Posts by Steven Knox

Crossover/Impersonator...

IS NOT WINE. It USES WINE and makes it more user-friendly.

WINE is not ready for the masses. Crossover almost was. Impersonator just may be.

... and AGAIN

We have someone who doesn't know the difference between patents and copyrights. For reference, US Patents expire in 20 years or less. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_patent_in_the_United_States)

US _copyrights_ are the ones that last for way too long.

Fractions

"...I pay my tax and therefore I already own the H2g2..."

No, you own approximately one 30 millionth* of it. If you really want to take your share, fine. Here you go:

"<p"

Have a nice day.

*1/30 700 000 figure based on http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/tax_receipts/table1-4.pdf assuming taxes other than income tax are considered fee taxes rather than stakeholder taxes and that your income tax is roughly average. So you're probably getting more than your fair share here, but I'm feeling nice.

HDMI Audio out

Seems rather sound to me...

DCMA?

What's the Defense Contract Management Agency got to do with this?

^This

Can we upvote more than once? A few hundred times, perhaps?

Really?

So you commented to:

1) criticize this guy for running a system on Windows, even though it's worked for him and he's been able to identify why a major failure happened, and

2) admit that the unix-variant you're running currently has a major failure that you can't identify.

Not ignored...

But not relevant. If you read the finding, you'll see that the case of non-willfulness was determined by analysis of the complexity of the process patented and the infringing process using a well-known (in patent legal circles) precedent.

Given that, Microsoft's prior record would have no effect on that finding.

Since that finding is the only one in favor of Microsoft, Microsoft's prior record is clearly unnecessary as evidence for the other findings.

Finally, Uniloc would have had to present Microsoft's record as evidence and apparently did not do so. I hardly think it's fair to blame a court for "ignoring" evidence which has not been presented to it.

RE: Depreciation

Whether depreciation is linear or not depends on which calculation method your organization chooses to use (which depends on which methods are legal in your country.) Straight-line depreciation is based on the initial value and does allow for a 0 or negative salvage value. You've described the declining-balance method.

Hardly definitive, but a good starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depreciation

Because...

If we had them, we could answer your questions (both the text one and the implicit one in your icon.)

RTFA...

and FTFL. The article gives a direct comparison and a link to the original press release, which includes sales figures in paragraph one.

Thanks...

for that link; it was an interesting piece of opinion on English usage.

Unfortunately, I think the underlying point of that piece actually undermines your comment. The point was that a noun should be treated as singular or plural on the basis of its etymology, but on the basis of its usage.

If Lewis had said "The first data _point_ was collected...", we would not argue that the subject was singular. If he had said "The first data _points_ were collected...", again there would be no discrepancy. It's solely the reliance on the ambiguous term "data" which causes the question.

In the case of the article, Lewis was speaking of data collected "in 2002". Without further clarification, it is reasonable to guess that this would consist of many points of data, likely collected in two or more discrete sets. That would, in my opinion, easily justify the plural. However, he could have been talking only about the very first point or set, which would imply a singular usage. So it comes down to interpretation.

In the end, we must accept that our language is a hodgepodge, a melange or salmagundi, if you will, of many languages and influences, and writers are continually changing the meaning and structure of the language (inkyfool referred to Shakespeare -- we consider him a genius, but if his writing were judged by the prevailing grammar of his day, he'd be graded a failure.) In my lifetime, I've seen words such as "gay' and "impotent" completely redefined, and rules for punctuation have changed in several ways.

So any attempt a definitive statement of English grammar is, as I have alluded to twice above, no more than an opinion.

opinions versus recommendations versus interests

The search results represent their opinion as to what is _relevant_ to the terms you asked for.

This does not make them in any way a recommendation or endorsement of any sites.

This, too, is where the antitrust arguments (those related to the usage of the term "opinion", anyway) fall flat -- they're conflating opinions with interests, specifically the opinions generated by a search engine with the business interests of its creators.

There is no certainty that those three terms coincide. For example, many people of our culture are of the opinion that we should not be using fossil fuels. Yet their interests lie in areas that lead them to use said fuels directly and indirectly on a regular basis. And some of them, still holding to that core opinion, actually recommend that we continue to use fossil fuels for the time being, because of other considerations.

@AC But Again

No, I think you're missing the point (directly from the article):

" Glider maker MDY Industries added the measure to evade a feature called the Warden..."

In other words, it's NOT the bot itself that violates the DMCA. It's the feature MDY added to the bot that was specifically written to evade Blizzard's protections.

The club analogy doesn't work because it doesn't have copyright involved. A better analogy would be a library.

You get a library card that gives you access to a library.

You then decide that you don't have time to read the introductory books, so you build a robot to do that for you and summarize the results.

The library then creates a system preventing robots from accessing copyrighted materials.

You then modify your robot to look so much like a human that the library security system can't tell the difference.

Now you've created a product specifically designed to circumvent access restrictions to copyrighted material. It ALSO breaks your library license agreement, but the modification is what allows the DMCA to come into play.

The only material difference between this scenario and the case in question is that the copyright in the original case belonged to the security system owner, whereas the copyright in this example does not necessarily belong to the library.

Space is Big. Really Really Big.

You're assuming that it will fly close to said bodies. Unless they're specifically on the itinerary, just set your initial course to miss them. Space, even our inner solar system, is so vast that it's much much easier to avoid a given planet than it is to actually fly near it.

Consider Earth. It's a prett big planet (volume of approximately 1,097,509,500,000 cubic kilometers) but the space encompassed by just the plane of its orbit is about 900,081,000,000,000,000,000 cubic km -- over 820 million times as much space. That's just the plane of its orbit at the thickness of the earth -- a sphere the size of earth's orbit would have approximately 20 thousand times the volume of the plane.

Furthermore, using method A for propulsion does not negate using method B for steering. ION still works best when small chemical rockets are used for "quick" course corrections,and solar sails would be no different.

One more gray area

"A quick comparison of the legal ramifications of Cablegate (Now) and the Pentagon Papers Affair (Then) provides the upshot to all this: In the United States, at least, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and the news organisations working with them are legally in the clear. By legal precedent of the United States' highest Court, the barriers against pre-publication censorship are very high indeed, and the Government needs the Mother of All Ladders to climb over them."

Except that it is not established that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks qualify as a news organization. It also cannot be easily said that the material provided has in fact been provided in the Public Interest.

Finally, it's important to note that precedent is not law. Judges are expected and encouraged to review and cite precedent in the interest of keeping the administration of law swift and consistent; however, they are free to disagree with the precedent or find that an individual case does not fit a given precedent for specific reasons.

So for all these reasons, there is a possibility of prosecution. I say possibility, because we still have no reliable source that an indictment is imminent. Assange's lawyer may be a reliable individual, but in this case his motivations are clearly biased, and press surrounding even the possibility of indictment serves his interests far more than those of the US government. The US government is biased in exactly the other direction, so they're keeping the likelihood of an actual indictment close to their chests. In short, we actually learn exactly nothing from this news that could not have been reasoned out from news of 6 weeks ago.

Just perhaps...

the tedious part is 5% of the game and the rest is perfect...?

That's math, that is.

Patently

'So, McNealy "believes in patents" but spent "years and millions of dollars to engineer out patents held by various patent holders"?'

Yes. There's nothing contradictory there. If you believe in patents, and want to use a patented technology, you have two options: license it, or build your own equivalent that doesn't infringe the details of the patent. McNealy chose the latter. With open source, you often have to choose the latter, as many patent licenses include restrictions on revealing the methodology.

Someone hasn't tried NetFlix -- on a reliable network anyway.

"Internet can't actually deliver TV. Not at Broadcast reliability and quality."

See title. I regularly watch movies and TV via Netflix on a Roku -- over a wireless connection on cable internet. The quality and reliability is consistently better than the cable co's own HD channels -- because the cable company is sending every channel down a fat pipe, it has to compress most of them. Netflix sending one signal down a slightly thinner pipe needs much less compression.

If my cable company hadn't significantly oversubscribed its own network, they could give everyone a Roku-like device, dedicate an IP stream to every customer, and provide much better quality and reliablility. Heck, if they just went as far as intelligent multicast, they could even handle the oversubscription most days.

Expanding the range of places

Visualize a basic Venn diagram in your head with two circles: one for places with phosphorous and one for places with arsenic. At some point they would overlap, indicating places with both phosphorus and arsenic. By your information the circle for phosphorous would be larger.

Even so, there would be some elements of the arsenic set which do not include phosphorous. Before this discovery, the assumption was that those places could not support life. This discovery calls that assumption* into question. So the number of potential life-supporting locations is increased at least by those areas where arsenic is available.

But it goes beyond that, because if the arsenic/phosphorous substitution is possible within the limited range of environment we can directly study, that increases the possibility of other substitutions in the much broader range of environments we have yet to even investigate. So assumptions limiting life to places with abundant phosphorous, carbon, even water all become questionable.

* And that's the core of the problem -- we keep assuming that life in the varied cosmos must follow the pattern we see in the < 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000001% of the universe that we've actually observed. This discovery goes a very small way towards highlighting the absurdity of that assumption.

Not really an understatement...

if you understand the proper meaning of "orders of magnitude."

Specifically, IPv6 provides exactly 96 binary orders of magnitude, or approximately 28 decimal orders of magnitude, over IPv4. In the common IPv6 notation, which is hexadecimal, IPv6 provides 24 orders of magnitude over IPv4.

Sure, in individual numbers that's a s**tload of space, but in orders of magnitude, "many" covers it quite nicely.

Actually...

"I find it amazing that junk foods (Burgers, Cola, Chocolate) which no Olympian would dream of touching and are, perhaps, the very antithesis of the Olympic spirit of physical perfection, are touted as the official food of the Olympics."

Actually, high-calorie foods like you describe are not so much junk for people who burn through 5-10 thousand calories a day in training. A lot of the foods which are probably destined to kill most of us lazy desk jockeys are the extreme athlete's *ahem* meat and potatoes.

Purely speculation, ...

but there is a woman's name "Thea", and "Shes" could be a form of a last name or nickname.

Or perhaps she owns an upscale resort famous for its trees of the genus Fraxinus.

There are probably a few dozen other reasons why that twitter name may make sense for her.

@Just Thinking

That attractive woman on Second Life?

Yeah, she's a dude.

The practically non-existent identity verification and incredibly low barrier to adoption for the internet means that you can have a wonderful conversation for hours, and have absolutely no idea whether the person you're talking to actually is, does, or believes, any of the things they've represented to you.

As for Ham Radio, befriending remote, random strangers is not the core of the hobby, but one of the side benefits. As such, and given the barriers to adoption, it's less likely to be abused as it is on the internet (although it can still happen.)

My thoughts exactly..

and that's why I thought the sample size was so small -- 17 good movies sounds about right. Then I saw that Avatar and Grease were on the list, so there went that idea.

Not to mention...

that, technically speaking, the Mars rovers have gone MUCH further -- approximately 514 million km further -- each.

Correction

"I use Opera on my phone, so things like this don't affect me -- as far as I know."

Corrected. I'm an Opera fan myself, partly for it's relatively good security track record, but my excessive pedantry will not allow such a broad statement to pass. Every browser has its security flaws, and often the ones we don't know about carry the most risk.