Europe, like any other region of this world, is dependent on its member states' economies being successful in maximizing their profits. That, and the fact that the EU in its heart is an economic union, not a civil rights institution, is the reason why there are, by conservative estimation, 15,000 lobbyists working in brussels, making 20 per member of the European Parliament, 550 per member of the European Commission. Which is why the EU, just as any other governmentorial institution in this world, usually creates laws and decisions in favor of the big money, not the people. And which is why a decision in favour of network neutrality, which would interfere with the profit maximization of the biggest European telcos, is improbable even if suggested by a top-rank commissioner. And if it really should become reality, it will be one of the rare exceptions to the rule.
The level of democratic legitimization of the European Commission is, by the way, completely irrelevant in this context. In this so-called civilized world, the only puropose of elections is to hold up the illusion that people could influence politics, while politics will, as a matter of economic necessity, always be dictated by profits, no matter in which cases people are allowed to vote, or, for that matter, whom they do elect.
Do you understand the concept of fiction? Actually, to "pretend" things is exactly what fiction is about. And if a creator of fiction wants to "pretend" there's a future without religion, then that's just as valid as anything, and, another mistake on your behalf, I do not need to be a Startrek fan to prefer the idea of a future without religion to one where religions still exist. (My favourite ST series used to be DS9, although it contained more tolerance for religion than I'd call healthy, and I generally do regard B5 much more highly than most ST productions).
Oh, and by the way - a future without religion, as improbable as it may seem today, is something I'd still call more probable than the existence of "souls", a purely religious belief that seems to be part of the coming production just as it ran like a golden thread through B5. No matter whether JMS calls himself atheist or not.
Makes me set my expectations low, if religious mystery is already communicated in such prominent a line. As much as I liked B5, JMS's embracing of everything religious and metaphysical was in my opinion the most annoying aspect of the series. Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to find out whether my prejudice will be proven right or wrong!
Some of these days I'll probably get one just for fun...
Now that the Raspberry Pi even has its own "Raspbmc" XBMC distribution, I could just as well have used one for my living-room audio/video needs instead of the cheap netbook I bought. (Which was no bad choice either, although driver issues forced me to use Windows instead of Linux, which otherwise would have been just perfect.)
What makes it so fascinating: it's extremely cheap, it's a great gadget for learning and experimenting with hard- and software, and at the same time it's powerful enough to be employed for quite some serious real-world computing tasks.
And by the way, in a world that is being choked to death by an economic system based on profit maximization, forcing more and more people to tighten their belts even in the rich industrialized regions while the objective requirements for universal affluence and well-being, i.e. resources, productivity and workforce, have never been available in such an abundance, inventions like the Raspberry Pi will probably become more and more important for people.
Even if the study's figures themselves may somehow be "correct", there's still the continued productivity increase per person through advance of technology - even though "labor capacity" might have dropped and might continue to drop.
Seems to be a study to give bespoke rationale for those in power to further increase work time or invent new socially detrimental measures to fight the impending shortage of workforce. While, in long term reality, increasing unemployment is the only thing to be expected.
Whatever might have been not to like about Aaron Swartz as a person, fact is that he's a victim of excessive persecution. A persecution resulting from a jurisdiction that is slave to the economy, an economy this time impersonated by the content industry. Nice and noble gesture of O'Reilly.
Hmm.... I chose an Android device for a mobile phone because of its potential in letting me learn things and improve my IT skills, beside other reasons. And I think it's quite amazing what you can do on Android if you only know some Java. I'd imagine there won't be much you couldn't do with that Cheap Android Dongle. Although, of course, you'd do it a different way than you might do it with a RPI running Linux.
After Microsoft stopped to sell it four years ago? With that-what-must-not-be-named, which was intended to widely replace it, having become available nearly five years ago from now? And with even Windows 7 now being around for more than three years?
I'd say, that's the important message behind the headline, and it's a good one, because it's continued proof that even Microsoft users, even when "the company is doing everything it can to get its users off Windows XP", as TFA says, don't eat every shit they're getting served. And, with Windows 8, there's good hope that Microsoft will be the ones who are going to choke on a new version of Windows, again.
Although it's still far from being completely extinct. Someone still has to design the iPhones and to design and build the robots. But more and more of that, too, will become automated, even in countries where labour is cheap, because technological progress will at some point in time make automation even cheaper.
What will happen? Instead of enabling people to enjoy more free time at decent living standards, more and more people will become jobless and thereby poor. Oh, and, by the way, because economic value can only be created by human work, both products and money will more and more lose their economic value, which will finally lead to world-wide inflation. The process has long since started, and the current financial and economic crises are only the first major symptoms of what is to come.
She wasn't. She has studied media science and worked for an internet agency and a supplier for the car industry. By the way, the rumour originated within Mr Wulff's own political party, the conservative CDU (christian-democratic union) which is also the party the head of government, Mrs Merkel, belongs to.
1. The event in discussion now dates back half a year. When it was news, Mr Wulff was still Federal President (an office which, in Germany, does not carry too much power; his main job is to represent the state) and struggling against the corruption allegations which finally made him resign. Back then, when it was urgent, Mrs Wulff did not deem it necessary to do or say anything at all.
2. This week there is a book by Mrs Wulff coming to the stores titled "Jenseits des Protokolls" ("Beyond Protocol"), which is expected to tell a few stories from the couple of months her husband was President, including, of course, the events she is now suing Google for.
Any questions?
All this is of course exactly in line with what those Wulff people have already shown to be their character.
I can't say which I find less encouraging and less trust-inspiring, the fact that the support for writing StarOffice 5 binary formats (sdw, sdc, sda, etc.) has been dropped per se, or the circumstance that such a significant change has been introduced quietly and without even being mentioned in the release notes.
Did they hope nobody would notice, perhaps assuming that users of StarOffice binary file formats would have all died of old age by now?
Not all have, though, and some do even remember that StarOffice 5.2 used to have a feature set which OpenOffice and LibreOffice, more than ten years later, still do not completely replace, which is why some still keep their StarOffice 5.2 setup (working perfectly well on Windows 7 x64) alive, some alongside whatever else they may be using these days, some (like myself) even as their primary office application suite.
Just for the record – 1998, I started a side-business as a really small, local internet service provider, offering web and mail services for customers on a machine running OS/2. If I remember correctly, until now, 14 years later, there was one major hardware upgrade and two operating system upgrades, with the next major upgrade (both hard- and software) planned this year. The mid-term future will probably be a Linux box with the latest eComStation running what OS/2 specific stuff will then still be needed in a VirtualBox, but the next setup will still be OS/2-only (eComStation 2.1). It doesn't let me do all the things other systems would, especially when compared with Linux in a server environment, but those 14 years mostly were a really low-maintenance time and I'm still quite happy with it. On the desktop, though, my OS/2 days are mostly over for something like 10 years now.
To make Ctrl-Alt-Del simply flush the filesystems and reboot the machine was a design decision, and a dubious one to boot (scnr), but not a technical necessity imposed by the architecture. Actually, the current OS/2 packagings by name of eComStation do come with a Ctrl-Alt-Del interceptor that switches to a console mode process manager.
Whatever most English speakers really think about the German word "Doktor" (sic!), "performant", which is a common word in German, too, wouldn't really be the first German word to become part of the English language. Wow, how stupid those must have been who first used the words "kindergarten" and "rucksack" among an English speaking audience...
... when every couple of years one of the not-so-well-adjusted kids gets himself a gun and makes them pay. As far as I'm concerned, actually I'm surprised that it's only one of them every couple of years.
Am I the only one reading "Windows Marketplace for Mobiles, which is set to compete with the popular Apple's App Store" and imagining handcuffs competing with bracelets?
Right. And, and there Safina is simply wrong, Marxism is not "one man's dictate", although it was made to something like that in the socialist dictatorships misusing and abusing it.
Most of Marxism is simply a kind of scientific, socio-economic analysis. Even today many economists admit that Marx' magnum opus does a great job in explaining capitalist economy (and its shortcomings).
Yeah, I've seen the idea of an organ-pipe based computing machine detailed in Neal Stephenson's 'Cryptonomicon'. The fictitious machine was not exactly what we'd call low-noise, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Europe, like any other region of this world, is dependent on its member states' economies being successful in maximizing their profits. That, and the fact that the EU in its heart is an economic union, not a civil rights institution, is the reason why there are, by conservative estimation, 15,000 lobbyists working in brussels, making 20 per member of the European Parliament, 550 per member of the European Commission. Which is why the EU, just as any other governmentorial institution in this world, usually creates laws and decisions in favor of the big money, not the people. And which is why a decision in favour of network neutrality, which would interfere with the profit maximization of the biggest European telcos, is improbable even if suggested by a top-rank commissioner. And if it really should become reality, it will be one of the rare exceptions to the rule.
The level of democratic legitimization of the European Commission is, by the way, completely irrelevant in this context. In this so-called civilized world, the only puropose of elections is to hold up the illusion that people could influence politics, while politics will, as a matter of economic necessity, always be dictated by profits, no matter in which cases people are allowed to vote, or, for that matter, whom they do elect.
Do you understand the concept of fiction? Actually, to "pretend" things is exactly what fiction is about. And if a creator of fiction wants to "pretend" there's a future without religion, then that's just as valid as anything, and, another mistake on your behalf, I do not need to be a Startrek fan to prefer the idea of a future without religion to one where religions still exist. (My favourite ST series used to be DS9, although it contained more tolerance for religion than I'd call healthy, and I generally do regard B5 much more highly than most ST productions).
Oh, and by the way - a future without religion, as improbable as it may seem today, is something I'd still call more probable than the existence of "souls", a purely religious belief that seems to be part of the coming production just as it ran like a golden thread through B5. No matter whether JMS calls himself atheist or not.
Makes me set my expectations low, if religious mystery is already communicated in such prominent a line. As much as I liked B5, JMS's embracing of everything religious and metaphysical was in my opinion the most annoying aspect of the series. Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to find out whether my prejudice will be proven right or wrong!
Some of these days I'll probably get one just for fun...
Now that the Raspberry Pi even has its own "Raspbmc" XBMC distribution, I could just as well have used one for my living-room audio/video needs instead of the cheap netbook I bought. (Which was no bad choice either, although driver issues forced me to use Windows instead of Linux, which otherwise would have been just perfect.)
What makes it so fascinating: it's extremely cheap, it's a great gadget for learning and experimenting with hard- and software, and at the same time it's powerful enough to be employed for quite some serious real-world computing tasks.
And by the way, in a world that is being choked to death by an economic system based on profit maximization, forcing more and more people to tighten their belts even in the rich industrialized regions while the objective requirements for universal affluence and well-being, i.e. resources, productivity and workforce, have never been available in such an abundance, inventions like the Raspberry Pi will probably become more and more important for people.
Even if the study's figures themselves may somehow be "correct", there's still the continued productivity increase per person through advance of technology - even though "labor capacity" might have dropped and might continue to drop.
Seems to be a study to give bespoke rationale for those in power to further increase work time or invent new socially detrimental measures to fight the impending shortage of workforce. While, in long term reality, increasing unemployment is the only thing to be expected.
Whatever might have been not to like about Aaron Swartz as a person, fact is that he's a victim of excessive persecution. A persecution resulting from a jurisdiction that is slave to the economy, an economy this time impersonated by the content industry. Nice and noble gesture of O'Reilly.
I was about to post something similar, seeing noone seemed to notice the inconsistency...
It's somewhat like claiming to fear fire or to flee from fire was stupid because those who fled weren't burnt much after all...
Hmm.... I chose an Android device for a mobile phone because of its potential in letting me learn things and improve my IT skills, beside other reasons. And I think it's quite amazing what you can do on Android if you only know some Java. I'd imagine there won't be much you couldn't do with that Cheap Android Dongle. Although, of course, you'd do it a different way than you might do it with a RPI running Linux.
After Microsoft stopped to sell it four years ago? With that-what-must-not-be-named, which was intended to widely replace it, having become available nearly five years ago from now? And with even Windows 7 now being around for more than three years?
I'd say, that's the important message behind the headline, and it's a good one, because it's continued proof that even Microsoft users, even when "the company is doing everything it can to get its users off Windows XP", as TFA says, don't eat every shit they're getting served. And, with Windows 8, there's good hope that Microsoft will be the ones who are going to choke on a new version of Windows, again.
Although it's still far from being completely extinct. Someone still has to design the iPhones and to design and build the robots. But more and more of that, too, will become automated, even in countries where labour is cheap, because technological progress will at some point in time make automation even cheaper.
What will happen? Instead of enabling people to enjoy more free time at decent living standards, more and more people will become jobless and thereby poor. Oh, and, by the way, because economic value can only be created by human work, both products and money will more and more lose their economic value, which will finally lead to world-wide inflation. The process has long since started, and the current financial and economic crises are only the first major symptoms of what is to come.
She wasn't. She has studied media science and worked for an internet agency and a supplier for the car industry. By the way, the rumour originated within Mr Wulff's own political party, the conservative CDU (christian-democratic union) which is also the party the head of government, Mrs Merkel, belongs to.
And it couldn't be more evident. Just two things:
1. The event in discussion now dates back half a year. When it was news, Mr Wulff was still Federal President (an office which, in Germany, does not carry too much power; his main job is to represent the state) and struggling against the corruption allegations which finally made him resign. Back then, when it was urgent, Mrs Wulff did not deem it necessary to do or say anything at all.
2. This week there is a book by Mrs Wulff coming to the stores titled "Jenseits des Protokolls" ("Beyond Protocol"), which is expected to tell a few stories from the couple of months her husband was President, including, of course, the events she is now suing Google for.
Any questions?
All this is of course exactly in line with what those Wulff people have already shown to be their character.
... the Jews in Nazi Germany were free to be Jews. Just not free from the consequences of being brought to concentration camps and murdered.
(This is *not* comparing the event told by TFA to the shoah, by the way and just in case.)
But thanks for the brilliant demonstration of how dubious the term "free" sometimes gets used and probably is never going to stop to be used.
I can't say which I find less encouraging and less trust-inspiring, the fact that the support for writing StarOffice 5 binary formats (sdw, sdc, sda, etc.) has been dropped per se, or the circumstance that such a significant change has been introduced quietly and without even being mentioned in the release notes.
Did they hope nobody would notice, perhaps assuming that users of StarOffice binary file formats would have all died of old age by now?
Not all have, though, and some do even remember that StarOffice 5.2 used to have a feature set which OpenOffice and LibreOffice, more than ten years later, still do not completely replace, which is why some still keep their StarOffice 5.2 setup (working perfectly well on Windows 7 x64) alive, some alongside whatever else they may be using these days, some (like myself) even as their primary office application suite.
Just for the record – 1998, I started a side-business as a really small, local internet service provider, offering web and mail services for customers on a machine running OS/2. If I remember correctly, until now, 14 years later, there was one major hardware upgrade and two operating system upgrades, with the next major upgrade (both hard- and software) planned this year. The mid-term future will probably be a Linux box with the latest eComStation running what OS/2 specific stuff will then still be needed in a VirtualBox, but the next setup will still be OS/2-only (eComStation 2.1). It doesn't let me do all the things other systems would, especially when compared with Linux in a server environment, but those 14 years mostly were a really low-maintenance time and I'm still quite happy with it. On the desktop, though, my OS/2 days are mostly over for something like 10 years now.
To make Ctrl-Alt-Del simply flush the filesystems and reboot the machine was a design decision, and a dubious one to boot (scnr), but not a technical necessity imposed by the architecture. Actually, the current OS/2 packagings by name of eComStation do come with a Ctrl-Alt-Del interceptor that switches to a console mode process manager.
I've never seen that behaviour and have been using the 2.2 version
So what you have is multiples of the same file with .2.2 and .2.2.2.2.2.2 extensions?
Whatever most English speakers really think about the German word "Doktor" (sic!), "performant", which is a common word in German, too, wouldn't really be the first German word to become part of the English language. Wow, how stupid those must have been who first used the words "kindergarten" and "rucksack" among an English speaking audience...
... when every couple of years one of the not-so-well-adjusted kids gets himself a gun and makes them pay. As far as I'm concerned, actually I'm surprised that it's only one of them every couple of years.
See photoscala.de (translated from German)
By the way, when Olympus released their first Four Thirds lenses, they said they were designed to resolve 20 MP minimum.
Cheers,
d. d.
Am I the only one reading "Windows Marketplace for Mobiles, which is set to compete with the popular Apple's App Store" and imagining handcuffs competing with bracelets?
Right. And, and there Safina is simply wrong, Marxism is not "one man's dictate", although it was made to something like that in the socialist dictatorships misusing and abusing it.
Most of Marxism is simply a kind of scientific, socio-economic analysis. Even today many economists admit that Marx' magnum opus does a great job in explaining capitalist economy (and its shortcomings).
Or does anyone seriously think the more 'mature' the Internet gets, equaling the more commercially exploited, the less infantile it would become?
Yeah, I've seen the idea of an organ-pipe based computing machine detailed in Neal Stephenson's 'Cryptonomicon'. The fictitious machine was not exactly what we'd call low-noise, though.