The weirdest thing about this debacle is that I can no longer tell the conspiracy kooks apart from the fairly rational. It's almost as if they've joined forces somehow, for just this question.
Rick didn't speak to the director, he spoke to a functionary, but yes, it is true that FRA has been conducting surveillance before - it what they do.
Now all forms of surveillance are becoming regulated by the new law - regulated in a way they have never been before. Believe it or not, this is a restriction on what types of surveillance may be carried out, and how the results should be treated.
If you believe encryption makes flags worthless, you haven't read Cryptonomicon.
People still leave messages on server? Worse, they rely on it still being there?
Man, I must be getting old, I thought we were past this, but apparently web mail has brought back a few of the 'net's child diseases.
I thought the Seebeck effect already had a conversion efficiency of 2-3%. How can you possibly increase that a hundredfold without breaking the laws of thermodynamics?
I am annoyed by references to general "bottlenecks", because it's not just Anonymous Coward who comes up with this.
It's just not that simple. A 5GHz CPU will be faster than a 3GHz CPU and 3 video cards will be faster than 1 video card almost regardless of other components. The only real bottlenecks you can talk about are the system busses and at the moment, that's not a problem either. HyperTransport 3.0 and intel's quad-pumped busses are still plenty wide enough for 5GHz processors, no sweat.
I completely understand what you're trying to say, it's just that you're wrong. PCs aren't cars and processors aren't jet engines. A faster CPU will do more CPU work every second, a faster video card will give you higher framerates and more RAM will fix most of your stutters. The slowest part of your computer is the hard disk, so do whatever you can to exclude it from time-critical operations. If the rest of your system is waiting for data from that ancient storage device, THAT would be a bottleneck.
If climate change is slow enough, corals will die off at one end and expand at the other, essentially moving as the niche is displaced. If the change is very fast, say two degrees per 100 years or so, the coral won't be able to catch up with the displacement of its niche.
All comments at my level so far seem to accept and discuss the results as describing a causal relation.
I'm thinking if you can afford to buy four alcoholic drinks per day, you are either comparatively wealthy or living in a region of the world that can afford to sell you cheap alcohol. Either way, the sheer fact that you are able to buy some 1500 drinks per annum means you're pretty well off in a global perspective, perhaps even compared to your neighbors. Can we really take for granted that the study isolates the effects of alcohol from all other variables?
Why is the world not ready for Linux?
Because Linux is not ready for the world.
Well-timed coincidences and political overload
on
Sweden's Watergate
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Sweden is three weeks from a election. It's a time when every newspaper and every TV channel cover the election in some form and where several hundred candidates for various positions make plays for attention every single day. There are currently seven major parties competing for press and at any one time, two of them will most definatly be talking about the same thing. This is normally called a debate or argument or conflicting standpoints or a "talkie" or what-have-you.
The Swedish Liberal party (Folkpartiet) are focusing a very large part of their political campaign towards integration (of immigrants) and school issues. They bring it up every other day, or more often. The Swedish Social Democratic party (Socialdemokraterna) Party are in a defending position and vie for media attention every single day. They don't always discuss school or integration issues, but often enough. To say, as the Dagens Industri ("Industry Today") article does, that it is some sort of conspiracy if the Liberal Party happen to speak on school or integration issues on the same day that the Socialist party do, is an extremely peculiar accusation. If you look for a pattern, you will see that pattern everywhere in nature.
As for the timing of this news release. The Socialist party was informed by Dagens Industri this last Tuesday that the incursions were taking place. Yet the Socialist Party chose to hold public release of this news until yesterday evening, the same evening when Fredrik Reinfelt, leader of the largest party in opposition, the Moderates, was the subject of hearing in public television. Yet more election propaganda, of course, but covered by and questions asked by public service TV journalists.
If you want to talk about coincidences, you might want to look back at the television hearing a few weeks ago when the party Christian Democrat leader was heard in the same show. Before the political analysis of the questions and answers he had given could ever reach the press, the Social Democratic party just happen to "discover" that a (young, again) member of the Christian Democratic party had "spied" on the Social Democratic party. How had she performed this espionage, you ask. Had she hacked the Social Democratic database? Had she broken into the Party headquarters? Or had she perhaps made a single phone call to the Social Democratic election strategy center? Take your pick.
As far as I can smell, there's something fishy about the way information keeps popping out of the Social Democratic headquarters at extremely opportune times. They don't participate in the resulting ruckus, but they do choose when it should be started. Something smells fishy, and it's not my caviar that's doing it.
...because the seller will have to provide the data, the decryption hardware, and the decryption key to every single user every time. That means they're giving you the very means required to unlock the "protected" data, every time, or you wouldn't be able to watch your movie at all. This is self-evident if you just stop and think about it.
It does not matter if the "protection" is embedded into hardware - it is still a part of your system. As long as you as a buyer have access to all these three things, you are able to copy any data you are able to buy, even without buying it.
Since December of last year, Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget have upgraded all 10mbit customer feeds to 100mbit downstream (10mbit upstream) connections free of additional charge. For this connection, I pay 350 Swedish Kronor per month, and this news would never turn up on the Slashdot front page.
Bredbandsbolaget serves over 300 000 households in Sweden, a nation of around 9 million. It's not some curiosity out in the boondocks or goonhills or whatever you call'em.
"I'd even pay good money for it. I think they'd increase their market share significantly - much more than by adding a BT client really.
I don't think Opera will stop you paying for their web browser, but Opera has been free as in beer, and free of application-internal advertisements for quite a while now. I bought it before that, but I still don't feel the least bit cheated. Odd. I'm usually much more niggardly than this.
You self-admittedly bought ATI once and never again. My experiences are a little more current.
ATI drivers in the past few years have surpassed nVidia drivers in performance, stability and support, while nVidia drivers have maintained the same quality they always had (well, disregarding a few of the "leaked" betas in the 40 and 80-series) but have also become more and more bloated while adding little to stability or base functionality. Window throwing? Mouse gestures? In a driver? Not only is it absurd creature feep, it is also adding possible error sources to the package.
So while I, too, have experience from the "bad years" of ATI drivers - never mention the ATI Rage Turbo AGP2x to me ever again - I would not hold it against their drivers today. Why should I let past emotions stand between me and the best hardware I can buy? No reason at all, of course.
...isn't. Neither is security through minority. But back to the actual claims:
First off, Mac users on average pay more for their computers, are self-selected because they tend to know more about technology than your average PC buyer,
I really don't see how that follows. They are self-selected because they paid more for their computer, yes, and so they had a lot of money before they bought it. How does that in any way imply that they also "know more about technology"? In my experience, Mac buyers know plenty about design and pretty things, but on average, not so much about technology. This is all speculation from miniscule experience, of course... which I will continue to believe that all opinions are, until I see an actual study on these claims.
More affluent, yes, but it still does not follow that they also know more about technology. Even in the age of computers, people can still make money without actually knowing a lot about technology. Heck, some people don't even have to work to earn it.
Still... my criticism doesn't mean the original speculation is false. Just that it's a non-sequiteur.
To me, this is not only a reason to upgrade, but a reason to pirate the OS, or at least prevent it from calling home. I don't want spiffy GUI effects, and if not paying for the OS is going to get me just what I want... well, that's just perfect.
...are both compulsive gamers. When I say compulsive I say it in the lightest possible meaning of the word, but we still tend to sit down in front of our two high-end computers and play computer games once we both get home from work. It is not the only thing we do, but it is the only thing that is relevant to this discussion, and your imaginations can fill in the blanks elsewhere - thank you.
I turned her almost accidentally to gaming and she only recently started a blog with the intent of chronicling her gaming, except she is too wrapped up in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind at the moment to actually make any updates to the blog. Go figure.
Our favorite genre is RPGs, for Role Playing Games. I prefer games with a deep, rich story and plenty of character development choices. She prefers games that are beautiful. Marriage is like that, you will like different things and you should just roll with it and get along on what you can get along on. That is also where it gets tricky.
Because we are both gamers, and because we love many of the same games we have tried to play them cooperatively. Here are the ones we have tried so far:
Neverwinter Nights (Wintel/Linux)
This was the game that really turned my wife onto gaming, and it was even her first ever contact with the "Dungeons and Dragons" franchise, imagine that. She has played this game and all of its expansions through at least twice, and four times for some. I have not even completed the original campaign. In this game, she is the master and I am the apprentice and my incessant questions about "Who was that?" and "Did you get that quest item?" or "Where does that road go?" became too much for her. We have completely different playing styles and couldn't cooperate.
System Shock 2 (Wintel)
This futuristic first-person RPG has an atmosphere thicker than custard pie and the 2.09 patch introduces a cooperative campaign mode for up to four players. We both love it, we've both played it through, but when we tried to play it together, we ran in different directions. When she was ambushed by a Hybrid from an angle she thought I had covered, I had actually wandered off in search of upgrade modules. It is a tense experience, but it is probably best experienced on your lonesome in a darkened room.
Guild Wars (Wintel)
We had great expectations for the cooperative possibilities in this game, and played through the entire "pre-searing" part of the game together. In this game we did not have the problem of running in different directions, but we were two different player classes. I was the tank warrior and she was the bow-equipped ranger/elementalist mage. She hit targets from a distance while I had to run up to them to attack. This meant she stood still and I ran ahead, and though I never ran far she still got the impression that I was leading the way instead of the ranger.
Icewind Dale II (Wintel)
Another Dungeons and Dragons franchise RPG, but this one was still in 2D art. She liked the 2D art, but decided that the characters "look like LEGOs" and refused to play on account of their miniscule modular ugliness.
Civilization IV (Wintel/?)
My wife not only made first aquaintance with gaming since she met me, but after her introduction to Civilization III, she also made the aquaintance of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. CivIII was her drug of choice and the first time she kept me up all night with a game, it was CivIII. So naturally we were both excited and frightened of the CivIV release. Carpal is painful and fixing it is not exactly free or pleasant. But! The turn-based nature of Civilization IV made this game the best possible cooperative game we have ever tried. Regardless of whether you play simultaneous or individual turns, you always have time to do what you want to and if your partner is ready with his/her turn before you are, you can zoom around the cities you have for some micromanagement.
Just make sure you divide the world between each other before you start. You do not want to get into a diplomatic border dispute with your spouse. And send reinforcements!
/ Per
Opera does not do the same thing. It is faster, yes, but Opera does not maintain a forward-looking cache at all, it only caches pages you have already visited.
We do have a libertarian party, but in Europe, we call those people "liberals". In Sweden, that would be "Folkpartiet" who take their cues from the ideals of John Stuart Mill.
The american "liberal" variant is more akin to Swedish Social Democratic party. In conclusion, when you say "most people have no clue that there is a thing like libertarianism", I wonder if you included yourself.
/ Per
The title is completely irrelevant to the content of the message, incorrect because it is not about a year's end list, and it begins with a parenthesis. It's just horrible.
It's an interesting article, too, or I wouldn't even bother saying this.
Slashdot Mirror
The weirdest thing about this debacle is that I can no longer tell the conspiracy kooks apart from the fairly rational. It's almost as if they've joined forces somehow, for just this question.
Rick didn't speak to the director, he spoke to a functionary, but yes, it is true that FRA has been conducting surveillance before - it what they do.
Now all forms of surveillance are becoming regulated by the new law - regulated in a way they have never been before. Believe it or not, this is a restriction on what types of surveillance may be carried out, and how the results should be treated.
If you believe encryption makes flags worthless, you haven't read Cryptonomicon.
I think you mean abiogenesis.
However, it was entertaining watching you fail with such alacrity*.
(* Bugger, now I had to respell that word three times.)
People still leave messages on server? Worse, they rely on it still being there? Man, I must be getting old, I thought we were past this, but apparently web mail has brought back a few of the 'net's child diseases.
I thought the Seebeck effect already had a conversion efficiency of 2-3%. How can you possibly increase that a hundredfold without breaking the laws of thermodynamics?
I too prefer Memory Alpha. Wikimedia is the future and so is Star Trek.
I am annoyed by references to general "bottlenecks", because it's not just Anonymous Coward who comes up with this.
It's just not that simple. A 5GHz CPU will be faster than a 3GHz CPU and 3 video cards will be faster than 1 video card almost regardless of other components. The only real bottlenecks you can talk about are the system busses and at the moment, that's not a problem either. HyperTransport 3.0 and intel's quad-pumped busses are still plenty wide enough for 5GHz processors, no sweat.
I completely understand what you're trying to say, it's just that you're wrong. PCs aren't cars and processors aren't jet engines. A faster CPU will do more CPU work every second, a faster video card will give you higher framerates and more RAM will fix most of your stutters. The slowest part of your computer is the hard disk, so do whatever you can to exclude it from time-critical operations. If the rest of your system is waiting for data from that ancient storage device, THAT would be a bottleneck.
I find it hilarious that the unofficial fix linked has been updated to version 1.1 to fix a memory leak.
Speed.
Corals are slow, human pollution is fast.
If climate change is slow enough, corals will die off at one end and expand at the other, essentially moving as the niche is displaced. If the change is very fast, say two degrees per 100 years or so, the coral won't be able to catch up with the displacement of its niche.
All comments at my level so far seem to accept and discuss the results as describing a causal relation.
I'm thinking if you can afford to buy four alcoholic drinks per day, you are either comparatively wealthy or living in a region of the world that can afford to sell you cheap alcohol. Either way, the sheer fact that you are able to buy some 1500 drinks per annum means you're pretty well off in a global perspective, perhaps even compared to your neighbors. Can we really take for granted that the study isolates the effects of alcohol from all other variables?
Why is the world not ready for Linux? Because Linux is not ready for the world.
Sweden is three weeks from a election. It's a time when every newspaper and every TV channel cover the election in some form and where several hundred candidates for various positions make plays for attention every single day. There are currently seven major parties competing for press and at any one time, two of them will most definatly be talking about the same thing. This is normally called a debate or argument or conflicting standpoints or a "talkie" or what-have-you.
The Swedish Liberal party (Folkpartiet) are focusing a very large part of their political campaign towards integration (of immigrants) and school issues. They bring it up every other day, or more often. The Swedish Social Democratic party (Socialdemokraterna) Party are in a defending position and vie for media attention every single day. They don't always discuss school or integration issues, but often enough. To say, as the Dagens Industri ("Industry Today") article does, that it is some sort of conspiracy if the Liberal Party happen to speak on school or integration issues on the same day that the Socialist party do, is an extremely peculiar accusation. If you look for a pattern, you will see that pattern everywhere in nature.
As for the timing of this news release. The Socialist party was informed by Dagens Industri this last Tuesday that the incursions were taking place. Yet the Socialist Party chose to hold public release of this news until yesterday evening, the same evening when Fredrik Reinfelt, leader of the largest party in opposition, the Moderates, was the subject of hearing in public television. Yet more election propaganda, of course, but covered by and questions asked by public service TV journalists.
If you want to talk about coincidences, you might want to look back at the television hearing a few weeks ago when the party Christian Democrat leader was heard in the same show. Before the political analysis of the questions and answers he had given could ever reach the press, the Social Democratic party just happen to "discover" that a (young, again) member of the Christian Democratic party had "spied" on the Social Democratic party. How had she performed this espionage, you ask. Had she hacked the Social Democratic database? Had she broken into the Party headquarters? Or had she perhaps made a single phone call to the Social Democratic election strategy center? Take your pick.
As far as I can smell, there's something fishy about the way information keeps popping out of the Social Democratic headquarters at extremely opportune times. They don't participate in the resulting ruckus, but they do choose when it should be started. Something smells fishy, and it's not my caviar that's doing it.
...because the seller will have to provide the data, the decryption hardware, and the decryption key to every single user every time. That means they're giving you the very means required to unlock the "protected" data, every time, or you wouldn't be able to watch your movie at all. This is self-evident if you just stop and think about it.
It does not matter if the "protection" is embedded into hardware - it is still a part of your system. As long as you as a buyer have access to all these three things, you are able to copy any data you are able to buy, even without buying it.
Since December of last year, Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget have upgraded all 10mbit customer feeds to 100mbit downstream (10mbit upstream) connections free of additional charge. For this connection, I pay 350 Swedish Kronor per month, and this news would never turn up on the Slashdot front page.
Bredbandsbolaget serves over 300 000 households in Sweden, a nation of around 9 million. It's not some curiosity out in the boondocks or goonhills or whatever you call'em.
Where's the fun in making fun of someone who's half-joking with themselves to begin with?
"I'd even pay good money for it. I think they'd increase their market share significantly - much more than by adding a BT client really.
I don't think Opera will stop you paying for their web browser, but Opera has been free as in beer, and free of application-internal advertisements for quite a while now. I bought it before that, but I still don't feel the least bit cheated. Odd. I'm usually much more niggardly than this.
"Why we're going free" from the Opera webpage.
You self-admittedly bought ATI once and never again. My experiences are a little more current.
ATI drivers in the past few years have surpassed nVidia drivers in performance, stability and support, while nVidia drivers have maintained the same quality they always had (well, disregarding a few of the "leaked" betas in the 40 and 80-series) but have also become more and more bloated while adding little to stability or base functionality. Window throwing? Mouse gestures? In a driver? Not only is it absurd creature feep, it is also adding possible error sources to the package.
So while I, too, have experience from the "bad years" of ATI drivers - never mention the ATI Rage Turbo AGP2x to me ever again - I would not hold it against their drivers today. Why should I let past emotions stand between me and the best hardware I can buy? No reason at all, of course.
...isn't. Neither is security through minority. But back to the actual claims:
First off, Mac users on average pay more for their computers, are self-selected because they tend to know more about technology than your average PC buyer, I really don't see how that follows. They are self-selected because they paid more for their computer, yes, and so they had a lot of money before they bought it. How does that in any way imply that they also "know more about technology"? In my experience, Mac buyers know plenty about design and pretty things, but on average, not so much about technology. This is all speculation from miniscule experience, of course... which I will continue to believe that all opinions are, until I see an actual study on these claims.
More affluent, yes, but it still does not follow that they also know more about technology. Even in the age of computers, people can still make money without actually knowing a lot about technology. Heck, some people don't even have to work to earn it.
Still... my criticism doesn't mean the original speculation is false. Just that it's a non-sequiteur.
To me, this is not only a reason to upgrade, but a reason to pirate the OS, or at least prevent it from calling home. I don't want spiffy GUI effects, and if not paying for the OS is going to get me just what I want... well, that's just perfect.
...are both compulsive gamers. When I say compulsive I say it in the lightest possible meaning of the word, but we still tend to sit down in front of our two high-end computers and play computer games once we both get home from work. It is not the only thing we do, but it is the only thing that is relevant to this discussion, and your imaginations can fill in the blanks elsewhere - thank you.
I turned her almost accidentally to gaming and she only recently started a blog with the intent of chronicling her gaming, except she is too wrapped up in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind at the moment to actually make any updates to the blog. Go figure.
Our favorite genre is RPGs, for Role Playing Games. I prefer games with a deep, rich story and plenty of character development choices. She prefers games that are beautiful. Marriage is like that, you will like different things and you should just roll with it and get along on what you can get along on. That is also where it gets tricky.
Because we are both gamers, and because we love many of the same games we have tried to play them cooperatively. Here are the ones we have tried so far:
Neverwinter Nights (Wintel/Linux)
This was the game that really turned my wife onto gaming, and it was even her first ever contact with the "Dungeons and Dragons" franchise, imagine that. She has played this game and all of its expansions through at least twice, and four times for some. I have not even completed the original campaign. In this game, she is the master and I am the apprentice and my incessant questions about "Who was that?" and "Did you get that quest item?" or "Where does that road go?" became too much for her. We have completely different playing styles and couldn't cooperate.
System Shock 2 (Wintel)
This futuristic first-person RPG has an atmosphere thicker than custard pie and the 2.09 patch introduces a cooperative campaign mode for up to four players. We both love it, we've both played it through, but when we tried to play it together, we ran in different directions. When she was ambushed by a Hybrid from an angle she thought I had covered, I had actually wandered off in search of upgrade modules. It is a tense experience, but it is probably best experienced on your lonesome in a darkened room.
Guild Wars (Wintel)
We had great expectations for the cooperative possibilities in this game, and played through the entire "pre-searing" part of the game together. In this game we did not have the problem of running in different directions, but we were two different player classes. I was the tank warrior and she was the bow-equipped ranger/elementalist mage. She hit targets from a distance while I had to run up to them to attack. This meant she stood still and I ran ahead, and though I never ran far she still got the impression that I was leading the way instead of the ranger.
Icewind Dale II (Wintel)
Another Dungeons and Dragons franchise RPG, but this one was still in 2D art. She liked the 2D art, but decided that the characters "look like LEGOs" and refused to play on account of their miniscule modular ugliness.
Civilization IV (Wintel/?)
My wife not only made first aquaintance with gaming since she met me, but after her introduction to Civilization III, she also made the aquaintance of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. CivIII was her drug of choice and the first time she kept me up all night with a game, it was CivIII. So naturally we were both excited and frightened of the CivIV release. Carpal is painful and fixing it is not exactly free or pleasant. But! The turn-based nature of Civilization IV made this game the best possible cooperative game we have ever tried. Regardless of whether you play simultaneous or individual turns, you always have time to do what you want to and if your partner is ready with his/her turn before you are, you can zoom around the cities you have for some micromanagement.
Just make sure you divide the world between each other before you start. You do not want to get into a diplomatic border dispute with your spouse. And send reinforcements! / Per
Opera does not do the same thing. It is faster, yes, but Opera does not maintain a forward-looking cache at all, it only caches pages you have already visited.
Would that include sacrificing both hands?
...do your own homework!
We do have a libertarian party, but in Europe, we call those people "liberals". In Sweden, that would be "Folkpartiet" who take their cues from the ideals of John Stuart Mill. The american "liberal" variant is more akin to Swedish Social Democratic party. In conclusion, when you say "most people have no clue that there is a thing like libertarianism", I wonder if you included yourself. / Per
The title is completely irrelevant to the content of the message, incorrect because it is not about a year's end list, and it begins with a parenthesis. It's just horrible.
It's an interesting article, too, or I wouldn't even bother saying this.