Comment Results get sent directly to your doctor's phone (Score 1) 118
and the NSA, of course.
and the NSA, of course.
I really like the gnome 3 shell, but had to abandon it because of stability problems. I've seen the "Oh Noes" screen more times than I can count.
Ok, let's be fundamental about this. Isn't it strange that we should consider "software" as different from other intellectual property? If X hours of work have been invested into the invention of a clever software routine, then, it would be strange if a patent could not be granted for that work while a patent would be granted for some physical apparatus that also took X hours to develop.
Fundamentally, software is already different from other intellectual property as it also has copyright protection. Why should one body of work be allowed to be protected under two completely different IP regimes? Copyright protection is enough to encourage the advancement of the arts and sciences of software. Patents appear to be a hindrance.
And be glad the duration is 70+life years instead of hundreds of years. I mean imagine if you bought land or a house and you have rights to it only for 70+life years. After that, your children/descendants would have to vacate the place and it would be public property, perhaps a park. Does that seem okay to you?
Please... copyrights are a deal between the government and authors that in exchange for doing the hard work of creating, the government will offer a monopoly on REPRODUCING the content for a LIMITED period of time. The actual physical copies that the authors create (the manuscripts, for example) are still theirs to keep FOREVER. Just like me and my house.
We're British.
Douglas Adams predicted this. He predicted that everything would become gesture controlled and then we would have to sit maddeningly still in order to listen to the radio without changing stations.
Oh! The Dog! Don't get me started on the Dog!
I don't know why, but I have rarely felt more frustration than the hundreds of times I have told search to "turn off animation" for clients and then be forced to wait through an animation of the animation being turned off. It's like Microsoft just HAS to get the last word in. You don't like our animation? Well here's a little more of what you JUST TOLD US YOU DON'T LIKE! What're you going to do about it?
similar experience here. I wrote a terrible program that used character graphics to "simulate" a volcano erupting. Great thing about volcano science projects--they always win no matter how silly they are!
I was lucky. I was able to afford the Model I Level II with 16K of RAM using my baby-sitting money!
And Radio Shack had more than just the BASIC programming manual. They also had a Technical Reference manual that explained the full theory of operation including the timing, the generation of the video signal, the reading of the character data out of ROM...Everything!
I learned enough about digital electronics from that single manual to design my own programmable EPROM board that allowed me to rewrite the character font table.
It also helped me repair the unit after a mouse crawled inside and urinated all over the main board dissolving a number of traces.
The ATARI 800 I purchased a few years later had great documentation, too. The entire kernel was explained. MAN! What happened? Nothing comes with documentation any more!
and what, if any, specialized hardware exists for the purpose?
steel conduit and electrical boxes
I suppose the problem with the dog will be fixed by the global worming mentioned by Chrisq.
Wait... we're killing off all the global worms now?
When will the madness end?
All but about a dozen?
How the hell would you measure that? The most extreme testing stuff I've ever heard of can't get you anywhere near that much information. If you could get definite information that you were at the 1-in-1,000,000 level, that'd get you into the top seven thousand and change. And the thing is, we can't get accurate measurements even that far out.
Once you're to "the test can't produce meaningful results anymore", you're done. You might be way smarter than other people with that trait, you might be on the stupid end of the pool, we don't know, we can't tell, we have no way to measure it.
We don't know. He does. He's a genius.
Perhaps, but I have found that I can very often use a chroot jail when some would use a virtual machine. It takes more knowledge to set up, but generally performs better and can interact with applications on the native platform.
That's only for small black holes. For large black holes like the one at the center of our galaxy, the tidal forces are small near the event horizon.
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
