No, parallel programming isn't "too hard", it's just that programmers never learn how to do it because they spend all their time on mostly useless crap: enormous and bloated APIs, enormous IDEs, gimmicky tools, and fancy development methodologies and management speak. Most of them, however, don't understand even the fundamentals of non-procedural programming, parallel programming, elementary algorithms, or even how a CPU works.
These same programmers often think that ideas like "garbage collection", "extreme programming", "visual GUI design", "object relational mappings", "unit testing", "backwards stepping debuggers", and "refactoring IDEs" (to name just a few) are innovations of the last few years, when in reality, many of them have been around for a quarter of a century or more. And, to add insult to injury, those programmers are often the ones that are the most vocal opponents of the kinds of technologies that make parallel programming easier: declarative programming and functional programming (not that they could actually define those terms, they just reject any language that offers such features).
If you learn the basics of programming, then parallel programming isn't "too hard". But if all you have ever known is how to throw together some application in Eclipse or Visual Studio, then it's not surprising that you find it too hard.
It's not the market that makes the difference, it's the company. In the past, Microsoft has been able to kill competitors simply by announcing a product, and if that wasn't enough, they'd follow it with billions in marketing and loss leaders. Microsoft wanted to make Zune a big success and they have failed; it's just another clunky Microsoft product that may or may not sell enough to break even eventually.
OTOH, when other companies achieve 10% market share against a convicted but unrepentant monopolist with billions of dollars in his war chest and an army of lawyers, yes, that is big news.
the nitpicking over GM has more to do with the method by which genes are introduced
No. Even if GM works exactly as intended and has no direct health risks, it still is a dangerous technology to use for food because of its potential effects on the environment and the economy.
Yes, and that's the crucial difference: there is almost no experience with the safety of that. It may seem plausible to you that taking a beta carotene or vitamin C gene and moving it from one species to another is safe, but showing that is hard.
the gene that produces vitamin C in mammals is broken in primates
No, it's not "broken", it's simply not needed. Primates usually get enough vitamin C through their regular diet. If they don't, something is wrong with their diet. You can add the vitamin C to some food crop, but that doesn't fix the diet.
that if corrected could prevent scurvy in malnourished nations
It may prevent scurvy, but it won't fix the diet. The problem with the diet is that it's imbalanced, not just that it lacks vitamin C.
but to blindly fear it because of things like this is irresponsible
Well, the majority of people don't know anything about genetic engineering, and for them, "GMO = bad" is a simple message that gets the point across.
Exactly my point. He ends up creating a scenario where his word, his ideology, is law.
Stallman isn't creating a "scenario", he is creating software. Furthermore, he doesn't pick the licenses for software he doesn't write, the authors of that software do.
If you don't like it, your only alternative ultimately ends up becoming hardly using a computer at all.
Yes, if you're opposed to people giving you software with source code for free, you indeed have to stop using a computer at all. It is indeed terrible. How dare people give you something for free, and how dare other people choose it.
In any case, Stallman faced exactly that situation with commercial software vendors, which is why he went out and did something about it.
I thought the way ZDNet described it once was actually very insightful:- Free as in Do As I Say.
Yes, the GPL imposes restrictions on you, but they are less restrictive than the licenses on commercial counterparts. They are more restrictive than some open source licenses, but nearly three decades experience with open source licenses have shown that those restrictions are important in order to protect the software from legal attacks. For example, the free software revolution could have happened a decade earlier if BSD hadn't been tied up in court. Without the GPL, there would be no free software or open source software today.
This is why Stallman is a problem, and this is why I feel as opposed to him as I do.
Your problem isn't with Stallman, it's with the fact that the world chooses free software. If you don't like the GPL, make arguments against the GPL. All you are doing, however, is badmouthing a person. Not only is that mean spirited, you also miss the fundamental issue: despite his enormous contributions, Stallman is only a catalyst. If Stallman went away tomorrow, GPLv3 would still happen and still become widespread: people want it.
If that isn't raw authoritarianism, I'm not sure what is.
I'm sorry you're confused on this point, but we call it a "market economy" and a "democracy". And, yes, sometimes your fellow citizens just make choices that affect you in ways you don't like. It happens all the time. Or, as Churchill put it: "Democracy is the worst form of government--until you've tried the others."
Drinks manufacturers point out that sodium benzoate has been approved for use by regulators
Regulatory approval should not permit manufacturers to escape their responsibility: "it was approved" should never be a way of escaping liability over dangerous substances. Regulatory approval can, at best, be an extra safety check, not something manufacturers can rely on.
Your response is as predictable as it is wrong: evolution is not "a single set of related concepts that have no applicable use anyway, outside of nomenclature", it's at the heart of modern biology and medicine, and, increasingly, computer science.
Come on, use your head. The accusation of "shill" doesn't mean that I seriously believe you are one, it is simply shorthand for expressing that you are behaving as if you were one: it's people like you who hurt open source, not people like Stallman.
Expressing critical or dissenting opinions about Richard Stallman
You're not "expressing critical or dissenting opinions", you're throwing mud at someone who has done more for open source than you will in your entire lifetime.
I'm not merely a shill. From your perspective, I'm something considerably worse.
Actually, individually, I think you are completely insignificant. But you illustrate the kind of uninformed whiners that do, collectively, hurt open source somewhat. Mind you, I don't think you have much of an impact even as a group, but your kind of drivel occasionally does get picked up by the media.
His formal organisation and the informal collective of his followers together are a scourge, and I honestly cannot adequately verbalise the extent of the loathing which I feel towards them.
Well, then I suggest you stop using their software. You can start by canceling your Slashdot and Blogspot accounts and stop using Google and Firefox, because all of them have been built with FSF software and code that Stallman wrote. You see, Stallman has put his time and his money where his mouth is.
If you want to help open source, write software under whatever open source license you want and stop whining and badmouthing others who do.
An accident is a traumatic event, and it can be argued that a compassionate society is not going to make it's chief form of entertainment watching such tragedies.
Quite to the contrary: a compassionate society wouldn't try to hide suffering and death under a blanket of silence. There is nothing shameful about either dying or other people taking an interest in it; in a compassionate society, that is what people do. What is shameful and incompassionate is that people like you are trying to insulate themselves from these natural events.
If one believes that the highest form of art is sneaking up to a window and filming a neighbor in a compromising position, then there is no problem with this video.
Now you have slipped from bad arguments to pure demagoguery and name calling: what, please tell, does voyeurism have to do with documenting a news event on a public highway?
We were such in a hurry to film every innocuous act, that we did not set up a proper legal framework to control the flow of the footage, so we use the DCMA, a blunt and largely ineffective tool, to close the barn door after all the horses have escaped.
We have a legal framework, and it applies here: in some places, you have an expectation of privacy, in others, you don't. If you drive on a public highway, you have no expectation of privacy. And, in fact, the reason this video appeared in the first place is because the NJTA didn't recognize privacy rights in the first place: they released the video to the press, after all. All they are complaining about is that it has received wider distribution than they originally intended.
Unless, of course, what he does is to split the OSS community.
There's nothing to split. FOSS is just a marketplace of different products and licenses, just like any commercial marketplace. RMS has no control over what licenses people use. If FOSS developers don't like the GPLv3, they won't be adopting it. I predict, however, that the GPLv3 will be a big success because many FOSS developers will want its requirements applied to their code.
RMS won't, so it would be far better for us all if we could keep him just to THIS side of insanely divisive, and this deal isn't going to help that any.
What would be better for FOSS is to recognize people like you for what they are: either, you're a Microsoft shill who's trying to use this as an excuse to throw mud at proven open source contributors, or you're just some anti-GPL zealot who is disappointed that the GPL is so widely used.
Either way, if you want to help open source, as you claim you do, there's a simple thing you can do: stop groundlessly insulting people who have done far more for open source than you ever will.
The real damage is that the very thought this agreement will cause Stallman to pretty much COMPLETELY lose it, in the flying-blind-in-the-land-of-batshit kind of way. I can't imagine his behavior will get more reasonable anyway,
Actually, this agreement shows that Stallman's behavior is completely reasonable. It's you who is "batshit" because you still just don't get the kinds of dirty tricks companies like Microsoft are trying.
with his credibility already stretched and the tensions already rife within the community, it doesn't bode well. Open infighting amongst the FOSS community is just what we need right now......
There is no "infighting", and fairly little disagreement in the FOSS communities. Mostly, it's just laissez faire. Compare that to the kind of cut-throat competition and dirty tricks going on in the commercial world, where companies not only screw each other but also screw the customer.
Even if you look at individuals, Stallman and Linux may be abrasive, but they are far more sensible, rational, and smart individuals than Ballmer or other commercial industry leaders.
The damage is done
The only "damage" from this is to Microsoft's reputation: Ballmer has shown that he is impotent: he can't stop open source. He can't name any patents, and he can't even get Novell to license their patents without paying Novell hundreds of millions of dollars. And their attempts at getting agreements through FUD are being undermined by license changes within a few months.
The last few months have shown only one thing: Microsoft's technology is worse than open source, their patents are worthless, and their dirty tricks aren't working either. Yes, there's big damage, and it's to Microsoft's reputation.
This was a public, newsworthy event, captured by a public camera. Not only is there nothing wrong with viewing and posting it, there is something decidedly wrong with trying to hide it. In fact, that's the kind of behavior you'd expect if they are concerned about getting sued (say, over dangerous tool booth design or signage).
Whether or not they are concerned about liability in this particular case, setting a precedent that governments can take down public footage of public, newsworthy events through the DMCA would be bad. This kind of video needs to be open to public scrutiny.
Yeah, Knuth achieved fame in the 70's and is a tenured professor at Stanford. He can afford to turn off E-mail and prefer writing books. He doesn't even have to give a damn about what he publishes anymore.
The rest of us don't have much of a choice but to read E-mail because our livelihood depends on it.
it's not beyond imagining that some people might be asking for these things in Apple stores. That would be direct, and pretty damning evidence of confusion.
Come on: "hi, where are the sex toys?" I don't think so.
On the other hand, there are plenty of Mac accessories that really are highly confusable with Apple products and that people do ask for in Apple stores. Since Apple hasn't gone after those, they have little basis to go after iGasm.
If whenever you see commercials of a certain "style" and you think "Apple/iPod", then the style is likely trademark material.
Well, or maybe not. After all, the trademark of the product itself isn't being infringed, only the ads are similar, and the ads aren't the product.
Furthermore, the question is not whether the item or ads are "similar", the question is whether buyers are likely to confuse the origin of the products. That's a hard argument for Apple to make. First, the product is in a completely different product category, a category that Apple has never sold anything in. Second, there are many products that are far more confusable with Apple products than this.
I congratulate iGasm for coming up with an Apple-style legal publicity stunt.
Last time I checked, GB was still deemed to be a democracy.
So was Germany, right up to the point when it wasn't anymore. Germans freely voted away, first minority rights, then their own rights. And this has happened many times before: democracies self-destruct voluntarily long before the dictators come in.
cops can't get away with anything now: it's all on tape
If you actually bothered to look around the world how these kinds of cameras are being used, you'd see that this is not at all the case. Many jurisdictions where cops use cameras allow cops to control them. Even if they aren't allowed to control them, they still effectively can, through turning them off, tampering, blocking the view, etc. After video capture, the video can also be selected and edited to let defendants appear in the worst possible light. And many jurisdictions where the police tape you, you are explicitly not permitted to tape the police.
Cameras could, in principle, ensure that police behave properly, but whether they actually are depends very much on where you are. The article doesn't give us enough information to tell.
Furthermore, even if cameras are used like that, does Britain have such a serious police brutality problem that it is necessary to introduce cameras? And are cameras the best way of preventing it?
Parthenogenesis has been observed in many vertebrates and some mammals, and it may rarely occur naturally in humans (even without divine intervention). So, this isn't all that unusual.
I spend several hundred dollars on software every year. In addition, I buy various Linux distros. Yet, if I didn't have Windows licenses anyway, I would pirate Windows. Why? I use Windows to run the occasional game or the occasional poorly written firmware updater. But, in the end, I have no interest in running it, and if push came to shove, I'd just do without it. Windows simply isn't worth paying for.
When the GPLv3 comes out, we'll see whether software developers want to use it for their projects because they are free to choose. Personally, I plan on choosing it for my projects.
That's unlike Microsoft software, where many users use it because they don't have a choice. Personally, I have half a dozen Microsoft Windows licenses even though I don't actually use Windows and don't want those licenses.
only that the present model is incomplete and thus not capable of explaining the phenomena in question.
Every scientific theory is incomplete, and no scientific theory is capable of explaining every phenomenon. That's the nature of scientific theories. Incompleteness doesn't prevent scientific theories from making valid predictions.
Many of the cellular processes are occuring in quantum level and our brains are composed of those very cells.
That's true of every physical system. For example, a Pentium is composed of transistors that operate based on quantum mechanical effects, but the Pentium as a whole behaves like a classical system. What is relevant is what I stated: none of the areas in which physics is incomplete have ever been shown experimentally to have any effect on consciousness.
Or could you comprehensively explain the nature of information
If the goal is to have a cheap robust laptop for education, does it matter who makes it?
Intel makes a lot of money off their laptop chips and the demand for ever faster CPUs. The OLPC is promising to deliver a really neat machine with a lot of new technologies. If OLPC succeeds, Intel faces a major problem because the OLPC will be attractive not just to kinds in third world countries, but to everyday users in developed nations as well.
Therefore, chances are that Intel's "alternative" is actually an attempt to kill any effort like OLPC. While Classmate looks similar to OLPC, its specs and functionality are far worse than OLPC and it's only going to get worse from here on.
Slashdot Mirror
No, parallel programming isn't "too hard", it's just that programmers never learn how to do it because they spend all their time on mostly useless crap: enormous and bloated APIs, enormous IDEs, gimmicky tools, and fancy development methodologies and management speak. Most of them, however, don't understand even the fundamentals of non-procedural programming, parallel programming, elementary algorithms, or even how a CPU works.
These same programmers often think that ideas like "garbage collection", "extreme programming", "visual GUI design", "object relational mappings", "unit testing", "backwards stepping debuggers", and "refactoring IDEs" (to name just a few) are innovations of the last few years, when in reality, many of them have been around for a quarter of a century or more. And, to add insult to injury, those programmers are often the ones that are the most vocal opponents of the kinds of technologies that make parallel programming easier: declarative programming and functional programming (not that they could actually define those terms, they just reject any language that offers such features).
If you learn the basics of programming, then parallel programming isn't "too hard". But if all you have ever known is how to throw together some application in Eclipse or Visual Studio, then it's not surprising that you find it too hard.
It's not the market that makes the difference, it's the company. In the past, Microsoft has been able to kill competitors simply by announcing a product, and if that wasn't enough, they'd follow it with billions in marketing and loss leaders. Microsoft wanted to make Zune a big success and they have failed; it's just another clunky Microsoft product that may or may not sell enough to break even eventually.
OTOH, when other companies achieve 10% market share against a convicted but unrepentant monopolist with billions of dollars in his war chest and an army of lawyers, yes, that is big news.
I'm not sure I want to use a piece of software with a fat bunny as its mascot.
The toxic chemical in soda is well known, and it kills millions: it's called sugar.
the nitpicking over GM has more to do with the method by which genes are introduced
No. Even if GM works exactly as intended and has no direct health risks, it still is a dangerous technology to use for food because of its potential effects on the environment and the economy.
only now are we using genes from OTHER species
Yes, and that's the crucial difference: there is almost no experience with the safety of that. It may seem plausible to you that taking a beta carotene or vitamin C gene and moving it from one species to another is safe, but showing that is hard.
the gene that produces vitamin C in mammals is broken in primates
No, it's not "broken", it's simply not needed. Primates usually get enough vitamin C through their regular diet. If they don't, something is wrong with their diet. You can add the vitamin C to some food crop, but that doesn't fix the diet.
that if corrected could prevent scurvy in malnourished nations
It may prevent scurvy, but it won't fix the diet. The problem with the diet is that it's imbalanced, not just that it lacks vitamin C.
but to blindly fear it because of things like this is irresponsible
Well, the majority of people don't know anything about genetic engineering, and for them, "GMO = bad" is a simple message that gets the point across.
Exactly my point. He ends up creating a scenario where his word, his ideology, is law.
Stallman isn't creating a "scenario", he is creating software. Furthermore, he doesn't pick the licenses for software he doesn't write, the authors of that software do.
If you don't like it, your only alternative ultimately ends up becoming hardly using a computer at all.
Yes, if you're opposed to people giving you software with source code for free, you indeed have to stop using a computer at all. It is indeed terrible. How dare people give you something for free, and how dare other people choose it.
In any case, Stallman faced exactly that situation with commercial software vendors, which is why he went out and did something about it.
I thought the way ZDNet described it once was actually very insightful:- Free as in Do As I Say.
Yes, the GPL imposes restrictions on you, but they are less restrictive than the licenses on commercial counterparts. They are more restrictive than some open source licenses, but nearly three decades experience with open source licenses have shown that those restrictions are important in order to protect the software from legal attacks. For example, the free software revolution could have happened a decade earlier if BSD hadn't been tied up in court. Without the GPL, there would be no free software or open source software today.
This is why Stallman is a problem, and this is why I feel as opposed to him as I do.
Your problem isn't with Stallman, it's with the fact that the world chooses free software. If you don't like the GPL, make arguments against the GPL. All you are doing, however, is badmouthing a person. Not only is that mean spirited, you also miss the fundamental issue: despite his enormous contributions, Stallman is only a catalyst. If Stallman went away tomorrow, GPLv3 would still happen and still become widespread: people want it.
If that isn't raw authoritarianism, I'm not sure what is.
I'm sorry you're confused on this point, but we call it a "market economy" and a "democracy". And, yes, sometimes your fellow citizens just make choices that affect you in ways you don't like. It happens all the time. Or, as Churchill put it: "Democracy is the worst form of government--until you've tried the others."
Drinks manufacturers point out that sodium benzoate has been approved for use by regulators
Regulatory approval should not permit manufacturers to escape their responsibility: "it was approved" should never be a way of escaping liability over dangerous substances. Regulatory approval can, at best, be an extra safety check, not something manufacturers can rely on.
Your response is as predictable as it is wrong: evolution is not "a single set of related concepts that have no applicable use anyway, outside of nomenclature", it's at the heart of modern biology and medicine, and, increasingly, computer science.
Do us a favour; come up with something new.
Come on, use your head. The accusation of "shill" doesn't mean that I seriously believe you are one, it is simply shorthand for expressing that you are behaving as if you were one: it's people like you who hurt open source, not people like Stallman.
Expressing critical or dissenting opinions about Richard Stallman
You're not "expressing critical or dissenting opinions", you're throwing mud at someone who has done more for open source than you will in your entire lifetime.
I'm not merely a shill. From your perspective, I'm something considerably worse.
Actually, individually, I think you are completely insignificant. But you illustrate the kind of uninformed whiners that do, collectively, hurt open source somewhat. Mind you, I don't think you have much of an impact even as a group, but your kind of drivel occasionally does get picked up by the media.
His formal organisation and the informal collective of his followers together are a scourge, and I honestly cannot adequately verbalise the extent of the loathing which I feel towards them.
Well, then I suggest you stop using their software. You can start by canceling your Slashdot and Blogspot accounts and stop using Google and Firefox, because all of them have been built with FSF software and code that Stallman wrote. You see, Stallman has put his time and his money where his mouth is.
If you want to help open source, write software under whatever open source license you want and stop whining and badmouthing others who do.
Stallman isn't the problem, you are.
What I find odd is that the same people that promote this unscientific kind of bullshit still want the benefits of science and technology.
An accident is a traumatic event, and it can be argued that a compassionate society is not going to make it's chief form of entertainment watching such tragedies.
Quite to the contrary: a compassionate society wouldn't try to hide suffering and death under a blanket of silence. There is nothing shameful about either dying or other people taking an interest in it; in a compassionate society, that is what people do. What is shameful and incompassionate is that people like you are trying to insulate themselves from these natural events.
If one believes that the highest form of art is sneaking up to a window and filming a neighbor in a compromising position, then there is no problem with this video.
Now you have slipped from bad arguments to pure demagoguery and name calling: what, please tell, does voyeurism have to do with documenting a news event on a public highway?
We were such in a hurry to film every innocuous act, that we did not set up a proper legal framework to control the flow of the footage, so we use the DCMA, a blunt and largely ineffective tool, to close the barn door after all the horses have escaped.
We have a legal framework, and it applies here: in some places, you have an expectation of privacy, in others, you don't. If you drive on a public highway, you have no expectation of privacy. And, in fact, the reason this video appeared in the first place is because the NJTA didn't recognize privacy rights in the first place: they released the video to the press, after all. All they are complaining about is that it has received wider distribution than they originally intended.
Unless, of course, what he does is to split the OSS community.
There's nothing to split. FOSS is just a marketplace of different products and licenses, just like any commercial marketplace. RMS has no control over what licenses people use. If FOSS developers don't like the GPLv3, they won't be adopting it. I predict, however, that the GPLv3 will be a big success because many FOSS developers will want its requirements applied to their code.
RMS won't, so it would be far better for us all if we could keep him just to THIS side of insanely divisive, and this deal isn't going to help that any.
What would be better for FOSS is to recognize people like you for what they are: either, you're a Microsoft shill who's trying to use this as an excuse to throw mud at proven open source contributors, or you're just some anti-GPL zealot who is disappointed that the GPL is so widely used.
Either way, if you want to help open source, as you claim you do, there's a simple thing you can do: stop groundlessly insulting people who have done far more for open source than you ever will.
The real damage is that the very thought this agreement will cause Stallman to pretty much COMPLETELY lose it, in the flying-blind-in-the-land-of-batshit kind of way. I can't imagine his behavior will get more reasonable anyway,
Actually, this agreement shows that Stallman's behavior is completely reasonable. It's you who is "batshit" because you still just don't get the kinds of dirty tricks companies like Microsoft are trying.
with his credibility already stretched and the tensions already rife within the community, it doesn't bode well. Open infighting amongst the FOSS community is just what we need right now......
There is no "infighting", and fairly little disagreement in the FOSS communities. Mostly, it's just laissez faire. Compare that to the kind of cut-throat competition and dirty tricks going on in the commercial world, where companies not only screw each other but also screw the customer.
Even if you look at individuals, Stallman and Linux may be abrasive, but they are far more sensible, rational, and smart individuals than Ballmer or other commercial industry leaders.
The damage is done
The only "damage" from this is to Microsoft's reputation: Ballmer has shown that he is impotent: he can't stop open source. He can't name any patents, and he can't even get Novell to license their patents without paying Novell hundreds of millions of dollars. And their attempts at getting agreements through FUD are being undermined by license changes within a few months.
The last few months have shown only one thing: Microsoft's technology is worse than open source, their patents are worthless, and their dirty tricks aren't working either. Yes, there's big damage, and it's to Microsoft's reputation.
This was a public, newsworthy event, captured by a public camera. Not only is there nothing wrong with viewing and posting it, there is something decidedly wrong with trying to hide it. In fact, that's the kind of behavior you'd expect if they are concerned about getting sued (say, over dangerous tool booth design or signage).
Whether or not they are concerned about liability in this particular case, setting a precedent that governments can take down public footage of public, newsworthy events through the DMCA would be bad. This kind of video needs to be open to public scrutiny.
Yeah, Knuth achieved fame in the 70's and is a tenured professor at Stanford. He can afford to turn off E-mail and prefer writing books. He doesn't even have to give a damn about what he publishes anymore.
The rest of us don't have much of a choice but to read E-mail because our livelihood depends on it.
it's not beyond imagining that some people might be asking for these things in Apple stores. That would be direct, and pretty damning evidence of confusion.
Come on: "hi, where are the sex toys?" I don't think so.
On the other hand, there are plenty of Mac accessories that really are highly confusable with Apple products and that people do ask for in Apple stores. Since Apple hasn't gone after those, they have little basis to go after iGasm.
If whenever you see commercials of a certain "style" and you think "Apple/iPod", then the style is likely trademark material.
Well, or maybe not. After all, the trademark of the product itself isn't being infringed, only the ads are similar, and the ads aren't the product.
Furthermore, the question is not whether the item or ads are "similar", the question is whether buyers are likely to confuse the origin of the products. That's a hard argument for Apple to make. First, the product is in a completely different product category, a category that Apple has never sold anything in. Second, there are many products that are far more confusable with Apple products than this.
I congratulate iGasm for coming up with an Apple-style legal publicity stunt.
Last time I checked, GB was still deemed to be a democracy.
So was Germany, right up to the point when it wasn't anymore. Germans freely voted away, first minority rights, then their own rights. And this has happened many times before: democracies self-destruct voluntarily long before the dictators come in.
cops can't get away with anything now: it's all on tape
If you actually bothered to look around the world how these kinds of cameras are being used, you'd see that this is not at all the case. Many jurisdictions where cops use cameras allow cops to control them. Even if they aren't allowed to control them, they still effectively can, through turning them off, tampering, blocking the view, etc. After video capture, the video can also be selected and edited to let defendants appear in the worst possible light. And many jurisdictions where the police tape you, you are explicitly not permitted to tape the police.
Cameras could, in principle, ensure that police behave properly, but whether they actually are depends very much on where you are. The article doesn't give us enough information to tell.
Furthermore, even if cameras are used like that, does Britain have such a serious police brutality problem that it is necessary to introduce cameras? And are cameras the best way of preventing it?
Do some critical thinking yourself!
Parthenogenesis has been observed in many vertebrates and some mammals, and it may rarely occur naturally in humans (even without divine intervention). So, this isn't all that unusual.
I spend several hundred dollars on software every year. In addition, I buy various Linux distros. Yet, if I didn't have Windows licenses anyway, I would pirate Windows. Why? I use Windows to run the occasional game or the occasional poorly written firmware updater. But, in the end, I have no interest in running it, and if push came to shove, I'd just do without it. Windows simply isn't worth paying for.
When the GPLv3 comes out, we'll see whether software developers want to use it for their projects because they are free to choose. Personally, I plan on choosing it for my projects.
That's unlike Microsoft software, where many users use it because they don't have a choice. Personally, I have half a dozen Microsoft Windows licenses even though I don't actually use Windows and don't want those licenses.
only that the present model is incomplete and thus not capable of explaining the phenomena in question.
Every scientific theory is incomplete, and no scientific theory is capable of explaining every phenomenon. That's the nature of scientific theories. Incompleteness doesn't prevent scientific theories from making valid predictions.
Many of the cellular processes are occuring in quantum level and our brains are composed of those very cells.
That's true of every physical system. For example, a Pentium is composed of transistors that operate based on quantum mechanical effects, but the Pentium as a whole behaves like a classical system. What is relevant is what I stated: none of the areas in which physics is incomplete have ever been shown experimentally to have any effect on consciousness.
Or could you comprehensively explain the nature of information
Shannon did.
If the goal is to have a cheap robust laptop for education, does it matter who makes it?
Intel makes a lot of money off their laptop chips and the demand for ever faster CPUs. The OLPC is promising to deliver a really neat machine with a lot of new technologies. If OLPC succeeds, Intel faces a major problem because the OLPC will be attractive not just to kinds in third world countries, but to everyday users in developed nations as well.
Therefore, chances are that Intel's "alternative" is actually an attempt to kill any effort like OLPC. While Classmate looks similar to OLPC, its specs and functionality are far worse than OLPC and it's only going to get worse from here on.