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Duh! - by mlwmohawk (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread I remember a discussion on the PostgreSQL hacker’s list about recoverability and transaction logs. You can’t make a system that will not lose data, you can only make a system that knows the last save point of 100% integrity. There are too many variables and too much randomness on a cold hard power failure. You absolutely need a UPS that gives you time to shut down cleanly. |
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UPS - more than just a backup. - by Zebadias (Score: 5, Informative) Thread UPS is more than just saving your data. |
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Illiteracy - by carou (Score: 5, Funny) Thread From TFA: (DRAM needs to be refreshed constantly otherwise it will loose it’s data) Fly, little data! Be free! |
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Well no shit, Sherlock - by Skyshadow (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread Power losses can cause data loss? Gee, you mean that my system that relies on electricity for everything it does can be adversely effected by power outages even if I take precautions? That’s some good admin work there, Lou — if only there was some sort of law that covered the tendency of things that can go wrong to go wrong… Next week: Fires can make things warm, floods can make things wet. |
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Re:Well no shit, Sherlock - by Skyshadow (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread I don’t know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. As a former sysadmin, I would think that any machine reliant on ‘happy thoughts’ would be the most crash-prone system in the history of computing. |
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Because Violent Video Games are Hiding so Well - by hardburn (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread So you take a game like “Grand Theft Auto”, which is named after a felony, and comes with subtitles like “Vice City”, and which has a back cover talking about guns and gangsters, and if that’s not enough for you, comes with an M rating with a clear label of “Blood and Gore Violence”. Apparently after seeing all that, some people’s first thought is that it’s a game about rainbow-colored horses galloping across fields where the trees blossom lollipops. Parents should have more than enough information already about what games are violent or not. If they’re still buying them, then that’s their fault, not the gaming industry. |
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Why the Censorship tag? - by LWATCDR (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread “A law just passed in New York now requires labels for violent content in video games” I can see complaining about the cost of this law, the effectiveness of it, or even if it is redundant but censorship? Just what liberties are being taken away by labeling? I can see how it may be unconstitutional but only because it could be seen as the state interfering with interstate commerce. But that has nothing to do with freedom of speech. |
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Re:Just what we need, more laws - by 0100010001010011 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread People want the future in Wall-E. We want the government (or some company) to do everything for us. Parenting? Nah let the schools do it. If they screw it up, we’ll bitch about it. |
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Re:Unconstitutional? At what level? - by Woundweavr (Score: 4, Informative) Thread Unfamiliar with the 14th Amendment or just last 100 years of Constitutional precedent? Its pretty black letter law, and certainly applies to New York. |
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Re:Unconstitutional? At what level? - by jonnythan (Score: 5, Informative) Thread Go read your Fourteenth Amendment. The Bill of Rights applies to state governments as well. New York State is not allowed to abridge the freedom of speech of New York citizens. |
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Re:One Password to Rob Them All - by Jellybob (Score: 4, Informative) Thread
Maybe you should try reading the spec then, since that’s exactly what it’s designed to do. The only place that gets your plain text password is your OpenID provider, and whenever you try to login to another site using OpenID, you get redirect to your provider’s site, where: 1) If you don’t already have a session open, you login, and then go to 2. 2) You get asked if you really want to login on the client site, and if so, what information do you want to let them have (usually anything from “nothing at all” to “everything”, or a combination of them). This way the only site you need to implicitly trust is the OpenID provider - which if you choose can be on your own server, running your own code, with whatever means of authentication you like. If you’re feeling really paranoid you could even have it send you a text message, or electrocute your balls, every time someone logs in with your credentials, so that even if someone does get them you’ll know as soon as they try to use it, and can disable or change them. |
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Re:One Password to Rob Them All - by Doc Ruby (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread What we need is the opposite of this scheme. We need to store our passwords on our own local trusted machine. Like on our personal mobile phone with tested HW encryption, which requires multifactor ID: thumbprint, voice recog, keyed PIN, retina scan. In fact, that device shouldn’t store some simple password data, but rather a onetime password generator that generates unique secure password sequences for each challenging site. Maybe the phone should send the password via IR/Bluetooth or a phonecall, but secure itself against attacks over that connection, or just report the momentary password on the screen for its human to read and enter into the challenge. It’s insane that I give my bank PIN to some arbitrary sketchy ATM in some latenight deli when I’m already drunk, need another 6-pack, and won’t even remember where (or who) I was when I find out months later that my PIN was used by someone (of the dozen sketchy ATMs I used that year) to rob my account. I want onetime passwords right now, that my phone can remember, attached to the specific counterparties, money quantities and transaction description. So later I’ve got my own complete, authoritave record. Not go the other way and give my PIN to every fly by night website, just because they “trust each other” with nothing of their own at stake. |
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Re:OpenID? - by phoenix.bam! (Score: 5, Informative) Thread |
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Damned MS… - by db32 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread |
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Problem - by Rinisari (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread A problem inherent in a decentralized single signon system is that there are more and more providers popping up, and not all of them are trustworthy or taking the necessary security precautions to lockdown their sites. Caveat emptor, I guess, though. I run my own, and so I’m responsible for my own security. |
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Just goes to show, MySQL people are dolts - by mlwmohawk (Score: 5, Informative) Thread Sorry, it is incomprehensible that this sort of project would be started. The problem with MySQL, to BEGIN WITH, is that it doesn’t support enough SQL or the SQL it does support well enough, to construct efficient queries. What ends up happening is that you move your “data logic” to your application and out of your database. This means the database handles simpler queries, but returns more data. While these simple queries appear faster, they hit more data on the disk and actually cause the system to become I/O bound. “Real” databases handle the “data logic” close to the data and can estimate the most efficient access to the data needed, thus REDUCING the I/O bottleneck, making more complex queries more efficient than simple queries. CPU time is virtually free with respect to data access. Every time I see some Java, PHP, or I’ve been in the business for about 28 years and I don’t understand why software developers have this blind spot about databases. Maybe it is a “not written by me” attitude, but I just don’t get it. A “good” database has so many facilities to make your data access efficient and fast as hell. Yet, most developers that I have to direct, simply refuse to learn about databases, specifically SQL. They go out of their way to write elaborate functionality in their language of choice that could have been constructed in a moderately interesting SQL query, that could be wrapped in a function and been more efficient. The “drizzle” product is just another avoidance of an important semester of computer science that people don’t want to understand and will ultimately create even more poorly designed web sites. |
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All for it - by spinkham (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread From my point of view, this is MySQL finally embracing their target market. |
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For Crying Out Loud - by hardburn (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread Proof that when MySQL originally added those materials, they still didn’t know why they were important. Some of these aren’t even going to slow you down much. Prepared statements can speed you up in some cases. In this state, it occupies a spot that SQLite does just fine. |
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So it’s like SQLite… - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Funny) Thread …reinvented, but with security flaws. Awesome! |
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Oh man. - by Hero Zzyzzx (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread One man’s “superfluous” is another man’s key feature. No views? No prepared statements? Holy carp. Isn’t MySQL crippled enough as it is? At first glance it’s hard for me to see where Drizzle would fit where SQLite doesn’t. |
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a bit simplistic - by jollyreaper (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread “The first internet bubble popped largely because all business models failed except for ad selling.” (from the article). He’s forgetting that there was also the speculative insanity that goes along with any bubble in any industry. There were many companies that made enough revenue to be possible if only the executive spending could have been reined in. I’m forgetting the name of it but there was a new media company that was doing something like $180 million in business but was spending $200 million. They produced content, text! It’s not like that requires a huge capital investment. People are the biggest expense, get a cheap building somewhere, have your people work there, maybe rent a small bit of office space in a posh tower for impressing investors. But no, they put the whole organization in the posh tower, aeron chairs in every office, and shot their whole wad on overhead. The internet has nothing to do with that kind of stupidity, it’s endemic to human affairs. And the matter of crazy-stupid shit getting funded just because someone has a business plan? Again, common in any bubble, be it tech or tulips. |
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Psychology catches up everything - by Kupfernigk (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
People over time get sick of the “Trying to make me buy stuff”. Example: When I was a kid magazines like Amateur Photographer contained piles of ads which were basically directory listings. Item, price, condition. They were in fact useful data for buyers. What’s the nearest supplier who has a second hand Leica M3 in excellent condition? Nowadays, the ads in photo magazines are demand-creators; reams of eye candy. More advertising, in color, is needed to pay for the content. What does it tell me? Five guys have half a page of trying to sell me the same digital camera I don’t want. Do they have what I do want? Hard to say. Google’s problem is it wants to be a directory, but its advertisers want to distort its market by directing irrelevant traffic in the hope of selling something. Like bad coinage, bad ads drive out good ads. (Just like eBay with the crooks driving out legitimate sellers.) Ultimately the public gets turned off. (Do I ever click on a right hand link on a google page? No. Do I ever click on the top 3 links? Hardly ever. That’s experience, not prejudice.) So, my 2c worth is that this may be nothing to do with the recession and everything to do with the great public having had time to realise what a scam much internet advertising is. Someone will have to come up with a better paradigm. If people will still pay money for print magazines, how much will they pay for a verified Google for instance (I would personally pay a $10/month for a shit-free search engine where abusers were removed from search results, no messing.) |
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Other Industries Prosper on the Internet - by ehaggis (Score: 5, Funny) Thread |
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Re:Naive Question - by Tridus (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread How many times have you seen an ad for coke on TV, then immediately run out to the store to buy it? Can’t say I ever have, but they keep on doing it. Advertising exists for more then making instant purchase decisions. |
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Economics 101. - by 140Mandak262Jamuna (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread Free market wants to pay zero dollars for an ad? You mean people want to pay more than zero dollars for milk, cereals and bread? Come on! No body wants to pay more than zero dollars for anything. But the other side of the equation is, no body would sell things below the cost of production, at least not for sustained long durations. Google has a minimum bid because that is the cost of production for that ad. The author displays profound ignorance about economics. |
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No resurrection? Do your homework. - by fearsomepirate (Score: 4, Informative) Thread |
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Wrong Interpretation by Poster - by alexj33 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
This is a misleading statement by the poster and the article itself. The post-resurrection text in Mark (which is the only text the article seems to mention is in contention) has always been recognized by the modern Christian church as not appearing in the earliest manuscripts. Don’t take my word for it; pick up the latest NIV Bible and look at Mark 16:9-20. It most likely mentions this very fact.
Unfortunately, you still need to deal with the resurrection stories in the other three gospels (Matthew, Luke and John) as well as the Old Testament references such as Psalms 16:10. |
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Summary is wildly inaccurate - by john-da-luthrun (Score: 5, Informative) Thread First, as others have pointed out, the Codex is from the 4th century CE (i.e. “AD”) rather than BCE (or “BC”). Second, saying “it makes no mention of the resurrection” is inaccurate. It doesn’t contain the final 8 verses from Mark’s Gospel, which have been considered to be a late addition for years and are usually square-bracketed in modern Bible editions. However, if you actually *read* Mark’s Gospel, it has plenty of references to the resurrection of Jesus earlier in the text. Plus the Codex Sinaiticus also includes the other three Gospels, all of which include post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. But apart from misdating the document by 800 years, misstating the impact of putting it online and misrepresenting the likely attitude of Christians to its publication, the summary is fine… |
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Yes, and to take it further - by g4b (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread |
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Re:Welcome to Rabidly Anti-Christian Slashdot - by SirLoadALot (Score: 5, Funny) Thread |
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SANDISK has been caught in a lie here. - by Coolhand2120 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
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Ya, it is Vista’s fault… - by TheNetAvenger (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread Ok, even on SlashDot, this deserves to be bashed for what it is, instead of the we hate MS lovefest that it will probably get. Why is this the only manufacturer that seems to be having production issues, performance issues and general reliability problems on all OSes? SanDisk is the joke of Flash in all forms, especially SSD. Motives against Vista… Hmm, maybe when Vista was released and 80% of the SanDisk Flash Memory failed to perform well enough to be used for Readyboost, they were a bit Pissed Off? How about the devices Vista won’t even see properly because they don’t meet basic USB or SD specifications, that also POed SanDisk a bit. SanDisk also has a horrible reputation with USB Card readers, as the devices won’t even work at the basic BIOS levels, and people buying them that ‘only’ used them in Devices were POed and returning them because they started expecting them to work in their computers now too. (Issues like can’t see device, SD card, or see it as 1GB when it is a 2GB card are some of the basic problems with SanDisk SD and Flash USB devices.) 99% of all other SD/Flash brands work fine with Vista, see a pattern yet? Ok, now on to the Vista Issue - This is where it gets borderline insane… Vista is the only OS that has internal optimizations to work with SSD read/write array patterns. Even with as ‘crappy’ as the SanDisk people would like everyone to believe Vista handles SSD, Vista actually squeezes about 10-15% more performance out of a hybrid or SSD than XP or other OSes in general. (Sure there are some arguments about how MFRs implemented the SSD array controllers, and SanDisk again seems to be the odd dog out in this discussion.) So are SanDisk’s problems because of Vista or because of SanDisk’s ‘own’ issues? I guess everyone here should decide for themselves. A few searches on both Vista and SSD or Flash devices in general and a search or two on SanDisk should put this article in perspective. This would be a lot less laughable if they used any excuse except Vista, the main OS to have SSD kernel level support and the only OS(Windows) to outperform XP and previous versions of NT on SSD drives. (Be sure to check out the SanDisk demonstrations that specifically use Vista to ‘show off’ the performance of their drives, that even makes it more goofy.) |
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Re:Ya, it is Vista’s fault… - by jmpeax (Score: 5, Informative) Thread It is quite true that SanDisk’s SSD are woefully subpar in performance when running Windows Vista. Numerous benchmarks from around the web have shown SanDisk SSDs getting outpaced by the competition. |
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Re:what about linux? - by antifoidulus (Score: 5, Informative) Thread |
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Famous quote - by Trogre (Score: 5, Funny) Thread When I read this, a certain quote comes to mind: “The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.” -Unknown So perhaps on some plane of reality we might be grateful to the good people at Microsoft for forcing SSD makers to make improvements they might not otherwise have made? |
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It’s still labor intensive - by MrBlic (Score: 5, Informative) Thread I’ve recently spent a year with the GWT, and just a couple of months with Flex. I would use Flex to flashify whatever dynamic parts of a standard html page I needed to for my next project. Everything that I’m trying to do in GWT could be done much faster in Flex… and when you are done in Flex, you are really done. In the GWT, you have to be aware of what html each of the Java GWT widgets equates to… and then in the CSS, you have to work thinking about the resulting html. (FireBug makes it pretty easy.) Cons for GWT 1.4: - Long start-up times: web sites can take 8 seconds to show you their first page as the GWT javascript initializes. - One imperfect CSS declaration, and you’re having to debug IE6 / IE7 / Firefox / Safrai issues… Only very plain sites are insulated well from browser incompatibilities. - Your site is all-or-nothing GWT. It’s possible to use one GWT app to automate one part of a static page easily… but usually your whole site is 100% GWT, with no other static pages outside of the GWT’s control. - The AJAX mechanism on RFC-compliant browsers only lets you make two async requests at once… a third request is queued until one of the first two async requests returns… making it only asynchronous to an extent.
- I ended up having lots of html in my - The integration of GWT development can be done simply, but it can also grow to mirror the complexity of EJB style Java junk way too easily. - IE needs special treatment (worth repeating.) That said, it’s probably the best way to create a web app for an iPhone right now, since there’s no flash on the iPhone. (Please Adobe, I’d love it if you created an Air run-time for the iPhone!) Pros of the GWT: - it makes it easy to handle the back button and bookmarks. - it can scale up to fairly large sites, and the smallest building blocks can be kept clean and small. - the end user experience is a good one after that start-up delay. - The GWT team has done lots of fantastic work, and in an open exchange… one of my coworkers has committed some changes to one of the supporting libraries. Flex, on the other hand is designed to appeal to people who are weary from fighting CSS / browser incompatibility issues. In Flex, you still use CSS, but it works the way you would expect all the time. In Flex, you can also skin any compononent to look however you want, and then have a very clean top-level which wires up the various components with their skins. It’s really beautiful… and best of all, when you’re done, You’re done! You don’t even have to test on IE6! The learning curve is about the same, or a little harder, but it’s all forward motion. My next site is going to be 80% Django templates, with a good dose of mochikit (or dojo) for some dynamic parts, and a few Flex / flash applets sprinkled in where they make sense. |
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GWT is a good concept - by tangent3 (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread Theoretically… Number of Java developers > Number of Flash developers > Number of Silverlight developers Which is a good idea, since Google has created a framework in a language that most developers are familiar with, for a platform that just about all web browsers support out of the box. However… Number of PHP hosting sites > Number of ASP hosting sites > Number of Ruby hosting sites > Number of Tomcat hosting sites Which is probably one of the reasons why it’s not doing so well. Now if GWT is able to compile the server portion to easily deployable PHP code, this could lead to somewhere interesting. |
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I used it - by Fuzuli (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread Because I needed a website with a high level of interaction. The client asked for enabling disabling of various things on a widget, some bells and whistles,but nothing fancy. In the beginning I wrote the code for this using javascript, hand coded the whole thing. But change requests, and much more important than that, browser compatibility problems cost me a lot of time. GWT fixed this aspect. Mostly compatible with all major browsers, and being much more experienced in Java than in js, I became more productive. |
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So, where’s the question? - by DerekLyons (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread You start with the assumption it should be widespread, and are disappointed because it is not. Which leads to the question, what leads you to that assumption? |
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We are - by Arnold_DeVos (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread We have used it for a fairly big internal application for one of our clients. Given we wanted ajax rather than a typical rich client, the main advantage of GWT was that we could program in the same language end-to-end. We managed to avoid a lot of boilerplate code by using the same data class definitions (POJO’s) in the server and client. So an object might be created by hibernate from a database record, copied to the client, displayed and edited, copied back to the server, manipulated there and finally updated in the database via hibernate. The main omission in GWT is a good framework for binding data to UI elements. Because there is no introspection available in the GWT client environment, it is hard to do this in a generic way. We solved the basic problem by generating class and property descriptors during the usual hibernate code generation step. We then created a UI-POJO binding framework that picks up and uses these descriptors. Again avoiding a lot of boilerplate. Our code for all this is here: http://code.google.com/p/gwt-hibernate/ I’d say GWT worked out pretty well. |
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Nintendo basically admitted infringement! - by harlows_monkeys (Score: 5, Informative) Thread Nintendo used an interesting strategy. They basically conceded that the Gamecube controllers and Wii Classic controller infringed, and concentrated on making sure that only those would be found to infringe. The Wii remote was also accused, and their goal was to keep that from being found to infringe. Judge Clark commented on this when denying Nintendo’s motion for remittitur:
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Re:The real creator is Ralph H. Baer. 1967. - by harlows_monkeys (Score: 5, Informative) Thread |
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Re:Prior Art - by triffid_98 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
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Patent Office penalties - by Stephen Ma (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread Here is one way to fix the problem: let the Patent Office be heavily penalized for every patent overturned by the courts. If the Office goes bankrupt as a result of its own negligence, too bad, let it die. Congress can always start a new Office with completely different management. At the moment, the Patent Office is too unaccountable; there is little penalty for doing shoddy work. The threat of bankruptcy might concentrate a few minds over there. |
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Re:Patent Office penalties - by Harmonious Botch (Score: 5, Funny) Thread Here is one way to fix the problem: let the Patent Office be heavily penalized for every patent overturned by the courts. If the Office goes bankrupt as a result of its own negligence, too bad, let it die. Congress can always start a new Office with completely different management. At the moment, the Patent Office is too unaccountable; there is little penalty for doing shoddy work. The threat of bankruptcy might concentrate a few minds over there. I like this line of thought, but you are way too generous. Why penalize with money? Give each patent examiner a strike when their decisions are over turned. After three strikes, kill them. ( Most would retire after two ) Hmmm…this plan could bring accountability to other governmental agencies too. Imagine every congressperson getting a strike when a law that he/she passed was found to be unconstitutional. |
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Life or Death Violation of K.I.S.S. - by djmoore (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread I’m going to assume that the military is looking into this simply because they look into everything, not because they actually plan to deploy it. It’s a terrible idea. 1. See the incident a few weeks ago where a soldier was firing machine gun blanks into a crowd during a demonstration. He swapped mags—but unfortunately, the fresh mag was not filled with blanks. 2. A tactical shooting instructor I once had, a cop, told us about the bean-bag shotgun he kept in his patrol car. The barrel was wrapped with blue tape, and there was a strict policy, as “leave without pay and a reprimand in your file”, against ever loading it with anything other than beanbag rounds. In a crisis, if you grabbed the blue barrel, you had to be certain you would be firing beanbags, not lead. 3. When you point your gun at a person and pull the trigger, you must be very certain about what the gun will do. This adds a whole ‘nother level of complexity to what should be a simple, reliable design. Not only will soldiers and cops inadvertently fire this thing on “kill” not “stun”, but there’s also a question of whether or not it will fire at all—just as bad if the cop needs to make a bad guy stop. 4. When a bad guy sees a gun pointed at him, he needs to be certain that if he doesn’t do as he is told, he will die. I don’t want bad guys to see this gun, and decide to take a gamble that it’s only set to stun. 5. Americans have, and should have, a deep suspicion towards inappropriate force being exercised under color of law. The way to deal with this is through the Second Amendment, which properly exercised results in soldiers, cops, and civilians[1] regarding each other with mutual respect and caution. If you can’t trust your military or police, the answer isn’t to give them weak weapons—the answer is to disband them, by force if necessary, and organize trustworthy forces. [1] NB: Technically, the police are civilians (see for example Robert Peel #7), but I hope this gets my point across. I wish I knew a word for “out of uniform, unbadged civilians”, but nothing comes to mind. |
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Interesting, but perhaps not what it seems. - by Trespass (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread This technology really doesn’t see best suited for hand weapons. A single external pack of liquid or gaseous propellant really doesn’t seem like a good idea for an infantry weapon. At best it adds a further degree of complication to cleaning and maintaining the weapon, and at worst makes it more dangerous to use than current designs. Police use? The money would be better spent on more training, I’d suspect. Now a tank or naval gun might be a very interesting environment for a system like this. Because the propellant would be pumped separately from the projectile, shells would be smaller/lighter than conventional shells of a similar caliber. The autoloader could be smaller and lighter, thereby making the turret smaller. Likewise, it would be easier to compartmentalize the propellant separately from the fighting compartment. The tanks could conform to available space, taking up less interior room. Guns could fire in either a flat or arcing trajectory as well, making them more flexible. The problem of having the propellant under pressure could be a serious fire hazard, of course… |
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Rule #1 of Marksmanship - by Butisol (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread |
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Impossible to identify non-lethal attacks - by Alex Belits (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread With such a weapon the supposed target would never be able to distinguish between lethal and non-lethal attacks, and any mistake can turn out deadly — you will either have a cop unknowingly shooting lethal bullets, or fleeing person returning fire with a regular gun, believing that cops are trying to kill him. Or both at the same time. The right thing to do is to go into the opposite direction — making lethal and non-lethal weapons so different that it will be impossible to take one for another even from a distance. Like the difference that exists now between a gun and a club, or between uniforms and equipment of soldiers (who always shoot to kill) and riot police (that is expected to never use anything deadly). |
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Lund says the technology can be scaled to any size - by greenguy (Score: 4, Funny) Thread I can’t wait to see the Howitzer that leaves a bruise. |
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Re:There’s always the opium option… - by Saffaya (Score: 5, Informative) Thread Except it was originally the UK Parent and grand-parent are referring to : |
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“speaking for the Chinese government” - by Ritz_Just_Ritz (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread You don’t get to be in a position where you’re the CEO/President of a company who’s standard is “blessed” by the Chinese government without having very deep tendrils into the government itself (cough…corruption/nepotism…cough). More often than not, there are personal and/or family relations between the regulators and the regulated in China that would land all the parties in jail in a developed country. Welcome to Chinese business 101. |
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State level NIH - by gzipped_tar (Score: 5, Informative) Thread is quite common in China. However, as for UOF, this is not totally due to the Chinese standardization body. When the idea of the UOF standard was forming in 2002, ODF had not been on its standardization track yet. It turned out that the development of UOF was slower and ODF got ahead. Another example of this kind of NIH is the standards for Chinese character encoding. There are a series of “GBxxxxx” standards (GB is for Guo-Biao, acronym for national standard in Chinese) which are totally incompatible with Unicode, but both GB and Unicode are widely used China, causing a great deal of pain and trouble. Some Web developers, unaware of the character encoding problem, screw up the Web pages by sending the wrong header or using the wrong XML declaration. Some email programs automatically fuck up your email’s encoding. This also made distributed development more difficult. Usually the “invented-here” standards are not technically better than the others. Some of them are too restricted in scope (e.g. the GB encodings can handle English, Chinese, Japanese kana and the Cyrillic alphabet, but few others). But now it may be too late to make a change. |
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Re:here’s a fourth one - by Bob The Cowboy (Score: 5, Funny) Thread I just threw up in my mouth a little. |
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Extra feature? - by Lazyrust (Score: 5, Funny) Thread |
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Take it a little further… - by AceMulligan (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread A friend of mine worked at a marketing agency where she worked with a prototype system similar to this, howeverit was even more interactive. At any given time during a show, you could: 1) Hit the pause button 2) Point the remote at the TV which controles a mouse like cursor (think Wii Remote) 3) Point to car\shirt\bag\etc that happened to be on the screen at the time 4) Click it and be directed to a ‘buy it now’ interface The idea is that companies would pay the show for product placement adding to the revenue of the show and The only problem I foresee with this approach is increasingly blatant product placement within shows which WILL get to the point of being distracting, much like commercials are today. |
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Comcast Entry - by lymond01 (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread If you press something like 888, you get localish car sales. I think there’s one for real estate too. Granted, you can’t press BUY NOW, because you’d really need to hide the remote from your children… |
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Re:Comcast Entry - by svnt (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread Last time I was bored at my friend’s house, I calculated that in less than 15 minutes I could charge off around USD $2000 in porn using just the remote. Cars aren’t so scary compared with trying to resell pay-per-view porn. |
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Re:What’s with this news? - by kabz (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread Never underestimate the addictiveness of immediate gratification. It happened a couple of times that I’ve been browsing the ‘App Store’ and just thought “I need that!” and bought it. Combining TV watching, aspiration to own ‘stuff on TV’, with credit card information (on Amazon), and the ability to buy on a whim, we should see this take off. |
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Re:What’s with this news? - by HTH NE1 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread I’m pretty sure they are talking about buying things other than music and movies. Yeah, like if you like how the killer used the reciprocating saw to dismember the body on CSI:, buy it now with a ThumbsUp on your TiVo remote. I’m not shitting you: one of the CSI shows had product placement of a reciprocating saw as a dismemberment tool, first shown prominently in the episode (matching blade marks to bone), then the exact same model was advertised during a commercial break. I won’t like it if it means pop-ups during the show. And I own 8 TiVos (7 subscribed). |
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“Childhood” is a recent concept - by Rastl (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread Is it just me that remembers that the idea of “childhood” is at most a century old? Prior to that they were adults-in-training. So this entire “Think of the children” crap is more about protecting an idea that these small humans should be shielded from the realities of life instead of educated so they actually do become adults. I think the new definition of childhood actually extends into the mid-20s because of more societal pressure. They’re in college, they really aren’t responsible yet, etc. Screw that. It’s the parents job to get those little monsters properly trained to be responsible adults. Heck, overseas ‘kids’ are in professional training schools by they time they’re sixteen. Here they’re still considered helpless babes who can’t do anything without mommy and daddy there to make sure they don’t get ‘damaged’. Don’t even get me started on that whole self-esteem vs actual value stuff that the schools are promoting. I realize I’m starting to sound like an old fogey but I guess that’s what I am. I’m tired of seeing these poor young adults with absolutely no idea of what is expected of them or how to achieve it. And all because of some misguided idea that they should be protected while they’re young instead of taught. I despair. |
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ID - by Darkness404 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread The law would require sites to check visitors’ ages, e.g. by taking a credit card, if the site contained any material that is “harmful to minors,” whatever that means.
Stupid laws like this is the reason we have so much Identity theft here in the US. The moment that people think that giving out your credit card number to some site just to say, register for a blog, or view some porn, is normal, is the moment that even more scam sites will emerge. |
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Re:The problem isn’t really in parent’s hands - by taustin (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread Licenses and education required for breeding. Sure. As long as I, and only I, get to decide who gets the license and who doesn’t. Remember, the country is currently run by jeezmoid fantatics who believe - literally - in forced breeding. Real penalties for not getting help when you can’t parent your offspring properly. Sure. With a very precise definition of what constitutes “getting help,” which will involve getting it from some government office (who else could we trust?). Said office will be open 24 hours a day in affluent, mostly white neighborhoods, and one hour a month in poor, mostly non-white neighborhoods. Of course. End absent-parent child support - no amount of money paid to the mother makes up for lack of a responsible two-parent family. If you can’t be bothered with birth control you get to live with the results of your inattentiveness. Unless, of course, you are a man, in which case you obviously should have no responsibility whatsoever for where you dip your wick. (Yes, that is exactly what you just said - live with the results, but only if you are a woman.) Oh, and, BTW, get ready for the tax increases, since all those women will be on welfare. Except, of course, you’d rather let them literally starve. I mean, really, it’s not like women are people or anything, right? Holding parents responsible for the actions of their children, really. This means that when the 10-year-old kills a neighbor child the parents and the child are responsible. Today often as not the child gets some slap on the wrist punishment because of their age and the parents get nothing. How could you be an effective parent and not know your kid is seriously screwed up when a 10-year-old kills someone? Hold the parents responsible in exactly what way? Put them in prison? More tax increases. Plus, more tax increases to take care of their other kids. Undoubtably this means more “community resources” and “social workers” to help failing parents. Which is to say, more taxes. Lots more taxes. And, if so many parents aren’t capable of raising their kids properly, where are you going to find social workers who can? If we can train social workers to raise other people’s kids, why can’t we use the same money to train parents to raise their own, and then no pay them middle class wages for the rest of their working lives? But we are either going to spend the money on the front end or the back end. Right now you can check the prisons for the results of dealing with the problem on the back end. You appaerently want to put more people in prison. Then, you turn around and decry how many people are in prison. |
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Hey! - by realmolo (Score: 5, Funny) Thread My children ARE porn stars, you insensitive clod! Love, |
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Harm to children - by Black Art (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread What causes more harm to Children? Porn or Religion? I see reports of kids dying because their parents were too superstitious to take them to a doctor because of their religion. i have never heard of a kid dying because he watched a porno movie or read a dirty book. Oh wait… These are Metaphorical Children. They don’t obey natural laws, only metaphorical ones. |
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ohnoitsroland - by Danny Rathjens (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread |
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A heat sink is going to be crucial - by ArhcAngel (Score: 5, Funny) Thread to make sure the circuit never reaches 451F |
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obvious uses.. - by apodyopsis (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread |
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This is great and everything… - by BitterOldGUy (Score: 5, Funny) Thread What they really need to do is use something very common; like, I don’t know, sand. That’s assuming they can come up with the technology. I know, I know. I’m dreaming. |
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Re:This is great and everything… - by negRo_slim (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread but this will put even more demand on forests and the farming of trees - they grow too slow to keep up with the potential demand of these products… Yeah using a renewable and easily managed resource is obviously a terrible idea… Wait, no it’s a fantastic idea, I grew up surrounded by a managed forest and while it may stunt growth in the short term the fact is it left us with countryside to be proud of and long term economic activities, especially when you read of developments such as this. |
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Fraud… - by IHC Navistar (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread The so-called “inventors” of this should be locked up for fraud, since they presented themselves as inventors of something that has existed for years, en masse. This is like trying to patent speadsheets 10 years after they began to be used widespread and claim, on a *legal* document, that you created them, and using you claim of having invented it years after they came into existence as a your basis for filing suit. This action clearly constitutes: 1) Malicious prosecution, The shitwit patent clerks that approved this should be fired without pay, forced to pay attorney’s fees for every defendent listed, and prohibited from ever holding a government job again. They should at least be liable for attorney’s fees, since this was an exceptionally gross, very likely deliberate, misuse of authority and judgement. THE IDIOTS RESPONSIBLE: Primary Examiner: Greta Robinson I wonder how many pairs of shoes they got in return for approval… |
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Shoot them. - by Just Some Guy (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread There has evolved in our society a class of villains who would destroy the republic for love of profit. They are amoral and sociopathic, delighting in the money they steal from its citizens, allowed to thrive by our fatally broken legal system, and in the end relying on the armed strength of the government to confiscate their misgotten gains. I no longer see a reason why these subpeople should be allowed to walk freely among the citizens of our country. They are guilty of treason by criminal negligence, and have forfeited their right to be considered equals under the law by their utter contempt of the same. |
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Re:they don’t understand - by locokamil (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread patent is quite complementary to their one click “invention.” Fix’d your quoting |
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And Slashdot can fix it: - by snl2587 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread Ok, guys: the critical date is December 28, 2001. First person to post prior art gets a big pat on the back! |
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November 1999 - by edalytical (Score: 5, Informative) Thread November 1999
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=502658&highlight=wishlist |
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Signal to Noise ratio over time
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