It could be a useful strategy for Google to help LibreOffice or one of its clones with that. And porting the whole thing to Android (which is probably much easier said than done).
Plus adding a better touch interface for use on Android.
Proper editing capabilities for Office documents is to me one of the only severe restrictions of Android at the moment. And is indeed what stopped me from considering non-x86 alternatives when getting a new netbook half year ago. The offerings were interesting, but the need of editing documents is key to me.
That notwithstanding, there are many things we do because we know no-one is watching. And that are not necessarily illegal things. Or would they really want to take the camera in the bedroom and on the toilet as well?
Also indeed there are simply plenty of stupid things we do. Humans are not perfect, everyone suffers from bad judgement from time to time, or simply makes mistakes - if you want to have some inspiration, just look at YouTube for stuff like "epic fail" and you see many recordings of very stupid things people do. That are things we often like to forget about - I for one wouldn't want the world to know about all the stupid things that I did in my life.
Privacy is a great thing, and not just to prevent identity theft.
Do you have any proof that they are developing a nuclear weapon? And no, political allegations do not count.
That would be interesting, as the IAEA reports no such activities were found, while there are many activities that support Iran's claim that it is for peaceful reasons only.
And besides, what is so strange about countries having nuclear power for peaceful reasons? Iran wouldn't be the only one.
Not surprised he's an activist; that are the anti-Iran people too.
Currently there is, as he argues, no evidence that Iran is trying to produce a nuclear bomb. The regime denies they want to, and the information we have about their nuclear program supports that claim.
The author mentions two interesting extra arguments, though. First of all, he admits that the IAEA can not check everything. It is possible for Iran to have a secret program trying to put together a nuclear bomb, and if they hide it very well, there would be no evidence to be found. But that'd be really hard.
And as soon as Iran has a mature civilian nuclear industry, they have a nuclear weapons capability. Which is fully within their rights as signatories of the NPT. This is a simple result of this technology being dual-use by nature. Many countries have the capability to build a nuclear weapon in a matter of months, but do not do this. By signing the NPT they agree not to, so to develop a bomb they would have to break the NPT (openly or not), and in all likelyhood expell the IAEA inspectors.
Anyway one key point in his argument I fully agree with: the problem that certain countries have with Iran is more political than legal. And in that line, the best way to prevent Iran building a nuclear weapon may be very well by actually helping them to develop the civilian nuclear industry they want - that way you can keep certain key technologies out of that country, keep better track of what they're doing, and, maybe most importantly, make the regime happy and take away any urge they may have to make a nuclear weapon.
I have so far not seen a single web site that comes close to the apps that I have on my phone in graphical features. I'm sure that part of the reason is that when you develop an in-browser application, the general requirements are far different than for say some game on a smartphone.
The richest in-browser stuff that I have encountered is stuff like Google Docs - and those mimic what you see on a normal desktop. I have never seen anything like say Angry Birds. That I haven't encountered it of course doesn't mean it can't be done, it's just that the web (a content delivery platform) is so different from a smart phone (a general purpose computing platform).
But as I said it's the folks of Mozilla that are behind this OS, making it primarily a browser and secondarily a general purpose OS. That may make a difference. But then, maybe not. I hope they succeed. Having a serious third player in this market is definitely a good thing. Especially if they can provide the same quality of apps as other platforms, but then effectively platform-independent.
The basic idea is great (and in a way what Java was purported to be, back when it was first concieved): write once, run anywhere. It runs in the browser, so you don't develop for Android phones or iPhones or Ubuntu phones or whatever. The exact same app runs in any recent browser.
Now of course it's not an ideal world, and there will be differences between browsers (the apparent lack of a reference implementation and still-not-standard-status of HTML5 is a big issue). I also don't think HTML5/JS is up to the task of writing apps as rich as what can be found now in the app stores (even though those apps are still nothing compared to full fledged deskopt apps). And I'm quite positive Mozilla themselves are aware of that - but being primarily a web browser developer that is exactly what they could help fix along the way.
And the difference with other vendors in those respects?
MS is not trusted any more with their proprietary "standards" for browsers, and are prone to ship half-baked solutions withotu clear direction.
RIM has no control over the quality of the web browsers themselves, they depend on third parties.
WebOS was premature. At the time HTML5 was promising, but far from ready, and JS was just slow.
HTML5 and JS have come a long long way in the past few years. JS execution speed has gone up orders of magnitude, not any more slowing down web browsing to a crawl or giving those "Firefox is not responding" messages (later replaced by "non-responsive script" by Firefox) for heavy scripts.
I have no idea whether Firefox can succeed where the others failed. Web technology has improved immensely, making a lot more possible now. Is it good enough? No idea, I don't develop HTML. But dismissing them outright based on past failures, that's not fair to say the least.
Humans have been doing just that for thousands of years. Basically since we moved from hunter/gatherers to farmers. Now that change also did not go easy, fossil records show that humans actually got shorter (the explanation is that the diet became less varied and often less food overall even though supply was more reliable) before adapting and growing again. Farming of course included quite a learning curve.
After that it went faster, and more radical. By now we have adapted our environment so much, that it has become a totally different environment than where humans came into existence. The required skills to survive are different too - not as much physical labour (farming) as brains (schooling) are important for one's success in life, and with that success in finding a partner and procreating. I don't think I'm going too far to say that as species we have to start catching up with the environment we created, and the individuals that are best suited for such an urbanised environment are the ones that in the end come out on top.
Another part of human evolution some will argue is the knowledge we gather. This is what makes humans unique, our advanced communication and script, allowing us to understand abstract issues, and pass this understanding on to future generations. That is how we could come as far as we have, if you have to reinvent the wheel time and again instead of teaching one another about it, you're not getting any further.
Interestingly, not so long ago I read about evolution in humans, and how that is actually speeding up currently.
And that makes total sense to me, considering the huge changes we made to our environment over the past couple hundred years. Urbanisation, industrialisation - it requires different skills than farming.
Not sure whether there is a mechanism or not. It's not so clear.
For evolutionary pressure to be present, there should be an advantage (may be rather minor) to mosquitoes that can bite people wearing DEET repellent over other mosquitoes.
Humans are not their only prey - if we were, all mosquitoes would be resistant to DEET by now.
Mosquitoes draw blood from many other warm-blooded animals, they live in many places where humans never set foot. I have no idea what ratio humans have in that diet, however I think humans could be a really convenient blood source for mosquitoes as we don't have a thick fur covering most of our skin.
But does a dish work well as reflector when the wavelengths are larger than the dish? 27 MHz (assuming they would use that frequency to kill the CB radio) has 10m wavelength. That's one awfully big dish, normal dishes to communicate with satellites are more in the order of 1m diameter.
And for efficient broadcast of those long wavelengths you also need a rather large antenna.
Which means that they must have been using high frequencies to try to fry that equipment, and again you won't fry anything unless you have enough power and can get it to resonate one way or another on the receiving side.
The only problem is that if the US would ever start a serious war with say China, or one of China's allies, all China has to do is stop supplies of anything to the US.
That would quickly ground most equipment due to lack of parts.
And it would kill the rest of the population who would die from starvation, as after a while no more working microwaves to heat up their junk food.
TFA mentions that F22s would have been used in Lybia, if not for these communication issues. So there you have your answer.
Just like the B2 was used against Saddam in Iraq. Weapons the enemy doesn't have an answer to - that at least makes kinda sure your plane will come back unharmed, and that the mission will be accomplished. That doesn't mean a lesser aircraft could also have done the job, it's just making extra sure the job is done.
There is no western interest in the areas mainly due to lack of oil in the ground. Or other sufficiently valuable resources.
No I say that wrong, as there are valuable resources in Africa. It is more that as long as those wars are fought, no-one is able to actually keep track of what western companies - who secure their installations using private-hire armies - remove from their lands. And that's a win for the western world, who as a result are not really interested in stopping those wars.
Well, also not entirely true, that is unless some islamists start to actually gain ground, like recently in Mali, after which western forces jump in to restore the balance of power and to prevent the conflict from ending.
When I get such mails that I suspect of being a phishing attempt (and as almost anyone on this planet, I'm receiving at least several of those every single day), I ignore them. The mail in question I'd likely have ignored for that exact reason: suspected phishing, ignored and forgotten by the time my finger has left the button.
Most of the phishing mails that I receive purport to be of services I've no connection with (I don't have a hotmail or yahoo mail account, for example). They're easy. Others pretend to be from sites where I do have connection with (e.g. gmail), they're harder to distinguish but it's rather safe to assume they're fake, too. Only when I read about a breach on an independent site, like/. indeed (which I trust as in not being related to phishers), then it'd be time for action. If I were to follow your advice, and go to the web site the phishing mail pretends to come from, I'd spend my whole day changing e-mail passwords.
The only mails that I'd recognise as real, would be if they use my complete name, preferably including middle name, when addressing me. Not "dear e-mail user", not "dear wvmarle@gmail.com" or "dear wvmarle". PayPal for example is doing that very well, and that's so far the only way I would believe those mails to be real. And still I'd not use a link provided in those mails, just to be sure.
You say they used a dish for satellite communication, no idea which frequency that is but definitely way higher than 27 MHz or most other amateur bands.
The receiving equipment is not designed to receive so much energy, and unless you happen to find resonance and their antenna pointing directly to you, power transmission is going to be really inefficient.
Then the sheer amount of power needed. To get smoke, you need a lot of power. To get their equipment fried, you'd need to deliver at least some 300W of power, and I think you can be happy to have a 1% efficiency. That'd require you to output some 30 kW of power - that's a lot. That's the kind of power broadcasters use for their FM radio signals.
Satellite communication doesn't normally use kWs of power (and if they did, they wouldn't be worried by a CB radio nearby - no way that guy was outputting anything near such powers). Sat phones can work off of batteries, for example. You don't need that much power with a highly directional antenna. That makes it unlikely your satellite communication equipment can output several kW of power. You may be getting smoke on your own side as well.
Be happy to live in a country where not everyone walks around shooting guns, so hearing gunfire is actually something special that warrants a closer look by the authorities.
On the other hand, it's said that every person on this planet is connected to anyone else in no more than six links. So any web site linked to any other web site in less than 19 clicks - especially with sites like Google in the mix - sounds rather plausible to me, if not on the high side for number of clicks even.
Well yes I know Google gives different results to different people, however if I get basically exclusively Python-the-programming-language results (which surprised me - I'd expect a bit more snakes), then it's hard to imagine that someone doing even basic research on a trademark can not find this.
Also as I understand they try to register the trademark now, after not having used it for many years. Trademarks do not come with expiry dates like patents or copyrights, however you may lose a trademark, even if registered, if you do not use it for some time (a few years is long enough to use that argument).
Python is not even 17 years old, nor is Google. If they had been using the Python trademark for all those 17 years it'd be theirs. And in that case they should've started complaining to Python the programming language long time ago.
RIM is dying, and unless they have a serious turnaround soon they're not a serious player any more. They could have been a good partner for MS, as Blackberry is (or used to be) popular in the corporate mobile e-mail market. Excellent candidate to integrate tightly into Exchange.
And the rest don't have the corporate power to get them actually used on the latest devices and sold in the shops.
If I were to register a trademark for my new company, during the process of making up a name, the first thing I'd do is to use it as search query in Google to see if anyone may be using it. Wikipedia's entry on nr. 10 is the first that's not about the programming language.
So even if he didn't know about the programming language, it seems he hasn't done any research at all on the current use of the name, and whether there are any clashes with their intended use of the brand.
Mind that it is no problem to have two or more companies using the same trademark, as long as they are in separate markets (either geographically or different product range - think e.g. the iPhone mobile phone brand in Brazil, and Apple Music vs. Apple Computer).
Slashdot Mirror
It could be a useful strategy for Google to help LibreOffice or one of its clones with that. And porting the whole thing to Android (which is probably much easier said than done).
Plus adding a better touch interface for use on Android.
Proper editing capabilities for Office documents is to me one of the only severe restrictions of Android at the moment. And is indeed what stopped me from considering non-x86 alternatives when getting a new netbook half year ago. The offerings were interesting, but the need of editing documents is key to me.
That notwithstanding, there are many things we do because we know no-one is watching. And that are not necessarily illegal things. Or would they really want to take the camera in the bedroom and on the toilet as well?
Also indeed there are simply plenty of stupid things we do. Humans are not perfect, everyone suffers from bad judgement from time to time, or simply makes mistakes - if you want to have some inspiration, just look at YouTube for stuff like "epic fail" and you see many recordings of very stupid things people do. That are things we often like to forget about - I for one wouldn't want the world to know about all the stupid things that I did in my life.
Privacy is a great thing, and not just to prevent identity theft.
Do you have any proof that they are developing a nuclear weapon? And no, political allegations do not count.
That would be interesting, as the IAEA reports no such activities were found, while there are many activities that support Iran's claim that it is for peaceful reasons only.
And besides, what is so strange about countries having nuclear power for peaceful reasons? Iran wouldn't be the only one.
Not surprised he's an activist; that are the anti-Iran people too.
Currently there is, as he argues, no evidence that Iran is trying to produce a nuclear bomb. The regime denies they want to, and the information we have about their nuclear program supports that claim.
The author mentions two interesting extra arguments, though. First of all, he admits that the IAEA can not check everything. It is possible for Iran to have a secret program trying to put together a nuclear bomb, and if they hide it very well, there would be no evidence to be found. But that'd be really hard.
And as soon as Iran has a mature civilian nuclear industry, they have a nuclear weapons capability. Which is fully within their rights as signatories of the NPT. This is a simple result of this technology being dual-use by nature. Many countries have the capability to build a nuclear weapon in a matter of months, but do not do this. By signing the NPT they agree not to, so to develop a bomb they would have to break the NPT (openly or not), and in all likelyhood expell the IAEA inspectors.
Anyway one key point in his argument I fully agree with: the problem that certain countries have with Iran is more political than legal. And in that line, the best way to prevent Iran building a nuclear weapon may be very well by actually helping them to develop the civilian nuclear industry they want - that way you can keep certain key technologies out of that country, keep better track of what they're doing, and, maybe most importantly, make the regime happy and take away any urge they may have to make a nuclear weapon.
It could be - but is it?
I have so far not seen a single web site that comes close to the apps that I have on my phone in graphical features. I'm sure that part of the reason is that when you develop an in-browser application, the general requirements are far different than for say some game on a smartphone.
The richest in-browser stuff that I have encountered is stuff like Google Docs - and those mimic what you see on a normal desktop. I have never seen anything like say Angry Birds. That I haven't encountered it of course doesn't mean it can't be done, it's just that the web (a content delivery platform) is so different from a smart phone (a general purpose computing platform).
But as I said it's the folks of Mozilla that are behind this OS, making it primarily a browser and secondarily a general purpose OS. That may make a difference. But then, maybe not. I hope they succeed. Having a serious third player in this market is definitely a good thing. Especially if they can provide the same quality of apps as other platforms, but then effectively platform-independent.
the only remaining niche is the web
I'm sure that's how you should read it (emphasis mine).
The basic idea is great (and in a way what Java was purported to be, back when it was first concieved): write once, run anywhere. It runs in the browser, so you don't develop for Android phones or iPhones or Ubuntu phones or whatever. The exact same app runs in any recent browser.
Now of course it's not an ideal world, and there will be differences between browsers (the apparent lack of a reference implementation and still-not-standard-status of HTML5 is a big issue). I also don't think HTML5/JS is up to the task of writing apps as rich as what can be found now in the app stores (even though those apps are still nothing compared to full fledged deskopt apps). And I'm quite positive Mozilla themselves are aware of that - but being primarily a web browser developer that is exactly what they could help fix along the way.
And the difference with other vendors in those respects?
MS is not trusted any more with their proprietary "standards" for browsers, and are prone to ship half-baked solutions withotu clear direction.
RIM has no control over the quality of the web browsers themselves, they depend on third parties.
WebOS was premature. At the time HTML5 was promising, but far from ready, and JS was just slow.
HTML5 and JS have come a long long way in the past few years. JS execution speed has gone up orders of magnitude, not any more slowing down web browsing to a crawl or giving those "Firefox is not responding" messages (later replaced by "non-responsive script" by Firefox) for heavy scripts.
I have no idea whether Firefox can succeed where the others failed. Web technology has improved immensely, making a lot more possible now. Is it good enough? No idea, I don't develop HTML. But dismissing them outright based on past failures, that's not fair to say the least.
Humans have been doing just that for thousands of years. Basically since we moved from hunter/gatherers to farmers. Now that change also did not go easy, fossil records show that humans actually got shorter (the explanation is that the diet became less varied and often less food overall even though supply was more reliable) before adapting and growing again. Farming of course included quite a learning curve.
After that it went faster, and more radical. By now we have adapted our environment so much, that it has become a totally different environment than where humans came into existence. The required skills to survive are different too - not as much physical labour (farming) as brains (schooling) are important for one's success in life, and with that success in finding a partner and procreating. I don't think I'm going too far to say that as species we have to start catching up with the environment we created, and the individuals that are best suited for such an urbanised environment are the ones that in the end come out on top.
Another part of human evolution some will argue is the knowledge we gather. This is what makes humans unique, our advanced communication and script, allowing us to understand abstract issues, and pass this understanding on to future generations. That is how we could come as far as we have, if you have to reinvent the wheel time and again instead of teaching one another about it, you're not getting any further.
Because it allows for better trolling of course, why?
Human surgery has been linked to many serious injuries and severe complications, including death.
And I think many more such cases overall than for robot surgery. Horror stories can be found always, just a matter of searching hard enough.
The question is: which one is more reliable overall?
Interestingly, not so long ago I read about evolution in humans, and how that is actually speeding up currently.
And that makes total sense to me, considering the huge changes we made to our environment over the past couple hundred years. Urbanisation, industrialisation - it requires different skills than farming.
Not sure whether there is a mechanism or not. It's not so clear.
For evolutionary pressure to be present, there should be an advantage (may be rather minor) to mosquitoes that can bite people wearing DEET repellent over other mosquitoes.
Humans are not their only prey - if we were, all mosquitoes would be resistant to DEET by now.
Mosquitoes draw blood from many other warm-blooded animals, they live in many places where humans never set foot. I have no idea what ratio humans have in that diet, however I think humans could be a really convenient blood source for mosquitoes as we don't have a thick fur covering most of our skin.
But does a dish work well as reflector when the wavelengths are larger than the dish? 27 MHz (assuming they would use that frequency to kill the CB radio) has 10m wavelength. That's one awfully big dish, normal dishes to communicate with satellites are more in the order of 1m diameter.
And for efficient broadcast of those long wavelengths you also need a rather large antenna.
Which means that they must have been using high frequencies to try to fry that equipment, and again you won't fry anything unless you have enough power and can get it to resonate one way or another on the receiving side.
The only problem is that if the US would ever start a serious war with say China, or one of China's allies, all China has to do is stop supplies of anything to the US.
That would quickly ground most equipment due to lack of parts.
And it would kill the rest of the population who would die from starvation, as after a while no more working microwaves to heat up their junk food.
TFA mentions that F22s would have been used in Lybia, if not for these communication issues. So there you have your answer.
Just like the B2 was used against Saddam in Iraq. Weapons the enemy doesn't have an answer to - that at least makes kinda sure your plane will come back unharmed, and that the mission will be accomplished. That doesn't mean a lesser aircraft could also have done the job, it's just making extra sure the job is done.
There is no western interest in the areas mainly due to lack of oil in the ground. Or other sufficiently valuable resources.
No I say that wrong, as there are valuable resources in Africa. It is more that as long as those wars are fought, no-one is able to actually keep track of what western companies - who secure their installations using private-hire armies - remove from their lands. And that's a win for the western world, who as a result are not really interested in stopping those wars.
Well, also not entirely true, that is unless some islamists start to actually gain ground, like recently in Mali, after which western forces jump in to restore the balance of power and to prevent the conflict from ending.
You really want me to contact gmail five times a day to verify all those mails they send me? And how to contact them anyway, other than by e-mail?
When I get such mails that I suspect of being a phishing attempt (and as almost anyone on this planet, I'm receiving at least several of those every single day), I ignore them. The mail in question I'd likely have ignored for that exact reason: suspected phishing, ignored and forgotten by the time my finger has left the button.
Most of the phishing mails that I receive purport to be of services I've no connection with (I don't have a hotmail or yahoo mail account, for example). They're easy. Others pretend to be from sites where I do have connection with (e.g. gmail), they're harder to distinguish but it's rather safe to assume they're fake, too. Only when I read about a breach on an independent site, like /. indeed (which I trust as in not being related to phishers), then it'd be time for action. If I were to follow your advice, and go to the web site the phishing mail pretends to come from, I'd spend my whole day changing e-mail passwords.
The only mails that I'd recognise as real, would be if they use my complete name, preferably including middle name, when addressing me. Not "dear e-mail user", not "dear wvmarle@gmail.com" or "dear wvmarle". PayPal for example is doing that very well, and that's so far the only way I would believe those mails to be real. And still I'd not use a link provided in those mails, just to be sure.
The problems are manifold.
You say they used a dish for satellite communication, no idea which frequency that is but definitely way higher than 27 MHz or most other amateur bands.
The receiving equipment is not designed to receive so much energy, and unless you happen to find resonance and their antenna pointing directly to you, power transmission is going to be really inefficient.
Then the sheer amount of power needed. To get smoke, you need a lot of power. To get their equipment fried, you'd need to deliver at least some 300W of power, and I think you can be happy to have a 1% efficiency. That'd require you to output some 30 kW of power - that's a lot. That's the kind of power broadcasters use for their FM radio signals.
Satellite communication doesn't normally use kWs of power (and if they did, they wouldn't be worried by a CB radio nearby - no way that guy was outputting anything near such powers). Sat phones can work off of batteries, for example. You don't need that much power with a highly directional antenna. That makes it unlikely your satellite communication equipment can output several kW of power. You may be getting smoke on your own side as well.
Be happy to live in a country where not everyone walks around shooting guns, so hearing gunfire is actually something special that warrants a closer look by the authorities.
To make something smoke in minutes they must have sent quite some power there, a couple hundred watts or so.
Over a significant distance.
At just the right frequency to have the equipment pick it up, and start overheating.
Sorry, this story I'll file with "urban legends and other internet fables".
On the other hand, it's said that every person on this planet is connected to anyone else in no more than six links. So any web site linked to any other web site in less than 19 clicks - especially with sites like Google in the mix - sounds rather plausible to me, if not on the high side for number of clicks even.
Well yes I know Google gives different results to different people, however if I get basically exclusively Python-the-programming-language results (which surprised me - I'd expect a bit more snakes), then it's hard to imagine that someone doing even basic research on a trademark can not find this.
Also as I understand they try to register the trademark now, after not having used it for many years. Trademarks do not come with expiry dates like patents or copyrights, however you may lose a trademark, even if registered, if you do not use it for some time (a few years is long enough to use that argument).
Python is not even 17 years old, nor is Google. If they had been using the Python trademark for all those 17 years it'd be theirs. And in that case they should've started complaining to Python the programming language long time ago.
Series 40 is not for smart phones.
RIM is dying, and unless they have a serious turnaround soon they're not a serious player any more. They could have been a good partner for MS, as Blackberry is (or used to be) popular in the corporate mobile e-mail market. Excellent candidate to integrate tightly into Exchange.
And the rest don't have the corporate power to get them actually used on the latest devices and sold in the shops.
If I were to register a trademark for my new company, during the process of making up a name, the first thing I'd do is to use it as search query in Google to see if anyone may be using it. Wikipedia's entry on nr. 10 is the first that's not about the programming language.
So even if he didn't know about the programming language, it seems he hasn't done any research at all on the current use of the name, and whether there are any clashes with their intended use of the brand.
Mind that it is no problem to have two or more companies using the same trademark, as long as they are in separate markets (either geographically or different product range - think e.g. the iPhone mobile phone brand in Brazil, and Apple Music vs. Apple Computer).