Let Cuba have a hit of sweet, sweet capitalism. Once they get hooked, we can refuse to offer more unless they start doing what we want.
This sounds like a great plan. But why do you think it is going to happen? Is the government of Cuba about to allow free enterprise by its citizens?
The Economy of Cuba is a planned economy dominated by state-run enterprises. Most industries are owned and operated by the government and most of the labor force is employed by the state.
Actually, that article goes on to say that after the Soviet Union collapsed, the government of Cuba began to allow a tiny amount of free enterprise. But:
Investment is restricted and requires approval by the government. The government sets most prices and rations goods to citizens.
I agree, if the people of Cuba get a taste of free enterprise they will want more. But I fear the government of Cuba knows this and will not cooperate with the plan.
I wish to make a correction: the Obama administration has not yet unilaterally dropped the embargo; the article contains quotes saying they want to do it, but it hasn't happened yet.
From the article:
"We want to make the process of normalisation irreversible," said US national security adviser Ben Rhodes, who led an advance party to Havana this week, and also oversaw the secret talks in Canada that led up to the 2014 deal.
Though the president announced last Sunday that he believes Congress will finally lift the trade embargo once has he gone, even some of his own party are nervous that he has already offered too much too easily.
The US does business with countries like China and Saudi Arabia, so why would Cuba be left out in the cold?
I'm not a fan of dictatorships but I do understand the realities of the world. The USA can't just snap its fingers and reform China or Saudi Arabia, or even Cuba.
But what I'm talking about is using the historic, one-time-only opportunity of getting something in exchange for lifting the embargo. We don't have any similar embargo on China and Saudi Arabia, so they are not very relevant to my question: why did the Obama administration simply unilaterally drop the embargo without getting anything in return?
the national interest is best served by not having China replacing Russia as a major force in Cuba, which is exactly what will happen if relations and trade with Cuba are not normalized.
So, it's not worth making even the smallest effort to help out the prisoners of conscience? The one-sided deal where the government of Cuba gets what it wants, and the USA demands nothing, is the best possible deal?
Maybe it is. If so, I'd like for someone to make that case.
I do agree that China having Cuba in its pocket is undesirable. And I realize that really major demands (break the dictatorship and hold free elections, etc.) would never be met. But again, the appearance here is that the Obama administration granted a huge boon to the government of Cuba, no strings attached, and I don't understand why that's a good deal (or even the best possible deal).
News reports say there are more than 100 long-term prisoners of conscience in Cuba. Nobody knows for sure, as the Castro regime does not grant international organizations access to its prisons. But we know they are there and that hundreds are held for shorter periods, and beaten in prison regularly.
Just two months ago, the president told Yahoo News that he would only travel to Cuba "if, in fact, I with confidence can say that we're seeing some progress in the liberty and freedom and possibilities of ordinary Cubans.... If we're going backwards, then there's not much reason for me to be there."
I have news, Mr. President: No progress has taken place. Cuba is going backward.
If you are a fan of President Obama, could you please explain to me why you think Senator Cruz is wrong about this? Because at the moment I agree with Senator Cruz. President Obama's administration has dropped the embargo and helped out the government of Cuba, and I'm not aware of a single demand that Cuba has granted in return. Set free political prisoners? Allow Amnesty International to visit the prisons? Maybe beat the political prisoners a little bit less? No, no, and no.
Not only did President Obama not make any demands of Cuba, but now Cuba is making demands of President Obama. Pay reparations, return Guantanamo Bay.
I do hope that President Obama will at least use his "bully pulpit" to say something about human rights in Cuba. Words are what he is best at. I would have preferred a binding agreement, but he already didn't do that.
This is a sympathetic article designed to sow confusion about this stuff. The article made the true but irrelevant statement that of a recent batch of emails not many were classified and those not Top Secret; it repeated Hillary Clinton's assertion that nothing she sent or received was marked classified, without discussing what is questionable about that assertion; it didn't mention how many Top Secret emails were found, didn't mention the satellite data or the discussion of the names of spies, and didn't mention that about 7% of all the emails were classified at some level. It also didn't mention that the State Department offered a Blackberry and Huma Abedin said that idea "doesn't make a whole lot of sense." But the article did spend several paragraphs talking about how well she is doing in the primaries.
P.S. So Hillary Clinton wanted a mobile device that could be used for secure communications, and was told "nope, that's not secure, you can visit the SCIF just like everyone else has to do." So naturally she just used her own insecure server to send and receive classified information, so she could use her mobile device. Great.
If President Obama doesn't pardon Hillary Clinton, she will have problems fr
Steveha, you admit you don't understand the paper as well as what you think you could do.
Like that writer in Reason, I see the paper as a complete waste. I see no merit in it whatsoever. There is little there to understand. It's a string of assertions and footnotes, with no examples. It makes no testable predictions.
You claim to be trained to understand papers, and unless I am mistaken you claim that the paper has merit. I don't see any merit, so it would be fair to say that you are claiming to understand the paper better than I do.
I've also argued the history of science demonstrates that culture affects the way people do science, and what they get out of it. You appear to have a big problem with that general insight as it applies to a field of study you care about.
Don't overestimate how much I care about this paper. What I care about is that it cost $400K and it appears to be a complete waste of money and time.
I will grant you that culture can affect the way people do science, and what people get out of science. I gave three examples of rigid consensus thinking causing correct ideas not to get a fair hearing and causing a delay in scientific progress. However, this paper didn't provide any examples of this. It asserted that the male and "colonial" researchers should adopt a feminist and postcolonial mindset... but provided no examples of overlooked facts, faulty reasoning, or any other problem that could have been avoided.
You yourself wrote:
the authors are pushing the idea that the cultural lens through which we understand scientific knowledge means we don't understand things we really ought to know about glaciers as well as we could be
So once again I invite you to provide me with even a single example of why the current understanding of glaciers is faulty, and in what way the actual facts about nature would be better understood by applying a "feminist postcolonial framework".
For example, I claim that a glacier is mostly made out of water ice. I also claim that this is true whether a male studies a glacier, or a female, or someone who is genderqueer or a member of any minority. The glacier would still be made of ice if there were no humans around to study it. There is a natural truth to glaciers that is separate from humans and human culture, and it is not impossible to study glaciers in isolation from culture. (The paper asserts the opposite of this.)
If you want to study the interactions of humans and glaciers, be my guest. If you want to claim that it is difficult to determine the true nature of glaciers, and that anyone who studies glaciers must of necessity study human/glacier interactions, you have a lot more convincing to do.
Even putting that argument to one side, the fact is you probably have no idea about the different ways population groups, such as women, are affected by glacier melt. I'm not about to summarize the paper for you.
A paper discussing the ways different people are affected by melting glaciers is not a paper without merit. I wouldn't sneer at such a paper.
I just went and checked again. This paper doesn't discuss that issue at all.
You have asserted that there is more to the paper than what I understand, and you have refused to explain the merit you see. Therefore I continue to see no merit in the paper, and I regret that $400K of taxpayer money was spent on this paper.
As for the "ice is just ice" argument, anyone who believes that puts themselves in direct conflict with the theory of signs developed by the pragmatist CS Peirce, one of the most brilliant American scholars of any field in any generation
Since I had never heard of that, I looked it up. This is semiotics, the study of symbols and how they are used to communicate. It seems to be to be an irrelevant thing to bring up, yet you seem to think it is relevant in some unspecified way.
I suspect there will be little profit for either of us in continuing this conversation. Good day to you, and have a nice life.
I am not convinced that there is some sort of "blind spot" in our knowledge of glaciers due to the fact that males have studied glaciers. I am not even convinced that female contributions to glacier science have been rejected. Was my writing unclear?
Presumably one thing that has got you bothered is that the authors are pushing the idea that the cultural lens through which we understand scientific knowledge means we don't understand things we really ought to know about glaciers as well as we could be.
You believe that? Show me!
The major thing that has got me bothered is that the authors made assertion after assertion without offering any examples at all, let alone statistics from a broad base of facts, to support their assertions.
Suppose I wanted to write a paper about dogmatic adherence to an old idea in the face of new evidence. I might include the example of J. Harlen Bretz, who was ridiculed for his idea that some geologic features could have been produced by sudden catastrophe; he turned out to be correct. I might include the example of plate tectonics, another theory that was rejected for decades but turned out to be correct. I might include the example of the theory that bacteria could cause ulcers. But if I wrote a long paper saying "People might be slow to accept a new idea. This might lead to slowness in the advancement of science." (only in a lot more words) the paper wouldn't be wrong, but I hope you would not respect it very much. And I hope nobody would get paid $400K in grant money for a paper like that.
All of section VI is a discussion of paintings, fiction stories, and other art, with breathless praise for how these can lead to seeing glaciers in a new way. Okay, give me just one example of how the scientific understanding of glaciers is improved by a painting that has a timestamp on it, or a short story about two women who travel to the South Pole in secret and don't tell anyone about it. If you are going to argue that I'm missing something by not looking at these paintings or reading that story, give me even one example of just what it is that I am missing.
Now it's true that communicating tricky ideas with clarity can be mighty difficult.
IMHO this is not clearly explaining anything. I see a string of assertions. There is a "need" for a "more profound" analysis... why? If we want to study the cross-section of a glacier, the accepted technique would be to drill for an ice core and inspect the core... this is "penetrating" and "exploiting" the glacier in manly male fashion; what then is the alternative? Can we learn more about the glacier by painting a picture of it and putting a timestamp on the painting? If so, give me even one example.
(FWIW I do understand it, because I've been trained to do so).
The Reason piece can be summarized as "there is very little value in this paper, but it cost the taxpayers $400K." When I read the paper, it seemed like a parody of science, complete with passages about how m
The introduction of the paper brings up the idea that "ice is just ice" and then dismisses it. If I am understanding the paper correctly (and how can I be certain of that!) the idea is that people care about glaciers, therefore there is a sociological component to them:
Through a review and synthesis of a multi-disciplinary and wide-ranging literature on human-ice relations, this paper proposes a feminist glaciology framework to analyze human-glacier dynamics, glacier narratives and discourse, and claims to credibility and authority of glaciological knowledge through the lens of feminist studies.
(italics in original)
The paper goes on to say that most research on glaciers was produced by males, which of course is a problem.
Most existing glaciological research — and hence discourse and discussions about cryospheric change — stems from information produced by men, about men, with manly characteristics, and within masculinist discourses.
No, I didn't punch that up to make it funny, the original really says "men, with manly characteristics".
Structures of power and domination also stimulated the first large-scale ice core drilling projects — these archetypal masculinist projects to literally penetrate glaciers and extract for measurement and exploitation the ice in Greenland and Antarctica.
Again, this is the original text. "penetrate" and "exploitation" are both from the paper.
So the paper argues that all existing knowledge of glaciers is tainted by the maleness of the research, and also by the "colonialism" of the research. In short, not even the study of glaciers can be a pure study of the natural world; glacier scientists must be feminist postcolonial social-justice warriors.
The conclusion of the paper states:
Ice is not just ice. The dominant way Western societies understand it through the science of glaciology is not a neutral representation of nature.
I'm not convinced. The paper is very long on speculation and very short on evidence. If the maleness and colonialism of glacier studies have given us a blind spot in our understanding of what glaciers are, then give at least one example.
Even in the paper, female mountaineers and female scientists are mentioned. If the study of glaciers somehow rejected these women and their contributions, the paper doesn't give any examples.
Also I reject the paper's idea that the word "glaciology" should be expanded to include sociological and feminist context. It seems like a transparent attempt to latch fuzzy SJW ideas onto a natural science. Ice really is just ice; people can study ice without studying how society reacts to ice.
The Mac Pros are using GPUs designed for the people who are creating content
And the Mac Pros were designed to be impossible to upgrade. Want to put in a "gaming" GPU? So sorry, you can't.
And the Mac Pros don't have a model that ships with a "gaming" GPU. Are you shouting "hey Apple, take my money?" They aren't taking it.
The weird thing is that the Mac Pro is really getting long in the tooth. Seriously overdue for an upgrade. According to an article I just found, Apple is likely to either update in 2016, or never as the Mac Pro has been something of a flop.
But it sure looks cool... it's like Darth Vader's own trash can (and I don't mean that as an insult).
Instead of an upgraded Mac Pro, Apple might come out with a model that actually has internal bays for things like drives, and actually has upgradeable video cards.
The current Mac Pro design would rock as a "Mac Mini Pro" if Apple would release a model just like it but $1200 and with a gaming GPU.
Apple's model of "only have a few different models, and make as much as possible on each model" is starting to hurt them in the high end of the market. The pro users who should buy the Mac Pro are not being well served, and they are getting tired of it.
Here's a quote from Desmond Tutu: If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
I don't think he had slanting the news reporting in mind. Making some facts prominent while burying others is not my idea of reporting the truth.
If the truth is that one side is bad the the other is not, then an even-handed reporting of the facts will make this clear.
This sounds more balanced to you? It sounds, at first at the very least, that the dead and wounded are all Israeli soldiers.
Okay, my bad there. I'm not actually experienced at writing headlines, did it show?
I trust you grasped my greater point: it is not balanced to omit all mention of harm on one side; the headline boiled down to "Israelis screwed up and Palestinians paid a horrific price", when the reality is more like "Palestinians paid a price for attacking Israeli soldiers".
The thing is, both groups have been repeatedly breaking this convention for a while now (phosphorus bombs, does it ring a bell?).
Two wrongs don't make a right, and past wrongs don't justify slanting the news coverage.
If it were factually true, I wouldn't have a problem with a news story that said "Group X started placing rocket launchers in hospitals in response to phosphorous bombs being dropped on them." If both sides are breaking the Geneva conventions, it should be reported that way.
Reporting just one group isn't slanted?
I really don't understand how you can possibly be accusing me of this. I have repeatedly said that I think all the relevant facts should be reported. My example was that it's disingenuous to excoriate "Group I" for attacking a hospital, while not mentioning that the hospital was being used to launch rockets and mortars to kill members of "Group I". How can you possibly equate this with "Reporting just one group isn't slanted"?
Do you believe that the end justifies the means? Any means at all? I don't believe that anyone is morally justified to use children as human shields, or put rocket launchers inside hospitals. Even if you are cheering for the Palestinians to use asymmetric warfare tactics against Israel, don't you have a problem with the most extreme tactics?
And if the most extreme tactics are used, are you okay with the news media deciding what you are allowed to read about it?
Finally, from a statistical point of view, we're arguing over epsilons here. Hundred of thousands are dying elsewhere (e.g. Syria) and we don't talk about it much here.
True, but my topic was "this reporting is slanted" not "this story is important".
And on that note, I think I should stop spending time on this conversation. Thank you for the conversation and I hope you have a good day.
It is my position that news reporting should be even-handed. Even if you feel that Israel responds with better weapons and armour, details do matter.
From other comments in this thread, it appears that some people on Slashdot think that the Palestinians and Israel are actually at war, and that it is acceptable for Palestinians to try to kill a couple of soldiers from a non-combat unit who got lost, as "legitimate military targets". Further, it is not only acceptable to slant the reporting to leave out details of who started the fighting, but also that my post about the slanted reporting must be modded down into oblivion. (The top post is modded +3 Insightful, -2 Flamebait, -2 Troll; I'm sure it will hit -1 soon.)
I will grant that there was an asymmetry here. Once the Israeli army understood that two of its soldiers were in danger, it sent in about 20 vehicles full of soldiers to rescue the two missing soldiers. But I think intent matters here; and the intent was to rescue the two lost soldiers and leave.
Oversimplifying the news to "Israeli soldiers use Waze, and Palestinians get hurt as a result" is IMHO dishonest reporting, even if the reporter doesn't approve of Israel. Since you brought up asymmetry, the key question is: does asymmetry of forces justify slanting the reporting heavily to one side?
Do you want the people reporting the news to decide what you should take away from the news story, and slant the story to help make sure you take away the "right" opinion? I don't; I want to hear both sides. "Israel kills one Palestinian and wounds 10 for no apparent reason" is dishonest; "Palestinians attack Israeli soldiers; 1 dead, 10 wounded, with 10 Israeli soldiers wounded" is more balanced.
If someone (let's just call them "Group X") puts rocket launchers and mortars inside a hospital, and uses them to attack another group (let's just call them "Group I"), then IMHO the correct reporting is "Group I damages a hospital while destroying rocket launchers and mortars being used to attack", not "Group I destroys hospital, patients in danger". Even if you think Group I is doing something you disapprove of, failing to report that Group X broke the Geneva convention about not using hospitals to attack, while at the same time excoriating Group I for attacking a hospical, that to me is way over the line journalistic malpractice. Yet that was one of the examples of slanted reporting from the URL I linked in the top post.
The headline makes it sound like there was this firefight just sort of hanging out, like firefights do, and a couple of troops just blundered into it.
Let's rewrite the headline in active voice: "Palistinians Attempt to Kill Two Noncombatant Israeli Soldiers Who Accidentally Entered Refugee Camp"
From the article:
In the camp, they were "stormed by a mob of people with rocks and molotov cocktails," Lerner said. The troops' vehicle was blocked from turning around and caught fire. The soldiers fled in separate directions.
I don't think Israel is perfect, nor Israeli soldiers, but I am rather tired of how passive voice is so often used when describing things done to Israelis.
I wouldn't say that the two Israeli soldiers "blundered into a firefight". They blundered into a refugee camp, and there a group of Palestinians tried to kill them. Since their vehicle was blocked and then destroyed, they fled on foot. The firefight came later, when more Israeli soldiers came to rescue the two who blundered.
Note that the Slashdot story headline is worse than the one from the Washington Post, which is: "Israeli troops relying on Waze app blunder into Palestinian area; clashes follow"
I note also that the summary has a detailed accounting of the harm done to Palestinians: "at least one Palestinian dead and 10 injured, one seriously." Yet curiously it leaves out the small details that the Palestinians attacked first, destroyed a military vehicle, and injured 10 Israeli soldiers.
Again for comparison, the Washington Post article says:
The clashes in the Qalandiya refugee camp outside Jerusalem left at least one Palestinian dead and 10 injured, one seriously. At least 10 Israeli soldiers also were wounded during the hour-long operation.
Perhaps the omissions are simple mistakes, but it's kind of strange how the omissions were all about harm done to Israeli soldiers.
I'll finish with one more quote from the Washington Post story:
Tension between Israelis and Palestinians has been running high over the past five months, with almost daily stabbing, shooting and vehicular attacks by Palestinians against Israelis. The violence has left at least 29 Israeli citizens and three foreign nationals dead.
So the two soldiers who "blundered" are guilty of getting a bit lost. I've gotten a bit lost; I'm just lucky that I don't live in a place where a mob of people will attack me if I go to the wrong neighborhood.
The thing is: why not? If you are volunteering as tech support for Grandma, you can make things easy for yourself by setting her up with Linux instead of Windows.
That's what I have done. My father is over 80 and he is exclusively running Linux. (Specifically: Linux Mint 17.3, 64-bit with MATE)
Once it's set up, it Just Works. It keeps on working. My father is completely happy. He has one must-have Windows app (Adobe FrameMaker, versions 5.5.6 and 7) and that runs great under WINE. (The default WINE in Linux Mint just works, no tweaking needed and no need to buy CrossOver or whatever.)
Now, if your point is "Grandma is going to buy computers with Windows pre-installed and isn't going to install Linux for herself" then sure, I'll agree. But if you set it up for her, she will be able to do the most common things: web (including YouTube and Facebook) and email.
A friend of mine once, as a prank, installed a Windows XP desktop theme on his Linux computer. Then visiting relatives used his computer and none of them even realized they were using Linux. It really wasn't very much of a prank; they didn't realize anything was out of the ordinary.
People who have specialized software needs may be chained to Windows; but even they could probably run Windows inside VirtualBox, and do their web surfing and email in Linux. But for the stereotypical Grandma, Linux is already just fine.
About half of my family is running Linux instead of Windows. We're geekier than the average, but I can tell you that non-geeks in my family have no problem at all running a Linux desktop. (And I've installed Windows and Linux, and overall it's easier to do a Linux install.)
It has never been easier to junk Windows and switch to Linux. Many people just use email, a web browser, and Facebook; those all Just Work on Linux. Video, sound, it's all fine.
And desktop is getting less important all the time; people are using mobile devices more and more. And Microsoft missed the boat on mobile.
So even as the "network" that makes Windows important is crumbling ("network" as in "network effect"), even as Microsoft's actual power to push people is waning, they keep finding new ways to punish people who stick with them. Hey, nobody will mind if we monitor them a bunch, right? Make it almost impossible to figure out whether it's enabled or not. (If it's even possible to disable it... maybe it isn't!) And start pushing ads, because nobody hates having full-screen ads in their faces.
Is Microsoft actually trying to achieve Windows 8 levels of hatred for Windows 10? Does Linus Torvalds have sleeper agents inside Microsoft trying to make Windows crumble from inside?
Keep this up, MIcrosoft, and we may yet see the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
P.S. I haven't bothered to keep up with all the settings one must change to disable all the bad behaviors in Windows 10. I just checked to see if there's a tool for it... there's a bunch and it's not obvious which one(s) to use. Is there a clear favorite tool to fix the Windows 10 settings?
I definitely don't agree that Flash Gordon is a contender for worst anything ever. It was campy fun. I was laughing in the places the film maker wanted me to laugh, not laughing at how terrible it was. The special effects were not much better or worse than most other movies of its time (Star Wars being a huge exception).
You can't possibly think that Flash Gordon is a worse movie than Batman & Robin. Ugh.
P.S. Surprisingly, Roger Corman produced an extremely low-budget superhero movie and it actually is not bad: Black Scorpion
Defenders have argued that network transparency is a minority application and that they don't like the way it's implemented in X11 anyway,
All I need to know is that all the people who know the most about X11 think Wayland is a good idea.
Here's a talk from 2013 where an experienced X11 developer explaining exactly what is wrong with X11 and why he thinks Wayland is a good idea. This link starts 40 minutes into the talk, where he specifically talks about running remotely over a network.
And I've never seen a Wayland developer say that network transparency would never happen; they were focused on getting the essentials right.
Here's a talk from SCALE a year ago. This link starts with him saying exactly that: the Wayland guys were focused on essentials but now are ready to start looking at remote.
"redesigned user interface for improved ease of use"?
You might try watching the demo videos. They made improvements to the menus, improvements to the context menus, and improvements to toolbars (including a pop-out side panel formatting toolbar thing that I guess is new to the 5.x series).
No ribbon.
Here, have a playlist URL that lets you watch the demo videos directly from YouTube instead of using the embedded videos in TFA.
The original Doom games were noteworthy for having big levels that contained lots and lots of enemies. I haven't played Doom 3, but I've heard that it has much more beautiful 3D graphics, and as a result you would be attacked by only a few monsters at a time (because too many would overwhelm the graphics adapters that were current when that game came out).
My favorite thing in the the original Doom games was getting the monsters to fight each other. If you could get an Imp so hit a Cacodemon with a fireball, for example, the two would get into a fight. Frequently I would lure some monster into the line of fire and as soon as it was hit, it would forget about me and go kill whatever monster hit it. This is more fun to me than just shooting everything. I hope the new game has this.
The specific rules: monster special attacks don't hurt other monsters of the exact same type... for example, Imp fireballs don't hurt Imps. But the zombie soldiers shoot bullets and bullets hurt anything, so you could get soldiers to fight each other. And anytime a monster hit a different kind of monster it would do damage.
One side-effect of this is that processes on a system can get into a fight with each other. Two processes enter, one leaves. Not recommended for critical systems.
If you say something about my freedom stopping at his nose, then I remind you that the baby's right to live stops at the aborter's saline injection, scraping blade, etc.
libertarians might agree that abortion should be illegal, and might not. I'll explain why:
The core of libertarian philosophy: force and fraud are not acceptable, but as long as people are free to choose, the state shouldn't intervene.
Thus a libertarian would not be in favor of the state forbidding drugs like alcohol or tobacco or marijuana. If a person chooses to use such drugs it is his/her choice.
But a libertarian would agree that murder should be illegal.
So it comes down to: is an abortion murder?
libertarians who believe that life begins at conception, and even a one-week-old embryo counts as a person, would believe that abortion is murder, and thus should be illegal.
libertarians who believe that an embryo isn't a person yet would believe that abortion should be the choice of the mother.
The question of whether an embryo is a person is not one that is decided by libertarian philosophy, and thus two people who are libertarians might have opposite opinions.
All libertarians would agree that the state should not be using tax money to fund abortions. Some libertarians think the state should be very small, and others (the "anarcho-capitalists") want no state at all; none would consider funding abortions to be a legitimate function for the state.
P.S. I read an essay by Carl Sagan where he suggested that before brain activity starts up, a fetus is not a person, but after the brain is functioning it should be considered an unborn person. IIRC he said that is about the third trimester. (Note, I did a Google search and found one web page saying brain activity starts around 25 weeks, which would be early third trimester.)
The point of Docker is to have a single package ("container") that contains all of its dependencies, running in isolation from any other Docker containers. Since the container is self-contained, it can be run on any Docker host. For example, if you have some wacky old program that only runs on one particular set of library versions, it might be hard for you to get the Docker container just right to make it run; but once you do, that container will Just Work everywhere, and updating packages on the host won't break it.
The point of the news story is that someone did a better job of stripping the container down, removing libraries and such that were not true dependencies (weren't truly needed).
Not only does this make for smaller containers, but it should reduce the attack surface, by removing resources that are available inside the container. For example, if someone finds a security flaw in library libfoo, this would protect against that security flaw by removing libfoo when it is not needed. It's pretty hard for an exploit to call code in a library if the library isn't present. Also, presumably all development tools and even things like command-line shells would be stripped out. Thus a successful attacker might gain control over a docker container instance, but would have no way to escalate privileges any further.
If the stated numbers are correct (a 644 MB container went down to 29 MB) yet the new small package still works, then clearly there is a lot of unnecessary stuff in that standard 644 MB container.
Hey, AMD, show us your new CPUs for 2016. Everything you got now is long in the tooth.
How right you are. But their basic problem has been that they were still stuck on old semiconductor fabrication processes. Intel has spent a bunch of money on fab technology and is about two generations ahead of AMD. It didn't help that their current architecture isn't great.
I'm not a semiconductor expert, but as I understand it: the thinner the traces on the semiconductor, the higher clock rate can go or the lower the power dissipation can be (those two are tradeoffs). Intel's 4th-generation CPUs were fabbed on 22 nm process, and their current CPUs are fabbed on 14 nm process. AMD has been stuck at 28 nm and is in fact still selling CPUs fabbed on a 32 nm process. It's brutal to try to compete when so far behind. But AMD is just skipping the 22 nm process and going straight to 14 nm. (Intel has 10 nm in the pipeline, planned for 2017 release, but it should be easier to compete 14 nm vs 10 nm than 32/28 nm vs 14 nm! And it took years for AMD to get to 14 nm, while there are indications that they will make the jump to 10 nm more quickly.)
But AMD is about to catch up. AMD has shown us their new CPU for 2016; its code-name is "Zen" and it will be fabbed on a 14 nm process. AMD claims the new architecture will provide 40% more instructions-per-clock than their current architecture; combined with finally getting onto a modern fab process, the Zen should be competitive with Intel's offerings. (I expect Intel to hold onto the top-performance crown, but I expect AMD will offer better performance per dollar with acceptable thermal envelope.) Wikipedia says it will be released in October 2016.
Intel is so far ahead of AMD that it's unlikely that AMD will ever take over the #1 spot, but I am at least hoping that they will hold on to a niche and serve to keep Intel in check.
The ironic thing is that Intel is currently making the best products, yet still they feel the need to cheat with dirty tricks like the Intel C Compiler's generating bad code for CPUs with a non-Intel CPUID. Also I don't like how Intel tries to segment their products into dozens of tiers to maximize money extraction. (Oh, did you want virtualization? This cheaper CPU doesn't offer that; buy this more expensive one. Oh, did you want ECC RAM? Step right up to our most expensive CPUs!)
Intel has been a very good "corporate citizen" with respect to the Linux kernel, and they make good products; but I try not to buy their products because I hate their bad behavior. I own one laptop with an Intel i7 CPU, but otherwise I'm 100% non-Intel.
I want to build a new computer and I don't want to wait for Zen so I will be buying an FX-8350 (fabbed on 32 nm process, ugh). But in 18 months or so I look forward to buying new Zen processors and building new computers.
Only 4 years, not 18+, but still a good story. At University of North Carolina they took an inventory of their servers and realized they couldn't find one. Eventually by following cables they discovered that it had been sealed up behind a new wall, four years previously. The server had been chugging along with no problems during that that whole time.
Right. This is why I think VP9 actually could win and become the new standard (replacing H.264).
H.265 and VP9 seem like they are definitely in the same ballpark on quality. And H.265 is heavily encumbered with patents; you have to pay royalties, and you never know what the royalties might cost in five years. VP9, on the other hand, is simply free: no royalties, no restrictions on what you may do with the video.
Even if VP9 takes a lot more CPU time to encode, and even if H.265 is slightly better than VP9, not having to pay royalties (not even having to keep track of what you do with the video!) is such a huge benefit. It seems like a no-brainer.
And Google will be making sure that all the Android phones at least will have good hardware support for VP9 decoding. VP8 never had a chance against H.264 because the hardware support wasn't there, and large companies were content to pay the capped fees as you noted.
All that's left is possible legal FUD around VP9, but even that seems pretty cut-and-dried to me. MPEG-LA tried for something like a year to find patents to put into their patent pool to extract royalties from VP8, and in the end Google gave them a one-time payment of (to Google) a relatively small amount of money. Thanks to that one-time payment we know MPEG-LA won't ever come after anyone for using a VP8-derived codec, and I have no reason to think anyone would be able to prevail in court if they try it.
Given all of the above, it seems to me that VP9 is the obvious choice for the new video standard, and I kind of wonder why anyone is still interested in using H.265 and paying the royalties.
The O2 headphone amplifier is an extremely clean amp that can drive almost any headphones. It sounds great. Pair it with a clean DAC, rip all your CDs to FLAC, and you can listen to your music from your computer with the very highest in fidelity.
If you can solder, you can build the O2 amp for $30 to $40 worth of parts.
The guy who designed the O2 also designed a really good DAC. He wanted to release it as a DIY project but the realities of the DAC chip business mean that it was only practical to sell a complete DAC board. But you could make a project out of building an O2 amp in an enclosure with the DAC board built-in. (I have such a device but I can't solder; I bought mine from JDS Labs, pre-built.)
I'm glad that you are so happy with the cost of electricity. However, I keep reading magazine articles about what a disaster the energy policy in Germany has been, and your one data point does not convince me.
The simultaneous dash to renewables and new fossil-fuel power plants resulted in overcapacity and caused wholesale prices to tumble, which has battered the utilities' profits.
At the same time, the prices paid by consumers have been rising. This is because of the above-market prices guaranteed for renewable energy.
[...]
This means that traditional utilities have turned instead to much more climate-damaging coal for generation. The result is that prices have gone up and the use of renewable sources has expanded, but Germans have ended up emitting more carbon dioxide as a result of the extra coal...
But it gives me no happiness to think that the energy plan in Germany is failing. I hope that it will work out eventually.
What Germany really needs, what everyone really needs, to make renewable energy work is storage. I am hoping for new storage technologies to make grid-level storage practical... the liquid metal batteries from Ambri, or pumped electrolyte batteries, or whatever. The only currently practical technology is pumped hydro, and the energy policy in Germany has led to pumped hydro facilities shutting down. If your energy policy leads to coal plants continuing to operate and pumped hydro shutting down, You're Doing It Wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Let Cuba have a hit of sweet, sweet capitalism. Once they get hooked, we can refuse to offer more unless they start doing what we want.
This sounds like a great plan. But why do you think it is going to happen? Is the government of Cuba about to allow free enterprise by its citizens?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Cuba
Actually, that article goes on to say that after the Soviet Union collapsed, the government of Cuba began to allow a tiny amount of free enterprise. But:
I agree, if the people of Cuba get a taste of free enterprise they will want more. But I fear the government of Cuba knows this and will not cooperate with the plan.
I wish to make a correction: the Obama administration has not yet unilaterally dropped the embargo; the article contains quotes saying they want to do it, but it hasn't happened yet.
From the article:
The US does business with countries like China and Saudi Arabia, so why would Cuba be left out in the cold?
I'm not a fan of dictatorships but I do understand the realities of the world. The USA can't just snap its fingers and reform China or Saudi Arabia, or even Cuba.
But what I'm talking about is using the historic, one-time-only opportunity of getting something in exchange for lifting the embargo. We don't have any similar embargo on China and Saudi Arabia, so they are not very relevant to my question: why did the Obama administration simply unilaterally drop the embargo without getting anything in return?
the national interest is best served by not having China replacing Russia as a major force in Cuba, which is exactly what will happen if relations and trade with Cuba are not normalized.
So, it's not worth making even the smallest effort to help out the prisoners of conscience? The one-sided deal where the government of Cuba gets what it wants, and the USA demands nothing, is the best possible deal?
Maybe it is. If so, I'd like for someone to make that case.
I do agree that China having Cuba in its pocket is undesirable. And I realize that really major demands (break the dictatorship and hold free elections, etc.) would never be met. But again, the appearance here is that the Obama administration granted a huge boon to the government of Cuba, no strings attached, and I don't understand why that's a good deal (or even the best possible deal).
Here is what Senator Ted Cruz wrote about this:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/obama-cuba-visit-ted-cruz-213749
If you are a fan of President Obama, could you please explain to me why you think Senator Cruz is wrong about this? Because at the moment I agree with Senator Cruz. President Obama's administration has dropped the embargo and helped out the government of Cuba, and I'm not aware of a single demand that Cuba has granted in return. Set free political prisoners? Allow Amnesty International to visit the prisons? Maybe beat the political prisoners a little bit less? No, no, and no.
Not only did President Obama not make any demands of Cuba, but now Cuba is making demands of President Obama. Pay reparations, return Guantanamo Bay.
I do hope that President Obama will at least use his "bully pulpit" to say something about human rights in Cuba. Words are what he is best at. I would have preferred a binding agreement, but he already didn't do that.
This is a sympathetic article designed to sow confusion about this stuff. The article made the true but irrelevant statement that of a recent batch of emails not many were classified and those not Top Secret; it repeated Hillary Clinton's assertion that nothing she sent or received was marked classified, without discussing what is questionable about that assertion; it didn't mention how many Top Secret emails were found, didn't mention the satellite data or the discussion of the names of spies, and didn't mention that about 7% of all the emails were classified at some level. It also didn't mention that the State Department offered a Blackberry and Huma Abedin said that idea "doesn't make a whole lot of sense." But the article did spend several paragraphs talking about how well she is doing in the primaries.
Problems with Hillary Clinton's claims that no material was marked classified:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/8/28/1416309/-Hillary-Clinton-s-Felony-The-federal-laws-violated-by-the-private-server
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/02/09/judicial-watch-hillary-e-mailed-classified-info-to-get-printout-without-any-identifiers/
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/19/politics/hillary-clinton-emails-server-classified-ig-report/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-on-her-private-server-wrote-104-emails-the-government-says-are-classified/2016/03/05/11e2ee06-dbd6-11e5-81ae-7491b9b9e7df_story.html
Names of spies discussed in insecure email, lives probably lost:
http://observer.com/2016/02/breaking-hillary-clinton-put-spies-lives-at-risk/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3413033/Hillary-s-emails-contained-classified-information-HUMAN-SPYING-State-Department-says-won-t-meet-deadline-publish-emails.html
Satellite data discussed in emails:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3196774/Hillary-s-emails-contained-secret-CIA-intelligence-satellite-info-panic-hits-Democrats-campaign-issues-4-000-word-explanation-s-innocent.html
7% of emails classified... 2079 out of about 30,000:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/02/new-email-release-brings-final-total-of-classified-clinton-emails-to-2079.php
"doesn't make a whole lot of sense":
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/01/18/state-to-huma-in-2011-your-boss-better-get-an-official-e-mail-account/
P.S. So Hillary Clinton wanted a mobile device that could be used for secure communications, and was told "nope, that's not secure, you can visit the SCIF just like everyone else has to do." So naturally she just used her own insecure server to send and receive classified information, so she could use her mobile device. Great.
If President Obama doesn't pardon Hillary Clinton, she will have problems fr
Steveha, you admit you don't understand the paper as well as what you think you could do.
Like that writer in Reason, I see the paper as a complete waste. I see no merit in it whatsoever. There is little there to understand. It's a string of assertions and footnotes, with no examples. It makes no testable predictions.
You claim to be trained to understand papers, and unless I am mistaken you claim that the paper has merit. I don't see any merit, so it would be fair to say that you are claiming to understand the paper better than I do.
I've also argued the history of science demonstrates that culture affects the way people do science, and what they get out of it. You appear to have a big problem with that general insight as it applies to a field of study you care about.
Don't overestimate how much I care about this paper. What I care about is that it cost $400K and it appears to be a complete waste of money and time.
I will grant you that culture can affect the way people do science, and what people get out of science. I gave three examples of rigid consensus thinking causing correct ideas not to get a fair hearing and causing a delay in scientific progress. However, this paper didn't provide any examples of this. It asserted that the male and "colonial" researchers should adopt a feminist and postcolonial mindset... but provided no examples of overlooked facts, faulty reasoning, or any other problem that could have been avoided.
You yourself wrote:
So once again I invite you to provide me with even a single example of why the current understanding of glaciers is faulty, and in what way the actual facts about nature would be better understood by applying a "feminist postcolonial framework".
For example, I claim that a glacier is mostly made out of water ice. I also claim that this is true whether a male studies a glacier, or a female, or someone who is genderqueer or a member of any minority. The glacier would still be made of ice if there were no humans around to study it. There is a natural truth to glaciers that is separate from humans and human culture, and it is not impossible to study glaciers in isolation from culture. (The paper asserts the opposite of this.)
If you want to study the interactions of humans and glaciers, be my guest. If you want to claim that it is difficult to determine the true nature of glaciers, and that anyone who studies glaciers must of necessity study human/glacier interactions, you have a lot more convincing to do.
Even putting that argument to one side, the fact is you probably have no idea about the different ways population groups, such as women, are affected by glacier melt. I'm not about to summarize the paper for you.
A paper discussing the ways different people are affected by melting glaciers is not a paper without merit. I wouldn't sneer at such a paper.
I just went and checked again. This paper doesn't discuss that issue at all.
You have asserted that there is more to the paper than what I understand, and you have refused to explain the merit you see. Therefore I continue to see no merit in the paper, and I regret that $400K of taxpayer money was spent on this paper.
As for the "ice is just ice" argument, anyone who believes that puts themselves in direct conflict with the theory of signs developed by the pragmatist CS Peirce, one of the most brilliant American scholars of any field in any generation
Since I had never heard of that, I looked it up. This is semiotics, the study of symbols and how they are used to communicate. It seems to be to be an irrelevant thing to bring up, yet you seem to think it is relevant in some unspecified way.
I suspect there will be little profit for either of us in continuing this conversation. Good day to you, and have a nice life.
You're not convinced about what, exactly?
I am not convinced that there is some sort of "blind spot" in our knowledge of glaciers due to the fact that males have studied glaciers. I am not even convinced that female contributions to glacier science have been rejected. Was my writing unclear?
Presumably one thing that has got you bothered is that the authors are pushing the idea that the cultural lens through which we understand scientific knowledge means we don't understand things we really ought to know about glaciers as well as we could be.
You believe that? Show me!
The major thing that has got me bothered is that the authors made assertion after assertion without offering any examples at all, let alone statistics from a broad base of facts, to support their assertions.
Suppose I wanted to write a paper about dogmatic adherence to an old idea in the face of new evidence. I might include the example of J. Harlen Bretz, who was ridiculed for his idea that some geologic features could have been produced by sudden catastrophe; he turned out to be correct. I might include the example of plate tectonics, another theory that was rejected for decades but turned out to be correct. I might include the example of the theory that bacteria could cause ulcers. But if I wrote a long paper saying "People might be slow to accept a new idea. This might lead to slowness in the advancement of science." (only in a lot more words) the paper wouldn't be wrong, but I hope you would not respect it very much. And I hope nobody would get paid $400K in grant money for a paper like that.
All of section VI is a discussion of paintings, fiction stories, and other art, with breathless praise for how these can lead to seeing glaciers in a new way. Okay, give me just one example of how the scientific understanding of glaciers is improved by a painting that has a timestamp on it, or a short story about two women who travel to the South Pole in secret and don't tell anyone about it. If you are going to argue that I'm missing something by not looking at these paintings or reading that story, give me even one example of just what it is that I am missing.
Now it's true that communicating tricky ideas with clarity can be mighty difficult.
Here's a section from the paper:
IMHO this is not clearly explaining anything. I see a string of assertions. There is a "need" for a "more profound" analysis... why? If we want to study the cross-section of a glacier, the accepted technique would be to drill for an ice core and inspect the core... this is "penetrating" and "exploiting" the glacier in manly male fashion; what then is the alternative? Can we learn more about the glacier by painting a picture of it and putting a timestamp on the painting? If so, give me even one example.
(FWIW I do understand it, because I've been trained to do so).
The Reason piece can be summarized as "there is very little value in this paper, but it cost the taxpayers $400K." When I read the paper, it seemed like a parody of science, complete with passages about how m
The introduction of the paper brings up the idea that "ice is just ice" and then dismisses it. If I am understanding the paper correctly (and how can I be certain of that!) the idea is that people care about glaciers, therefore there is a sociological component to them:
(italics in original)
The paper goes on to say that most research on glaciers was produced by males, which of course is a problem.
No, I didn't punch that up to make it funny, the original really says "men, with manly characteristics".
Again, this is the original text. "penetrate" and "exploitation" are both from the paper.
So the paper argues that all existing knowledge of glaciers is tainted by the maleness of the research, and also by the "colonialism" of the research. In short, not even the study of glaciers can be a pure study of the natural world; glacier scientists must be feminist postcolonial social-justice warriors.
The conclusion of the paper states:
I'm not convinced. The paper is very long on speculation and very short on evidence. If the maleness and colonialism of glacier studies have given us a blind spot in our understanding of what glaciers are, then give at least one example.
Even in the paper, female mountaineers and female scientists are mentioned. If the study of glaciers somehow rejected these women and their contributions, the paper doesn't give any examples.
Also I reject the paper's idea that the word "glaciology" should be expanded to include sociological and feminist context. It seems like a transparent attempt to latch fuzzy SJW ideas onto a natural science. Ice really is just ice; people can study ice without studying how society reacts to ice.
The Mac Pros are using GPUs designed for the people who are creating content
And the Mac Pros were designed to be impossible to upgrade. Want to put in a "gaming" GPU? So sorry, you can't.
And the Mac Pros don't have a model that ships with a "gaming" GPU. Are you shouting "hey Apple, take my money?" They aren't taking it.
The weird thing is that the Mac Pro is really getting long in the tooth. Seriously overdue for an upgrade. According to an article I just found, Apple is likely to either update in 2016, or never as the Mac Pro has been something of a flop.
But it sure looks cool... it's like Darth Vader's own trash can (and I don't mean that as an insult).
Instead of an upgraded Mac Pro, Apple might come out with a model that actually has internal bays for things like drives, and actually has upgradeable video cards.
The current Mac Pro design would rock as a "Mac Mini Pro" if Apple would release a model just like it but $1200 and with a gaming GPU.
Apple's model of "only have a few different models, and make as much as possible on each model" is starting to hurt them in the high end of the market. The pro users who should buy the Mac Pro are not being well served, and they are getting tired of it.
Clearly we are not going to agree.
Here's a quote from Desmond Tutu: If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
I don't think he had slanting the news reporting in mind. Making some facts prominent while burying others is not my idea of reporting the truth.
If the truth is that one side is bad the the other is not, then an even-handed reporting of the facts will make this clear.
This sounds more balanced to you? It sounds, at first at the very least, that the dead and wounded are all Israeli soldiers.
Okay, my bad there. I'm not actually experienced at writing headlines, did it show?
I trust you grasped my greater point: it is not balanced to omit all mention of harm on one side; the headline boiled down to "Israelis screwed up and Palestinians paid a horrific price", when the reality is more like "Palestinians paid a price for attacking Israeli soldiers".
The thing is, both groups have been repeatedly breaking this convention for a while now (phosphorus bombs, does it ring a bell?).
Two wrongs don't make a right, and past wrongs don't justify slanting the news coverage.
If it were factually true, I wouldn't have a problem with a news story that said "Group X started placing rocket launchers in hospitals in response to phosphorous bombs being dropped on them." If both sides are breaking the Geneva conventions, it should be reported that way.
Reporting just one group isn't slanted?
I really don't understand how you can possibly be accusing me of this. I have repeatedly said that I think all the relevant facts should be reported. My example was that it's disingenuous to excoriate "Group I" for attacking a hospital, while not mentioning that the hospital was being used to launch rockets and mortars to kill members of "Group I". How can you possibly equate this with "Reporting just one group isn't slanted"?
Do you believe that the end justifies the means? Any means at all? I don't believe that anyone is morally justified to use children as human shields, or put rocket launchers inside hospitals. Even if you are cheering for the Palestinians to use asymmetric warfare tactics against Israel, don't you have a problem with the most extreme tactics?
And if the most extreme tactics are used, are you okay with the news media deciding what you are allowed to read about it?
Finally, from a statistical point of view, we're arguing over epsilons here. Hundred of thousands are dying elsewhere (e.g. Syria) and we don't talk about it much here.
True, but my topic was "this reporting is slanted" not "this story is important".
And on that note, I think I should stop spending time on this conversation. Thank you for the conversation and I hope you have a good day.
It is my position that news reporting should be even-handed. Even if you feel that Israel responds with better weapons and armour, details do matter.
From other comments in this thread, it appears that some people on Slashdot think that the Palestinians and Israel are actually at war, and that it is acceptable for Palestinians to try to kill a couple of soldiers from a non-combat unit who got lost, as "legitimate military targets". Further, it is not only acceptable to slant the reporting to leave out details of who started the fighting, but also that my post about the slanted reporting must be modded down into oblivion. (The top post is modded +3 Insightful, -2 Flamebait, -2 Troll; I'm sure it will hit -1 soon.)
I will grant that there was an asymmetry here. Once the Israeli army understood that two of its soldiers were in danger, it sent in about 20 vehicles full of soldiers to rescue the two missing soldiers. But I think intent matters here; and the intent was to rescue the two lost soldiers and leave.
Oversimplifying the news to "Israeli soldiers use Waze, and Palestinians get hurt as a result" is IMHO dishonest reporting, even if the reporter doesn't approve of Israel. Since you brought up asymmetry, the key question is: does asymmetry of forces justify slanting the reporting heavily to one side?
Do you want the people reporting the news to decide what you should take away from the news story, and slant the story to help make sure you take away the "right" opinion? I don't; I want to hear both sides. "Israel kills one Palestinian and wounds 10 for no apparent reason" is dishonest; "Palestinians attack Israeli soldiers; 1 dead, 10 wounded, with 10 Israeli soldiers wounded" is more balanced.
If someone (let's just call them "Group X") puts rocket launchers and mortars inside a hospital, and uses them to attack another group (let's just call them "Group I"), then IMHO the correct reporting is "Group I damages a hospital while destroying rocket launchers and mortars being used to attack", not "Group I destroys hospital, patients in danger". Even if you think Group I is doing something you disapprove of, failing to report that Group X broke the Geneva convention about not using hospitals to attack, while at the same time excoriating Group I for attacking a hospical, that to me is way over the line journalistic malpractice. Yet that was one of the examples of slanted reporting from the URL I linked in the top post.
The headline makes it sound like there was this firefight just sort of hanging out, like firefights do, and a couple of troops just blundered into it.
Let's rewrite the headline in active voice: "Palistinians Attempt to Kill Two Noncombatant Israeli Soldiers Who Accidentally Entered Refugee Camp"
From the article:
I don't think Israel is perfect, nor Israeli soldiers, but I am rather tired of how passive voice is so often used when describing things done to Israelis.
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=3132
I wouldn't say that the two Israeli soldiers "blundered into a firefight". They blundered into a refugee camp, and there a group of Palestinians tried to kill them. Since their vehicle was blocked and then destroyed, they fled on foot. The firefight came later, when more Israeli soldiers came to rescue the two who blundered.
Note that the Slashdot story headline is worse than the one from the Washington Post, which is: "Israeli troops relying on Waze app blunder into Palestinian area; clashes follow"
I note also that the summary has a detailed accounting of the harm done to Palestinians: "at least one Palestinian dead and 10 injured, one seriously." Yet curiously it leaves out the small details that the Palestinians attacked first, destroyed a military vehicle, and injured 10 Israeli soldiers.
Again for comparison, the Washington Post article says:
Perhaps the omissions are simple mistakes, but it's kind of strange how the omissions were all about harm done to Israeli soldiers.
I'll finish with one more quote from the Washington Post story:
So the two soldiers who "blundered" are guilty of getting a bit lost. I've gotten a bit lost; I'm just lucky that I don't live in a place where a mob of people will attack me if I go to the wrong neighborhood.
Grandma isn't going to use Linux, sorry people
The thing is: why not? If you are volunteering as tech support for Grandma, you can make things easy for yourself by setting her up with Linux instead of Windows.
That's what I have done. My father is over 80 and he is exclusively running Linux. (Specifically: Linux Mint 17.3, 64-bit with MATE)
Once it's set up, it Just Works. It keeps on working. My father is completely happy. He has one must-have Windows app (Adobe FrameMaker, versions 5.5.6 and 7) and that runs great under WINE. (The default WINE in Linux Mint just works, no tweaking needed and no need to buy CrossOver or whatever.)
Now, if your point is "Grandma is going to buy computers with Windows pre-installed and isn't going to install Linux for herself" then sure, I'll agree. But if you set it up for her, she will be able to do the most common things: web (including YouTube and Facebook) and email.
A friend of mine once, as a prank, installed a Windows XP desktop theme on his Linux computer. Then visiting relatives used his computer and none of them even realized they were using Linux. It really wasn't very much of a prank; they didn't realize anything was out of the ordinary.
People who have specialized software needs may be chained to Windows; but even they could probably run Windows inside VirtualBox, and do their web surfing and email in Linux. But for the stereotypical Grandma, Linux is already just fine.
About half of my family is running Linux instead of Windows. We're geekier than the average, but I can tell you that non-geeks in my family have no problem at all running a Linux desktop. (And I've installed Windows and Linux, and overall it's easier to do a Linux install.)
It has never been easier to junk Windows and switch to Linux. Many people just use email, a web browser, and Facebook; those all Just Work on Linux. Video, sound, it's all fine.
And desktop is getting less important all the time; people are using mobile devices more and more. And Microsoft missed the boat on mobile.
So even as the "network" that makes Windows important is crumbling ("network" as in "network effect"), even as Microsoft's actual power to push people is waning, they keep finding new ways to punish people who stick with them. Hey, nobody will mind if we monitor them a bunch, right? Make it almost impossible to figure out whether it's enabled or not. (If it's even possible to disable it... maybe it isn't!) And start pushing ads, because nobody hates having full-screen ads in their faces.
Is Microsoft actually trying to achieve Windows 8 levels of hatred for Windows 10? Does Linus Torvalds have sleeper agents inside Microsoft trying to make Windows crumble from inside?
Keep this up, MIcrosoft, and we may yet see the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
P.S. I haven't bothered to keep up with all the settings one must change to disable all the bad behaviors in Windows 10. I just checked to see if there's a tool for it... there's a bunch and it's not obvious which one(s) to use. Is there a clear favorite tool to fix the Windows 10 settings?
http://www.ghacks.net/2015/08/14/comparison-of-windows-10-privacy-tools/
Hmm... maybe this one: Spybot Anti-Beacon
I definitely don't agree that Flash Gordon is a contender for worst anything ever. It was campy fun. I was laughing in the places the film maker wanted me to laugh, not laughing at how terrible it was. The special effects were not much better or worse than most other movies of its time (Star Wars being a huge exception).
You can't possibly think that Flash Gordon is a worse movie than Batman & Robin. Ugh.
P.S. Surprisingly, Roger Corman produced an extremely low-budget superhero movie and it actually is not bad: Black Scorpion
Defenders have argued that network transparency is a minority application and that they don't like the way it's implemented in X11 anyway,
All I need to know is that all the people who know the most about X11 think Wayland is a good idea.
Here's a talk from 2013 where an experienced X11 developer explaining exactly what is wrong with X11 and why he thinks Wayland is a good idea. This link starts 40 minutes into the talk, where he specifically talks about running remotely over a network.
https://youtu.be/RIctzAQOe44?t=40m22s
And I've never seen a Wayland developer say that network transparency would never happen; they were focused on getting the essentials right.
Here's a talk from SCALE a year ago. This link starts with him saying exactly that: the Wayland guys were focused on essentials but now are ready to start looking at remote.
https://youtu.be/Sz1T0GvUziw?t=27m36s
"redesigned user interface for improved ease of use"?
You might try watching the demo videos. They made improvements to the menus, improvements to the context menus, and improvements to toolbars (including a pop-out side panel formatting toolbar thing that I guess is new to the 5.x series).
No ribbon.
Here, have a playlist URL that lets you watch the demo videos directly from YouTube instead of using the embedded videos in TFA.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0pdzjvYW9RHSwdRnZfaxAWICrkBrQl7k
The original Doom games were noteworthy for having big levels that contained lots and lots of enemies. I haven't played Doom 3, but I've heard that it has much more beautiful 3D graphics, and as a result you would be attacked by only a few monsters at a time (because too many would overwhelm the graphics adapters that were current when that game came out).
My favorite thing in the the original Doom games was getting the monsters to fight each other. If you could get an Imp so hit a Cacodemon with a fireball, for example, the two would get into a fight. Frequently I would lure some monster into the line of fire and as soon as it was hit, it would forget about me and go kill whatever monster hit it. This is more fun to me than just shooting everything. I hope the new game has this.
The specific rules: monster special attacks don't hurt other monsters of the exact same type... for example, Imp fireballs don't hurt Imps. But the zombie soldiers shoot bullets and bullets hurt anything, so you could get soldiers to fight each other. And anytime a monster hit a different kind of monster it would do damage.
P.S. Doom modified as a way to control processses on a system. Kill a process with a shotgun! https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html
One side-effect of this is that processes on a system can get into a fight with each other. Two processes enter, one leaves. Not recommended for critical systems.
If you say something about my freedom stopping at his nose, then I remind you that the baby's right to live stops at the aborter's saline injection, scraping blade, etc.
libertarians might agree that abortion should be illegal, and might not. I'll explain why:
The core of libertarian philosophy: force and fraud are not acceptable, but as long as people are free to choose, the state shouldn't intervene.
Thus a libertarian would not be in favor of the state forbidding drugs like alcohol or tobacco or marijuana. If a person chooses to use such drugs it is his/her choice.
But a libertarian would agree that murder should be illegal.
So it comes down to: is an abortion murder?
libertarians who believe that life begins at conception, and even a one-week-old embryo counts as a person, would believe that abortion is murder, and thus should be illegal.
libertarians who believe that an embryo isn't a person yet would believe that abortion should be the choice of the mother.
The question of whether an embryo is a person is not one that is decided by libertarian philosophy, and thus two people who are libertarians might have opposite opinions.
All libertarians would agree that the state should not be using tax money to fund abortions. Some libertarians think the state should be very small, and others (the "anarcho-capitalists") want no state at all; none would consider funding abortions to be a legitimate function for the state.
P.S. I read an essay by Carl Sagan where he suggested that before brain activity starts up, a fetus is not a person, but after the brain is functioning it should be considered an unborn person. IIRC he said that is about the third trimester. (Note, I did a Google search and found one web page saying brain activity starts around 25 weeks, which would be early third trimester.)
The point of Docker is to have a single package ("container") that contains all of its dependencies, running in isolation from any other Docker containers. Since the container is self-contained, it can be run on any Docker host. For example, if you have some wacky old program that only runs on one particular set of library versions, it might be hard for you to get the Docker container just right to make it run; but once you do, that container will Just Work everywhere, and updating packages on the host won't break it.
The point of the news story is that someone did a better job of stripping the container down, removing libraries and such that were not true dependencies (weren't truly needed).
Not only does this make for smaller containers, but it should reduce the attack surface, by removing resources that are available inside the container. For example, if someone finds a security flaw in library libfoo, this would protect against that security flaw by removing libfoo when it is not needed. It's pretty hard for an exploit to call code in a library if the library isn't present. Also, presumably all development tools and even things like command-line shells would be stripped out. Thus a successful attacker might gain control over a docker container instance, but would have no way to escalate privileges any further.
If the stated numbers are correct (a 644 MB container went down to 29 MB) yet the new small package still works, then clearly there is a lot of unnecessary stuff in that standard 644 MB container.
Hey, AMD, show us your new CPUs for 2016. Everything you got now is long in the tooth.
How right you are. But their basic problem has been that they were still stuck on old semiconductor fabrication processes. Intel has spent a bunch of money on fab technology and is about two generations ahead of AMD. It didn't help that their current architecture isn't great.
I'm not a semiconductor expert, but as I understand it: the thinner the traces on the semiconductor, the higher clock rate can go or the lower the power dissipation can be (those two are tradeoffs). Intel's 4th-generation CPUs were fabbed on 22 nm process, and their current CPUs are fabbed on 14 nm process. AMD has been stuck at 28 nm and is in fact still selling CPUs fabbed on a 32 nm process. It's brutal to try to compete when so far behind. But AMD is just skipping the 22 nm process and going straight to 14 nm. (Intel has 10 nm in the pipeline, planned for 2017 release, but it should be easier to compete 14 nm vs 10 nm than 32/28 nm vs 14 nm! And it took years for AMD to get to 14 nm, while there are indications that they will make the jump to 10 nm more quickly.)
But AMD is about to catch up. AMD has shown us their new CPU for 2016; its code-name is "Zen" and it will be fabbed on a 14 nm process. AMD claims the new architecture will provide 40% more instructions-per-clock than their current architecture; combined with finally getting onto a modern fab process, the Zen should be competitive with Intel's offerings. (I expect Intel to hold onto the top-performance crown, but I expect AMD will offer better performance per dollar with acceptable thermal envelope.) Wikipedia says it will be released in October 2016.
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/computing-components/processors/amd-confirms-powerhouse-zen-cpus-will-arrive-for-high-end-pcs-in-2016-1310980
Intel is so far ahead of AMD that it's unlikely that AMD will ever take over the #1 spot, but I am at least hoping that they will hold on to a niche and serve to keep Intel in check.
The ironic thing is that Intel is currently making the best products, yet still they feel the need to cheat with dirty tricks like the Intel C Compiler's generating bad code for CPUs with a non-Intel CPUID. Also I don't like how Intel tries to segment their products into dozens of tiers to maximize money extraction. (Oh, did you want virtualization? This cheaper CPU doesn't offer that; buy this more expensive one. Oh, did you want ECC RAM? Step right up to our most expensive CPUs!)
Intel has been a very good "corporate citizen" with respect to the Linux kernel, and they make good products; but I try not to buy their products because I hate their bad behavior. I own one laptop with an Intel i7 CPU, but otherwise I'm 100% non-Intel.
I want to build a new computer and I don't want to wait for Zen so I will be buying an FX-8350 (fabbed on 32 nm process, ugh). But in 18 months or so I look forward to buying new Zen processors and building new computers.
Only 4 years, not 18+, but still a good story. At University of North Carolina they took an inventory of their servers and realized they couldn't find one. Eventually by following cables they discovered that it had been sealed up behind a new wall, four years previously. The server had been chugging along with no problems during that that whole time.
http://www.informationweek.com/server-54-where-are-you/d/d-id/1010340?
Right. This is why I think VP9 actually could win and become the new standard (replacing H.264).
H.265 and VP9 seem like they are definitely in the same ballpark on quality. And H.265 is heavily encumbered with patents; you have to pay royalties, and you never know what the royalties might cost in five years. VP9, on the other hand, is simply free: no royalties, no restrictions on what you may do with the video.
Even if VP9 takes a lot more CPU time to encode, and even if H.265 is slightly better than VP9, not having to pay royalties (not even having to keep track of what you do with the video!) is such a huge benefit. It seems like a no-brainer.
And Google will be making sure that all the Android phones at least will have good hardware support for VP9 decoding. VP8 never had a chance against H.264 because the hardware support wasn't there, and large companies were content to pay the capped fees as you noted.
All that's left is possible legal FUD around VP9, but even that seems pretty cut-and-dried to me. MPEG-LA tried for something like a year to find patents to put into their patent pool to extract royalties from VP8, and in the end Google gave them a one-time payment of (to Google) a relatively small amount of money. Thanks to that one-time payment we know MPEG-LA won't ever come after anyone for using a VP8-derived codec, and I have no reason to think anyone would be able to prevail in court if they try it.
Given all of the above, it seems to me that VP9 is the obvious choice for the new video standard, and I kind of wonder why anyone is still interested in using H.265 and paying the royalties.
The O2 headphone amplifier is an extremely clean amp that can drive almost any headphones. It sounds great. Pair it with a clean DAC, rip all your CDs to FLAC, and you can listen to your music from your computer with the very highest in fidelity.
If you can solder, you can build the O2 amp for $30 to $40 worth of parts.
http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/08/o2-summary.html
The guy who designed the O2 also designed a really good DAC. He wanted to release it as a DIY project but the realities of the DAC chip business mean that it was only practical to sell a complete DAC board. But you could make a project out of building an O2 amp in an enclosure with the DAC board built-in. (I have such a device but I can't solder; I bought mine from JDS Labs, pre-built.)
http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2012/04/odac-released.html
I am friends with a world-class audio expert, and he agrees that the O2+ODAC is the best way to spend your money. It's as clean as $1000+ solutions.
P.S. Article about the guy who designed the O2 and ODAC: "the audio genius who vanished"
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/nwavguy-the-audio-genius-who-vanished
I'm glad that you are so happy with the cost of electricity. However, I keep reading magazine articles about what a disaster the energy policy in Germany has been, and your one data point does not convince me.
The Economist wrote:
[...]
But it gives me no happiness to think that the energy plan in Germany is failing. I hope that it will work out eventually.
What Germany really needs, what everyone really needs, to make renewable energy work is storage. I am hoping for new storage technologies to make grid-level storage practical... the liquid metal batteries from Ambri, or pumped electrolyte batteries, or whatever. The only currently practical technology is pumped hydro, and the energy policy in Germany has led to pumped hydro facilities shutting down. If your energy policy leads to coal plants continuing to operate and pumped hydro shutting down, You're Doing It Wrong.
On the other hand, I am also reading that that companies in Germany are planning to build more pumped storage within a decade despite the current economic disincentives, and coal use is going down. Perhaps it will work out in the future.