These people are nothing but anti-civilization types. Why would anyone educated person think this kind of garbage is good?
Agreed, civilization would be improved by the absence of BREIN and its ilk. I suspect that most educated persons look forward to that happy day, and hope it will arrive soon.
My grandfather crashed a B-17 in free-at-that-time France
How can that be? France was invaded in 1940, before the US and its B-17s were in the war, and was liberated in 1945 with the rest of Europe. Are you saying he crashed in peace time? Sounds a bit careless.
There is no contradiction inherent in GP's post. Parts of France were liberated in 1944; other parts were not liberated until 1945. The war and bombing (B-17, B-24, Lancaster, etc.) continued into 1945.
It will not need to. At this point, we will no doubt be making heavy use of drones. My guess is that within 10 years, most of our bombing runs will be via drones.
So now we know what the next refit for the B-52 will be. They'd be bloody big drones - if the remote control apparatus weighs less than the crew-related equipment, the armaments or fuel could even increase....
I'm 46 and I grew up with Star Trek, the World Trade Center, the Concorde, and the space shuttle. How's that working out...
Your comment sums up quite a lot. The fuck-ups started with defunding of Apollo in the early 1970s, and manned spaceflight has barely progressed since then. The shuttle made for a lot of nice launches and a couple of spectacular failures, but it only went to low Earth orbit. Programs like Hubble and Voyager and so on greatly expanded our knowledge of the universe, but damned little progress was made in manned spaceflight, despite pouring fortunes into a succession of boondoggles (Shuttle, Skylab, ISS, 'nuff said). Recall that even Voyager was just a scaled-back cheaper substitute for the Grand Tour.
I'm only a few years older than you, but vividly remember the Apollo missions. As a kid in Europe, I stayed up weird hours to catch live transmissions from Apollo 8 to Apollo 17. I saw almost every single one of them, and if there had been consumer-level recording technology like today's, I and many others would have copies of those transmissions. I don't recall the Apollo 1 disaster (too young, I guess), but was riveted by the Apollo 13 near-disaster. The decision to cancel Apollo 18 to Apollo 20 was baffling to me then, and remains so today, 40 years later.
Commitment was lost or lacking at a high enough level in U.S. political circles after Apollo reached its stated objective. After that, it was just a question of how soon the money could be diverted to political pork. And that's how NASA's budgets have been allocated ever since. Pork as the real objective, more pork as the means of attaining that objective, even more pork as the main spin-off, and a bit of science or space exploration as an unavoidable but incidental side effect. The objectives (pork) were always achieved successfully, even if the cover stories (science, space) ended in failure.
The rates in Finland are somewhat lower than those proposed for Portugal. Moreover, elsewhere on that site they say what consumers get in return: "Everyone is allowed to copy published works, such as music, movies, television and radio broadcasts for their own private use in Finland."
It is also quite clear that the compensation allows copying of movies and music on disks borrowed from libraries and suchlike. No doubt, the RIAA and MPAA would be a little queasy at such provisions in larger markets.
Use 12.04 first on a VM... upgrade only if you can tolerate Gnome3/Unity for more than 5 minutes
Actually, that laptop was migrated from Ubuntu to Xubuntu some time ago. Because it's XFCE, the Unity suckage and Gnome3 excreta won't affect it.
I have tried 11.04, 11.10 and a beta of 12.04 in VMs on one of the more capable PCs, and been dismayed by their GUI ordure. Consequently all other PCs in the house have also migrated from Ubuntu to Xubuntu. All are still running Xubuntu 10.04 LTS.
Download redistributable SP1 version with firewall on, disconnect your PC from network, turn off firewalls and install SP1.
Which is essentially what I did, as explained in my reply to another making a similar point. Download full offline update package, try to update while disconnected from network, update fails. And the firewall was in the router, not in the PC, so when disconnected from the network, the firewall was irrelevant. It was the MS support person who (perhaps following a script) instructed me to disable all firewalls and connect to the internet. She insisted that firewalls both in the PC (disabled) and in the router (ZoneAlarm, AFAIR) must be disabled, and would not suggest anything else. And yes, I had told her which SP1 package I was using.
Whatever way you slice it, it was a support failure from MS.
I was just about to post something similar. I find it hard to believe that using the offline installer was not the first thing they suggested when the "Windows Update" based install failed.
Actually, it was the full so-called offline installer that I downloaded, and it failed each time, including trying it with the network cable unplugged. I forget how big the package was, but it exceeded 100MB (maybe 300MB, it was a while ago). Luckily, I had a 3Mb link at the time[*], so the download took less than an hour each time.
I have no idea why the update failed, or even if it was failing because of a network connection issue. Please note that it was MS support who suggested that the internet link was at fault (and I had been quite clear which SP1 package I had). The support person was probably just reading from a script when she told me to disable all firewalls, and she was unwilling to suggest anything else until I had tried that step. So the process ended there.
Whether a network link was needed or not, the suggestion provided by MS support would have left my PC defenceless for some time. Since SP1 was supposed to fix a load of security holes, this sounded like appalling advice.
[*] Actually, it was supposed to be 2Mb, but the ISP had not enabled the DOCSIS on my crappy cable modem, so I usually got closer to 3Mb. They fixed that "problem" about a year later.
I can't say I 've ever had Microsoft XP support, either-
I did, back in the days when XP SP1 was promulgated, but it was not one of Microsoft's prouder moments. The SP1 package downloaded, but would not install. Several attempts yielded the same result, and various help articles on the MS web site were consulted fruitlessly. So I duly filed a report on the MS web site, not expecting much to happen. Somewhat to my surprise, I got a phone call a couple of days later (must have been international, I'm in Finland, and the support person spoke English with an Indian accent). She talked me through what I had already tried, and it failed yet again. So then she told me to disable all firewalls, both in the PC and in the router, and try again. I suggested that would be unwise, since my router logs indicated several nasty packets (fake routing, port probes, etc.) per second were being blocked, and none appeared to be from Microsoft. Her response was that the only way for me to install SP1 was to disable all firewalls. In other words, connect with pants down and legs open to a stream of questionable health. Yeah, right.
I paid attention to her advice, but did not follow it. Instead, I installed Warty Warthog, which seemed to work quite nicely (but had issues with wireless which meant wired connections only). A beta version of Breezy Badger followed, and it autodetected and supported almost everything on the laptop, including the wireless. XP was thrown away shortly thereafter, and the 8-year-old laptop today runs Xubuntu (10.04 LTS, soon upgrading to 12.04 LTS).
So... Where are you finding a cellular service provider who doesn't charge you for the service?
Oh, wait. That's your $1960.
(Yes, some fraction of that $1960 consists of the phone cost beyond the initial payment of $99, but not *all* of it by any stretch of the imagination.)
So try one of our smartphone contracts in Finland. For mine, the basic service costs euro0.66/month (yes, less than one euro). It includes true unlimited internet which costs an extra euro5/month (but there are no usage caps whatsoever). In combination with calls and text messages, it's a rare month when the total bill for this service exceeds euro10, including the unlimited internet.
So, over 24 months, this service would cost about euro240. Of course, you have to buy your phone separately, so spending about euro500 for a nice smartphone would bring the total to roughly euro740, which is US$970 today according to OANDA. In other words, at US$1960 you're overpaying by just about US$1000, even including the cost of the phone.
BTW, in some countries, you can get a rather better phone for rather less money - more pixels, more memory, similar size. For some reason, that particular Nokia phone is not for sale in the US or UK or Japan (or Germany, but is apparently a hot seller there, imported from vendors in Switzerland).
Depends what "viable" means. Reliabe or profitable?
MS definitely gets the other guy to take the fall for any shortcoming in MS software. Here is a recent example, where it looks like Nokia's fault that WP7 has a memory management issue.
Other than requiring a sign agreement with project meetings, milestones and checkpoints you'll have to go on faith.
Presumably you'll have lost that faith even before they ask you to "bend over and spread 'em". Posting a photo of the developers on a tropical beach was definitely adding powdered glass to the reaming they'd bestowed on their backers.
Perhaps you meant Douglas Adams, who died a few years ago.
Scott Adams, while witty enough in his Dilbert cartoons, is no substitute. Among other things, he believes in non-causal phenomena.
Now Dan Dennett or Robert Sapolski or Sam Harris would likely be good presidential material, at least from the governance of people perspective (if you could arm-twist them into submitting to such an ordeal). Alas, they are far too rational to be acceptable to the electorate, especially if pitted against the usual rabid fruitcake who gets elected. Anyway, they'd probably have to lie unconscionably to pass the required stupidity tests called Primaries in the US.
Rick Santorum was going to make the US a beacon again for the rest of the world.
Santorum complained about the frothy redefinition of his name, which was not intended to please him, but was not directly his doing (even if one considers that it was deserved). However, he actually boasted about his personal creepiness and that he enforced it on his family. It's a bit surprising that this episode received less commentary, as it is indicative of a major character flaw.
As a beacon to the world, the US would be better off squatting on the tower of power than with a weirdo like Santorum as president.
Yup. Just deleted the app. I also recommend doing this.
Never heard of Instagram (but I have used Photobucket on occasion), and now I know I am unlikely ever to use Instagram. And BTW, my router already blocks all of Facebook's IP ranges, so I'm probably safe from Facebook's trackers. Actually, it's quite remarkable how many web pages have one or more "Forbidden" frames on them, not just the ubiquitous "like" buttons. Next, I guess the Instagram IP ranges must be added to the filter...
If a bunch of publishers get together and lobby aggressively I wouldn't be surprised if a court found that a sufficient degree of similarity existed, thereby violating copyright. And if the court didn't find it, well, Congress can amend the copyright law and I think the US Copyright Office can regulate matters a bit.
But what if some of the Creative Commons work had been published before the textbook whose revenue stream the publishers are trying to defend. Parts of the textbook would then be infringing on the CC material. Ah, there's the rub.
The "one-stop-shopping" nature of the chip is chilling. Consider, Broadcom has seen enough of a market to warrant developing a sophisticated device, the stated purpose of which is to determine it's position and "phone home" with that information. Worse yet, it will also phone in all the personal details about you that it has access to, so that those "coupons" can be quickly crafted. If that's not scary enough, consider that also available to any given "shop keeper", is a list of all the other shops you've visited, and when. Still not bugged enough? Think about this technology in the hands of entities far more dangerous than merchants; law enforcement, for example.
And you'll even be stuck with the bills for calls/SMS/data as the phone reports your whereabouts which are then passed on to nearby merchants or watchful agencies. And perhaps also for the calls/SMS/data returned as so-called coupons or comforting security notifications ("wait there, an officer has been dispatched" or "you're not allowed to enter that movie theater").
If this and DuckDuckGo start gaining momentum google may find itself in Altavista's shoes.
Eh... OpenStreetMap is good for just that: street maps. It's got nothing on Google's other mapping features. Hell, it doesn't even show the lake where my cabin is at, just the streets. Google Maps offers detailed satellite and terrain imagery, for one thing.
Exactly. Google Maps even has the side roads and the dirt trail that my house is on, visible both in streetmap and in satellite views.
At present, OpenStreetMap barely even shows the lake as a splotch of blue, and south of the nearby town proper it only shows the motorway. It indicates nothing but blank forest for many kilometers of exurb, where houses are typically every 50-100 meters along every road and dirt track (and there are a lot of side roads and dirt tracks). Some day, OpenStreetMap may even show the main roads a few kilometers from near my house. In fact, around here OpenStreetMap covers fewer roads than even Google Street View.
$8 bucks for an e-book version of a $100 book and you're bitching about it?
Where did GP say the $8 was for an ebook?
He said it was for a second-hand textbook bought via Amazon. Hint: Amazon does not sell second-hand ebooks. Now if an ebook (which can't be loaned or resold, and with other DRM limitations) were only to cost quarter or less the price of the print equivalent (easily loaned, can be resold, no DRM), there would be much less belly-aching about things. As it is, publishers and sales channels seem to think they can fleece buyers for about as much for crippled ebooks as for traditional print books.
Slashdot Mirror
These people are nothing but anti-civilization types. Why would anyone educated person think this kind of garbage is good?
Agreed, civilization would be improved by the absence of BREIN and its ilk. I suspect that most educated persons look forward to that happy day, and hope it will arrive soon.
Would someone leave some flowers on Algernon's grave
His cousin Biggles probably did already.
My grandfather crashed a B-17 in free-at-that-time France
How can that be? France was invaded in 1940, before the US and its B-17s were in the war, and was liberated in 1945 with the rest of Europe. Are you saying he crashed in peace time? Sounds a bit careless.
There is no contradiction inherent in GP's post. Parts of France were liberated in 1944; other parts were not liberated until 1945. The war and bombing (B-17, B-24, Lancaster, etc.) continued into 1945.
It will not need to. At this point, we will no doubt be making heavy use of drones. My guess is that within 10 years, most of our bombing runs will be via drones.
So now we know what the next refit for the B-52 will be. They'd be bloody big drones - if the remote control apparatus weighs less than the crew-related equipment, the armaments or fuel could even increase....
If I could mod TFS or TFA, they would definitely get a "+1 Funny"...
I'm 46 and I grew up with Star Trek, the World Trade Center, the Concorde, and the space shuttle. How's that working out...
Your comment sums up quite a lot. The fuck-ups started with defunding of Apollo in the early 1970s, and manned spaceflight has barely progressed since then. The shuttle made for a lot of nice launches and a couple of spectacular failures, but it only went to low Earth orbit. Programs like Hubble and Voyager and so on greatly expanded our knowledge of the universe, but damned little progress was made in manned spaceflight, despite pouring fortunes into a succession of boondoggles (Shuttle, Skylab, ISS, 'nuff said). Recall that even Voyager was just a scaled-back cheaper substitute for the Grand Tour.
I'm only a few years older than you, but vividly remember the Apollo missions. As a kid in Europe, I stayed up weird hours to catch live transmissions from Apollo 8 to Apollo 17. I saw almost every single one of them, and if there had been consumer-level recording technology like today's, I and many others would have copies of those transmissions. I don't recall the Apollo 1 disaster (too young, I guess), but was riveted by the Apollo 13 near-disaster. The decision to cancel Apollo 18 to Apollo 20 was baffling to me then, and remains so today, 40 years later.
Commitment was lost or lacking at a high enough level in U.S. political circles after Apollo reached its stated objective. After that, it was just a question of how soon the money could be diverted to political pork. And that's how NASA's budgets have been allocated ever since. Pork as the real objective, more pork as the means of attaining that objective, even more pork as the main spin-off, and a bit of science or space exploration as an unavoidable but incidental side effect. The objectives (pork) were always achieved successfully, even if the cover stories (science, space) ended in failure.
Something like this is already in Finland.
The rates in Finland are somewhat lower than those proposed for Portugal. Moreover, elsewhere on that site they say what consumers get in return: "Everyone is allowed to copy published works, such as music, movies, television and radio broadcasts for their own private use in Finland."
It is also quite clear that the compensation allows copying of movies and music on disks borrowed from libraries and suchlike. No doubt, the RIAA and MPAA would be a little queasy at such provisions in larger markets.
Darn all typos and abbreviations. The North Koreans obviously meant to refer to their Missal doctrines...
Use 12.04 first on a VM... upgrade only if you can tolerate Gnome3/Unity for more than 5 minutes
Actually, that laptop was migrated from Ubuntu to Xubuntu some time ago. Because it's XFCE, the Unity suckage and Gnome3 excreta won't affect it.
I have tried 11.04, 11.10 and a beta of 12.04 in VMs on one of the more capable PCs, and been dismayed by their GUI ordure. Consequently all other PCs in the house have also migrated from Ubuntu to Xubuntu. All are still running Xubuntu 10.04 LTS.
Download redistributable SP1 version with firewall on, disconnect your PC from network, turn off firewalls and install SP1.
Which is essentially what I did, as explained in my reply to another making a similar point. Download full offline update package, try to update while disconnected from network, update fails. And the firewall was in the router, not in the PC, so when disconnected from the network, the firewall was irrelevant. It was the MS support person who (perhaps following a script) instructed me to disable all firewalls and connect to the internet. She insisted that firewalls both in the PC (disabled) and in the router (ZoneAlarm, AFAIR) must be disabled, and would not suggest anything else. And yes, I had told her which SP1 package I was using.
Whatever way you slice it, it was a support failure from MS.
I was just about to post something similar. I find it hard to believe that using the offline installer was not the first thing they suggested when the "Windows Update" based install failed.
Actually, it was the full so-called offline installer that I downloaded, and it failed each time, including trying it with the network cable unplugged. I forget how big the package was, but it exceeded 100MB (maybe 300MB, it was a while ago). Luckily, I had a 3Mb link at the time[*], so the download took less than an hour each time.
I have no idea why the update failed, or even if it was failing because of a network connection issue. Please note that it was MS support who suggested that the internet link was at fault (and I had been quite clear which SP1 package I had). The support person was probably just reading from a script when she told me to disable all firewalls, and she was unwilling to suggest anything else until I had tried that step. So the process ended there.
Whether a network link was needed or not, the suggestion provided by MS support would have left my PC defenceless for some time. Since SP1 was supposed to fix a load of security holes, this sounded like appalling advice.
[*] Actually, it was supposed to be 2Mb, but the ISP had not enabled the DOCSIS on my crappy cable modem, so I usually got closer to 3Mb. They fixed that "problem" about a year later.
I can't say I 've ever had Microsoft XP support, either-
I did, back in the days when XP SP1 was promulgated, but it was not one of Microsoft's prouder moments. The SP1 package downloaded, but would not install. Several attempts yielded the same result, and various help articles on the MS web site were consulted fruitlessly. So I duly filed a report on the MS web site, not expecting much to happen. Somewhat to my surprise, I got a phone call a couple of days later (must have been international, I'm in Finland, and the support person spoke English with an Indian accent). She talked me through what I had already tried, and it failed yet again. So then she told me to disable all firewalls, both in the PC and in the router, and try again. I suggested that would be unwise, since my router logs indicated several nasty packets (fake routing, port probes, etc.) per second were being blocked, and none appeared to be from Microsoft. Her response was that the only way for me to install SP1 was to disable all firewalls. In other words, connect with pants down and legs open to a stream of questionable health. Yeah, right.
I paid attention to her advice, but did not follow it. Instead, I installed Warty Warthog, which seemed to work quite nicely (but had issues with wireless which meant wired connections only). A beta version of Breezy Badger followed, and it autodetected and supported almost everything on the laptop, including the wireless. XP was thrown away shortly thereafter, and the 8-year-old laptop today runs Xubuntu (10.04 LTS, soon upgrading to 12.04 LTS).
Not new by a long shot. Look at N9.
Right, that is so six months old. And now it's been improved by software that works faster on more modest, and therefore cheaper, hardware.
FYI, Lumia is running at 1.4GHz while N9 is running at 1GHz.
And the N9 has more pixels (854x480 vs 800x480). And is available with 64GB memory.
So... Where are you finding a cellular service provider who doesn't charge you for the service?
Oh, wait. That's your $1960.
(Yes, some fraction of that $1960 consists of the phone cost beyond the initial payment of $99, but not *all* of it by any stretch of the imagination.)
So try one of our smartphone contracts in Finland. For mine, the basic service costs euro0.66/month (yes, less than one euro). It includes true unlimited internet which costs an extra euro5/month (but there are no usage caps whatsoever). In combination with calls and text messages, it's a rare month when the total bill for this service exceeds euro10, including the unlimited internet.
So, over 24 months, this service would cost about euro240. Of course, you have to buy your phone separately, so spending about euro500 for a nice smartphone would bring the total to roughly euro740, which is US$970 today according to OANDA. In other words, at US$1960 you're overpaying by just about US$1000, even including the cost of the phone.
BTW, in some countries, you can get a rather better phone for rather less money - more pixels, more memory, similar size. For some reason, that particular Nokia phone is not for sale in the US or UK or Japan (or Germany, but is apparently a hot seller there, imported from vendors in Switzerland).
Have they produced a viable OS?
Depends what "viable" means. Reliabe or profitable?
MS definitely gets the other guy to take the fall for any shortcoming in MS software. Here is a recent example, where it looks like Nokia's fault that WP7 has a memory management issue.
Don't forget to teach about immaculate conception in biology class too...
Yup, that could save a little embarrassment. Lots of miraculous baby Jesus deliveries coming soon...
Other than requiring a sign agreement with project meetings, milestones and checkpoints you'll have to go on faith.
Presumably you'll have lost that faith even before they ask you to "bend over and spread 'em". Posting a photo of the developers on a tropical beach was definitely adding powdered glass to the reaming they'd bestowed on their backers.
Scott Adams?
Perhaps you meant Douglas Adams, who died a few years ago.
Scott Adams, while witty enough in his Dilbert cartoons, is no substitute. Among other things, he believes in non-causal phenomena.
Now Dan Dennett or Robert Sapolski or Sam Harris would likely be good presidential material, at least from the governance of people perspective (if you could arm-twist them into submitting to such an ordeal). Alas, they are far too rational to be acceptable to the electorate, especially if pitted against the usual rabid fruitcake who gets elected. Anyway, they'd probably have to lie unconscionably to pass the required stupidity tests called Primaries in the US.
Rick Santorum was going to make the US a beacon again for the rest of the world.
Santorum complained about the frothy redefinition of his name, which was not intended to please him, but was not directly his doing (even if one considers that it was deserved). However, he actually boasted about his personal creepiness and that he enforced it on his family. It's a bit surprising that this episode received less commentary, as it is indicative of a major character flaw.
As a beacon to the world, the US would be better off squatting on the tower of power than with a weirdo like Santorum as president.
Yup. Just deleted the app. I also recommend doing this.
Never heard of Instagram (but I have used Photobucket on occasion), and now I know I am unlikely ever to use Instagram. And BTW, my router already blocks all of Facebook's IP ranges, so I'm probably safe from Facebook's trackers. Actually, it's quite remarkable how many web pages have one or more "Forbidden" frames on them, not just the ubiquitous "like" buttons. Next, I guess the Instagram IP ranges must be added to the filter...
If a bunch of publishers get together and lobby aggressively I wouldn't be surprised if a court found that a sufficient degree of similarity existed, thereby violating copyright. And if the court didn't find it, well, Congress can amend the copyright law and I think the US Copyright Office can regulate matters a bit.
But what if some of the Creative Commons work had been published before the textbook whose revenue stream the publishers are trying to defend. Parts of the textbook would then be infringing on the CC material. Ah, there's the rub.
The "one-stop-shopping" nature of the chip is chilling. Consider, Broadcom has seen enough of a market to warrant developing a sophisticated device, the stated purpose of which is to determine it's position and "phone home" with that information. Worse yet, it will also phone in all the personal details about you that it has access to, so that those "coupons" can be quickly crafted. If that's not scary enough, consider that also available to any given "shop keeper", is a list of all the other shops you've visited, and when. Still not bugged enough? Think about this technology in the hands of entities far more dangerous than merchants; law enforcement, for example.
And you'll even be stuck with the bills for calls/SMS/data as the phone reports your whereabouts which are then passed on to nearby merchants or watchful agencies. And perhaps also for the calls/SMS/data returned as so-called coupons or comforting security notifications ("wait there, an officer has been dispatched" or "you're not allowed to enter that movie theater").
If this and DuckDuckGo start gaining momentum google may find itself in Altavista's shoes.
Eh... OpenStreetMap is good for just that: street maps. It's got nothing on Google's other mapping features. Hell, it doesn't even show the lake where my cabin is at, just the streets. Google Maps offers detailed satellite and terrain imagery, for one thing.
Exactly. Google Maps even has the side roads and the dirt trail that my house is on, visible both in streetmap and in satellite views.
At present, OpenStreetMap barely even shows the lake as a splotch of blue, and south of the nearby town proper it only shows the motorway. It indicates nothing but blank forest for many kilometers of exurb, where houses are typically every 50-100 meters along every road and dirt track (and there are a lot of side roads and dirt tracks). Some day, OpenStreetMap may even show the main roads a few kilometers from near my house. In fact, around here OpenStreetMap covers fewer roads than even Google Street View.
Oh, is Sony in on this too?
No, no, no!
It's one tablet per child, not one poison pill per child.
$8 bucks for an e-book version of a $100 book and you're bitching about it?
Where did GP say the $8 was for an ebook?
He said it was for a second-hand textbook bought via Amazon. Hint: Amazon does not sell second-hand ebooks. Now if an ebook (which can't be loaned or resold, and with other DRM limitations) were only to cost quarter or less the price of the print equivalent (easily loaned, can be resold, no DRM), there would be much less belly-aching about things. As it is, publishers and sales channels seem to think they can fleece buyers for about as much for crippled ebooks as for traditional print books.