboriously) that it is true for a certain case or cases.
Yes but .... the workers they hire locally and pay locally, don't buy goods and services from Tata Consulting Services. Also, you raise the issue of 'long term sense' .......... TCS would be concerned with short and medium term costs and profits.