There is no technical reason why you couldn't have a self driving bus, but the industry they are in is rather conservative when it comes to procurement. Very few early adoptors. Car buyers are less conservative, and there are more early adoptors. The cost of a "driver" is more - with a bus, the cost of the driver is effectively split between everyone on the bus, so there isn't as large a saving to be made. There is also a huge class of users who will buy a self driving car to free themselves of driving duties (parents). Hence, it makes sense to target cars first. Once the tech is working and proved, I would expect haulage firms will be quick to adopt, since wages there are a greater percentage of the shipping cost, and liability cost is higher for drivers who spend many hours on the road every day. From there it will be a short step to self driving buses, but there are other issues - we could've had self driving trains years ago, but social resistance prevented it. We might see the same attitudes holding back self driving buses.
No, since you can't do Java on iOS, it is easier to do a cross-platform app in C with SDL for the graphics and audio stuff. There are some other options: C# via monotouch/monoforandroid, Javascript via phonegap or titanium.
if someone from your doctor's office wants to discuss your medical records with the local TV reporter who the fuck are we to try to stop that communication
Sure, you can try, but you won't succeed. If your doctor, or someone employed by your doctor, really wants to leak your medical records then there is very little that you can do about it. No organisation in a free society has ever eliminated leakers and whistleblowers.
By your wonderful logic, a democratic society should have no expectation of privacy at all.
The only reason we have an expectation of privacy with respect to medical records is because people don't habitually communicate them to others. This is the opposite situation to the content industry; it is estimated that around 75% of people pirate music and video. If 75% of the doctors in a democratic society were leaking patient's medical records, then, regardless of the moral aspect, we wouldn't have an expectation of privacy. The reason the vast majority of medical records are safe isn't due to technical countermeasures, or the diligence of our police and legal system - it is because, apart from maybe a few celebrities, there is no widespread demand for medical records.
Perhaps you have not fully considered what your words actually mean. Think: what exactly is distribution of a work, in terms of "rights"? It is not an act in itself, it is a subset of a much larger behavior; it is an act of communication. And the right to communicate in privacy with another human being is widely recognised: Communication is recognised as an essential human need and, therefore, as a basic human right.
Here is the important thing to understand: when it comes to communicating through a modern, digital system, with privacy (encryption) there is no difference to an outside observer between two adults swapping love letters, and two adults swapping copyrighted works of art. It is just data. And hence, although you may not literally have the right to distribute someone elses work, you do have the right to communicate in privacy with another human being, and in practice you can use that medium of communication for whatever you want - even if you want to distribute copyrighted works of art. And that is the reason why file sharing is ultimately unstoppable in a democratic society. If people want to send each other songs and movies, and they have the right to communicate in private, then there is no way to stop them from doing it.
they can easily make it harder and inconvenient enough for general population.
No, they can't. There is a fundamental contradiction that people like you don't understand: you can't have a population that has free, open access to digital communications, and at the same time restrict what data they are communicating to each other. Every single time the various agencies get together and close down one site, there are a dozen more that spring up to take its place. We have seen this pattern time and time again, every single warez group that has ever been closed down has been trumpeted as a "huge success against piracy", and yet here we are, in 2012, and piracy is everywhere. Remember DrinkOrDie?Operation Buccaneer - one of the largest, most expensive global anti-piracy enforcement actions in history, and yet here we are a decade later and piracy is as big as it ever was. And so it will be with MegaUpload.
but when the circle is small enough companies don't care.
You seem to have forgotten that PirateBay is still running... and if that ever goes down, there will be another ten to take its place. This battle is not winnable while it is still legal to own PCs and develop software. There will always be another Usenet, another BitTorrent, another Kazaa, and another PirateBay.
Define "exercising a lot". There are some forms of exercise that don't burn so many calories, even when you do them intensely, or do them for a long time. If you want a clue as to how effective a particular form of exercise is in changing body shape given some period of daily exercise, then look at the people who do it professionally. A typical pro swimmer tends to have quite a more bulky muscular physique, and will spend maybe 3-4 hours a day in the pool. A typical pro long distance runner will have a slim, toned physique, and run something like 13 miles a day in 65-75 minutes. Cyclists have similar physique to the runners, but will do 5-6 hours a day cycling. Martial artists tend to vary in shape, judo for example being bulkier than karate, but they will also spend several hours a day training in the dojo and doing cardio and weights sessions. My non-scientific conclusion: the slimmest and most toned physique achievable given the minimal hours per day is from some exercise like running. There aren't many forms of exercise where only 70 minutes a day can put you into the elite (or "pro-am") category.
My personal experience pretty much corresponds with the above analysis. I have done many forms of exercise: cycling, swimming, martial arts, running etc. Of these, running was easily the best way to lose weight - I saw 13%-15% mass reduction in 8 months from running 60-90 minutes a day. Like everything, it feels slow and an effort at first, but your body adapts and by the time you are up to 10 miles a day you are starting to feel very fit. Of the other options, cycling is good but for large parts I found I was coasting, which isn't using that many extra calories, swimming (front crawl) is great for upper body exercise, but I found that the limiting factor was not my energy expended but my arms getting tired, martial arts was great fun but it's very stop/start, several minutes of intense activity seperated by much longer periods of observation and learning. My real world conclusion is that running is one of the optimal exercises when considering the calories likely to be expended per hour by the average person. It is also easily the most accessible: you just need a pair of trainers, and you can do it 24 hours a day. All other forms were less accessible, requiring more equipment, or being constrained to certain times that training facilities were open.
Did you ever consider that the reason national science bodies don't fund anti-global warming research is the same reason that they don't fund the Flat Earth Society? When every National Institute of Science in the industrialised world agrees that global warming is happening, and that human activity is the main driver, with 98% of climate scientists in agreement, why the heck would a science institute waste its limited funding on Flat Earth research?
Overview of the Legal Attaché Program The FBI’s legal attaché program was developed to pursue international aspects of the FBI’s investigative mandates through established liaison with principal law enforcement and security services in foreign countries and to provide a prompt and continuous exchange of information with these partners. The FBI currently has 60 fully operational legat offices and 15 sub-offices, with more than 250 agents and support personnel stationed around the world. The growth of transnational crime caused by the explosion in computer and telecommunications technology, the liberalization of immigration policies, and the increased ease of international travel has made it necessary for the U.S. to cooperate with countries around the world concerning security issues. The FBI’s role in international investigations has expanded due to the authority granted by the Congressional application of extraterritorial jurisdiction.
Also note:
FAQ What authority do FBI special agents have to make arrests in the United States, its territories, or on foreign soil?
In the U.S. and its territories, FBI special agents may make arrests for any federal offense committed in their presence or when they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed, or is committing, a felony violation of U.S. laws. On foreign soil, FBI special agents generally do not have authority to make arrests except in certain cases where, with the consent of the host country, Congress has granted the FBI extraterritorial jurisdiction.
Media reports that there were shotguns in the house, two were sawn-off shotguns, and Kim locked himself in his safe room with one of the sawn-off shotguns. Kim didn't have a gun license, so owning these guns was illegal in NZ. Guns were to protect my family, says Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom
Want a real shock? Grab a 5-year-old version of Knoppix and boot it - it's easily just as usable. 5 years of "progress"
Why would that be a shock? The basic design for the desktop was done by the 90s: apps in windows that get dragged around and manipulated by bars attached to each window. Some kind of status bar at the top or bottom of the screen. Everything since then has just been eye candy. The truth is that the basic desktop design works and everybody is familiar with it. There is nothing that you can do with a modern desktop (Apple, Windows, or Linux) that you couldn't have done with a Windows 2000-era desktop.
What liquid agent is a terrorist going to use to blow up a plane? Napalm? Or just set the plane on fire?
This kind of comment always comes up in these discussions: suggesting that it isn't possible to construct a liquid bomb in a regular drinks bottle by mixing precursor liquids taken through the security checks.
At this point a lot of people refer me to an apparently widely read article at The Register, Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible? which suggests that the plot would not have worked: "But what do these experts know about chemistry? Less than they know about lobbying for Homeland Security pork, which is what most of them do for a living." Hmmm. What people missed is that The Register later backpedalled and decided that, Yes, there was a viable liquid bomb plot. The bomb plot that The Register originally ridiculed was a complete strawman - the bombers never intended to make TATP in the toilet of a commercial plane.
I know what you're saying, and my normal work environment is something similar (black terminator sessions maximised on each monitor, vertically split with 2 or 3 terminals in each, and a screen session in one so I can easily open extra terminals when needed).
Having said that, I do not think that this style of desktop.. let's call it the "developer's desktop".. is going to lead to growth in the number of Ubuntu users if it were chosen as default. New users are mainly not hardcore developers, new users are attracted by the cool visual stuff, social network integration etc. And tablets are the main area for hardware growth right now. It makes business sense for Canonical to focus on these areas.
I really don't understand why developers, of all people, care about the default desktop. We are the ones who can supposedly change that default better than anyone else. Xubuntu is very simple to install. It has its own ISO installer, or you can apt-get xubuntu-desktop from any other Ubuntu-based system. It provides a win9x style desktop that is minimalist and fast. If you don't like Unity, then try one of the other numerous desktops. This is one of the strengths of Linux distributions - instead of being told by some corporation that you must use the desktop their designers came up with, you are free to try new desktops, and find the one that works best for you. The best desktop for kernel developers is not likely to be the same desktop that a teenage social network fan is using. The open source distributions are the only real place where both of these people can find a desktop to their liking.
Then they came up with this idea of getting rid of KDE altogether.
Please name the distribution that has "got rid of KDE altogether". I suspect what you meant is "Red Hat and Ubuntu decided to use Gnome as a default desktop", but you can easily install KDE on either.
They do it in Brussels too. The classical music is played on the Metro there in evenings, during the day they play English language pop (no French or Dutch to avoid antagonising people). I'm not aware of any crime statistics, but a local told me that when they introduced it she did notice a big effect on the groups of youths that used to hang around the stations. The article says something similar about this latest experiment, "Young people quit hanging out at one Portland station 'almost immediately' after classical music began playing, Scruggs said."
There is a big difference between a child predator and someone who trades or views child pornography. The larger question is whether it should be legal to publish materials if a person is not involved in the original crime. E.g. should a video or photo of a crime be illegal if it may lead to incitement to others to commit the same crime, as is the case for child porn? At the moment this is treated differently by various legal systems, some ban racist stuff, Nazi stuff, rape stuff, racist stuff, blasphemous stuff... most people accept that there must be limits to freedom of speech, the question is what and the precise reasoning why.
The 5GB number is just a guess from the article based on Google's existing Apps storage offers. Likewise, the idea that they will offer 20GB for $5/year is just a guess:
Google already offers additional storage space for Docs, Gmail, and Picasa at very competitive prices, starting at $5 per year for 20GB, or $20 per year for 80GB. In comparison, Dropbox is $9.99 per month for 50GB, SugarSync is $4.99 per month for 30GB, and Box.net is $9.99 per month for just 25GB. In short, Google is 10 times cheaper than the competition. There’s no confirmation that Google Drive will use the same pricing structure, but in all likelihood it will.
would Google analyze your documents to provide targeted advertisement
There is another big question - would they analyze your documents to prevent copyright infringement? I predict that, within a few years, Dropbox and the other big U.S. based services are going to be rejecting storage of files that match known pirated movies, video games etc. This is obviously one danger of using a de-duplicating cloud drive service. You could try using client-side encryption, but I have read that Dropbox either prohibit client-side encryption in their terms or drop customers that use it extensively, as it breaks their file de-duplicating model and they therefore have to provide many times more disk space and bandwidth for these customers.
the latter would provide no upside for Google
Sure it would. In the battle for mindshare, if a customer uses Google Drive, then they are inside the Google services sphere. If there is a service that Google doesn't offer, then some customers are going to go elsewhere, and the next time that customer wants to embrace some new service, they will be a bit less likely to choose Google.
It took me awhile to understand this, and on a techie note, to understand how damaged the former-BBSer women of the early to mid nineties at the tail end of the craze were.
BBSer: "A person who uses a BBS (bulletin board system)."
I thought that was what it meant. I still don't know what it means.
From the summary: "Four textbooks were relicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY 3.0) Unported license, the most open of the CC licenses, and in return the authors were awarded a prize of $20,000 for each book."
That is all that the text you quote is saying: this book is distributed as Creative Commons thanks to the prize money from the Textbook Challenge.
AMD/ATI isn't really any better. The open source drivers suck just like Nouveau.
Not my experience. I've been using ATI with open source drivers for years now and have had very few issues. I did have problems with Nouveau though and ended up swapping out the card out for an ATI one.
(the multiple monitor support is absolute shit compared to Windows or OSX).
I have a dualhead DVI setup with an AMD DMS-59 card and it works fine. What exactly do you think is missing in Linux? Last time I installed, Ubuntu auto-detected the dualhead setup, and it was a single mouse click to swap from mirror image to left/right screen. I know that using multiple cards for a multiple monitor setup doesn't work very well in Xorg - but I've also heard the same about Windows.
Not true. The Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser said "The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to 'best practice' in this area, given the difficulties of data collection and verification in the present circumstances in Iraq." And that is coming from a country that was part of the coalition. Iraqi deaths survey 'was robust'
Slashdot Mirror
There is no technical reason why you couldn't have a self driving bus, but the industry they are in is rather conservative when it comes to procurement. Very few early adoptors. Car buyers are less conservative, and there are more early adoptors. The cost of a "driver" is more - with a bus, the cost of the driver is effectively split between everyone on the bus, so there isn't as large a saving to be made. There is also a huge class of users who will buy a self driving car to free themselves of driving duties (parents). Hence, it makes sense to target cars first. Once the tech is working and proved, I would expect haulage firms will be quick to adopt, since wages there are a greater percentage of the shipping cost, and liability cost is higher for drivers who spend many hours on the road every day. From there it will be a short step to self driving buses, but there are other issues - we could've had self driving trains years ago, but social resistance prevented it. We might see the same attitudes holding back self driving buses.
No, since you can't do Java on iOS, it is easier to do a cross-platform app in C with SDL for the graphics and audio stuff. There are some other options: C# via monotouch/monoforandroid, Javascript via phonegap or titanium.
if someone from your doctor's office wants to discuss your medical records with the local TV reporter who the fuck are we to try to stop that communication
Sure, you can try, but you won't succeed. If your doctor, or someone employed by your doctor, really wants to leak your medical records then there is very little that you can do about it. No organisation in a free society has ever eliminated leakers and whistleblowers.
By your wonderful logic, a democratic society should have no expectation of privacy at all.
The only reason we have an expectation of privacy with respect to medical records is because people don't habitually communicate them to others. This is the opposite situation to the content industry; it is estimated that around 75% of people pirate music and video. If 75% of the doctors in a democratic society were leaking patient's medical records, then, regardless of the moral aspect, we wouldn't have an expectation of privacy. The reason the vast majority of medical records are safe isn't due to technical countermeasures, or the diligence of our police and legal system - it is because, apart from maybe a few celebrities, there is no widespread demand for medical records.
If you copy media you didn't purchase AND you make a profit off of it, you're a thief.
No, you're still just a copyright infringer. Nobody is being deprived of their property.
thief: "A person who steals another person's property, esp. by stealth and without using force or violence."
steal: "Take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it"
Perhaps you have not fully considered what your words actually mean. Think: what exactly is distribution of a work, in terms of "rights"? It is not an act in itself, it is a subset of a much larger behavior; it is an act of communication. And the right to communicate in privacy with another human being is widely recognised: Communication is recognised as an essential human need and, therefore, as a basic human right.
Here is the important thing to understand: when it comes to communicating through a modern, digital system, with privacy (encryption) there is no difference to an outside observer between two adults swapping love letters, and two adults swapping copyrighted works of art. It is just data. And hence, although you may not literally have the right to distribute someone elses work, you do have the right to communicate in privacy with another human being, and in practice you can use that medium of communication for whatever you want - even if you want to distribute copyrighted works of art. And that is the reason why file sharing is ultimately unstoppable in a democratic society. If people want to send each other songs and movies, and they have the right to communicate in private, then there is no way to stop them from doing it.
they can easily make it harder and inconvenient enough for general population.
No, they can't. There is a fundamental contradiction that people like you don't understand: you can't have a population that has free, open access to digital communications, and at the same time restrict what data they are communicating to each other. Every single time the various agencies get together and close down one site, there are a dozen more that spring up to take its place. We have seen this pattern time and time again, every single warez group that has ever been closed down has been trumpeted as a "huge success against piracy", and yet here we are, in 2012, and piracy is everywhere. Remember DrinkOrDie? Operation Buccaneer - one of the largest, most expensive global anti-piracy enforcement actions in history, and yet here we are a decade later and piracy is as big as it ever was. And so it will be with MegaUpload.
but when the circle is small enough companies don't care.
You seem to have forgotten that PirateBay is still running... and if that ever goes down, there will be another ten to take its place. This battle is not winnable while it is still legal to own PCs and develop software. There will always be another Usenet, another BitTorrent, another Kazaa, and another PirateBay.
Indeed. The NSA refuses to answer as to whether it is tracking cell phone locations. NSA Lawyer Questioned Over Cellphone Location Tracking of Americans Senators Ask Spy Chief: Are You Tracking Us Through Our iPhones?
So what are they going to do with the money they made from this profiteering "mistake"? Give it back?
I've made a point of exercising a lot lately
Define "exercising a lot". There are some forms of exercise that don't burn so many calories, even when you do them intensely, or do them for a long time. If you want a clue as to how effective a particular form of exercise is in changing body shape given some period of daily exercise, then look at the people who do it professionally. A typical pro swimmer tends to have quite a more bulky muscular physique, and will spend maybe 3-4 hours a day in the pool. A typical pro long distance runner will have a slim, toned physique, and run something like 13 miles a day in 65-75 minutes. Cyclists have similar physique to the runners, but will do 5-6 hours a day cycling. Martial artists tend to vary in shape, judo for example being bulkier than karate, but they will also spend several hours a day training in the dojo and doing cardio and weights sessions. My non-scientific conclusion: the slimmest and most toned physique achievable given the minimal hours per day is from some exercise like running. There aren't many forms of exercise where only 70 minutes a day can put you into the elite (or "pro-am") category.
My personal experience pretty much corresponds with the above analysis. I have done many forms of exercise: cycling, swimming, martial arts, running etc. Of these, running was easily the best way to lose weight - I saw 13%-15% mass reduction in 8 months from running 60-90 minutes a day. Like everything, it feels slow and an effort at first, but your body adapts and by the time you are up to 10 miles a day you are starting to feel very fit. Of the other options, cycling is good but for large parts I found I was coasting, which isn't using that many extra calories, swimming (front crawl) is great for upper body exercise, but I found that the limiting factor was not my energy expended but my arms getting tired, martial arts was great fun but it's very stop/start, several minutes of intense activity seperated by much longer periods of observation and learning. My real world conclusion is that running is one of the optimal exercises when considering the calories likely to be expended per hour by the average person. It is also easily the most accessible: you just need a pair of trainers, and you can do it 24 hours a day. All other forms were less accessible, requiring more equipment, or being constrained to certain times that training facilities were open.
Did you ever consider that the reason national science bodies don't fund anti-global warming research is the same reason that they don't fund the Flat Earth Society? When every National Institute of Science in the industrialised world agrees that global warming is happening, and that human activity is the main driver, with 98% of climate scientists in agreement, why the heck would a science institute waste its limited funding on Flat Earth research?
Overview of the Legal Attaché Program The FBI’s legal attaché program was developed to pursue international aspects of the FBI’s investigative mandates through established liaison with principal law enforcement and security services in foreign countries and to provide a prompt and continuous exchange of information with these partners. The FBI currently has 60 fully operational legat offices and 15 sub-offices, with more than 250 agents and support personnel stationed around the world. The growth of transnational crime caused by the explosion in computer and telecommunications technology, the liberalization of immigration policies, and the increased ease of international travel has made it necessary for the U.S. to cooperate with countries around the world concerning security issues. The FBI’s role in international investigations has expanded due to the authority granted by the Congressional application of extraterritorial jurisdiction.
Also note:
FAQ What authority do FBI special agents have to make arrests in the United States, its territories, or on foreign soil?
In the U.S. and its territories, FBI special agents may make arrests for any federal offense committed in their presence or when they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed, or is committing, a felony violation of U.S. laws. On foreign soil, FBI special agents generally do not have authority to make arrests except in certain cases where, with the consent of the host country, Congress has granted the FBI extraterritorial jurisdiction.
a few unarmed people
Media reports that there were shotguns in the house, two were sawn-off shotguns, and Kim locked himself in his safe room with one of the sawn-off shotguns. Kim didn't have a gun license, so owning these guns was illegal in NZ. Guns were to protect my family, says Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom
Want a real shock? Grab a 5-year-old version of Knoppix and boot it - it's easily just as usable. 5 years of "progress"
Why would that be a shock? The basic design for the desktop was done by the 90s: apps in windows that get dragged around and manipulated by bars attached to each window. Some kind of status bar at the top or bottom of the screen. Everything since then has just been eye candy. The truth is that the basic desktop design works and everybody is familiar with it. There is nothing that you can do with a modern desktop (Apple, Windows, or Linux) that you couldn't have done with a Windows 2000-era desktop.
What liquid agent is a terrorist going to use to blow up a plane? Napalm? Or just set the plane on fire?
This kind of comment always comes up in these discussions: suggesting that it isn't possible to construct a liquid bomb in a regular drinks bottle by mixing precursor liquids taken through the security checks.
Watch this video on BBC News of a 500ml drinks bottle bomb being detonated in an aircraft. It is possible. The man who built that bomb was Dr. Sidney Alford, an explosives and IED expert who does work for the Ministry of Defence. Here's an article about the liquid bomb. They state that they used 400ml of liquid which could be mixed from individual 100ml bottles. There was even a plot to use this exact method to blow up several aircraft simultaneously over the Atlantic. People were prosecuted and jailed for life for it.
At this point a lot of people refer me to an apparently widely read article at The Register, Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible? which suggests that the plot would not have worked: "But what do these experts know about chemistry? Less than they know about lobbying for Homeland Security pork, which is what most of them do for a living." Hmmm. What people missed is that The Register later backpedalled and decided that, Yes, there was a viable liquid bomb plot. The bomb plot that The Register originally ridiculed was a complete strawman - the bombers never intended to make TATP in the toilet of a commercial plane.
I know what you're saying, and my normal work environment is something similar (black terminator sessions maximised on each monitor, vertically split with 2 or 3 terminals in each, and a screen session in one so I can easily open extra terminals when needed).
Having said that, I do not think that this style of desktop.. let's call it the "developer's desktop" .. is going to lead to growth in the number of Ubuntu users if it were chosen as default. New users are mainly not hardcore developers, new users are attracted by the cool visual stuff, social network integration etc. And tablets are the main area for hardware growth right now. It makes business sense for Canonical to focus on these areas.
I really don't understand why developers, of all people, care about the default desktop. We are the ones who can supposedly change that default better than anyone else. Xubuntu is very simple to install. It has its own ISO installer, or you can apt-get xubuntu-desktop from any other Ubuntu-based system. It provides a win9x style desktop that is minimalist and fast. If you don't like Unity, then try one of the other numerous desktops. This is one of the strengths of Linux distributions - instead of being told by some corporation that you must use the desktop their designers came up with, you are free to try new desktops, and find the one that works best for you. The best desktop for kernel developers is not likely to be the same desktop that a teenage social network fan is using. The open source distributions are the only real place where both of these people can find a desktop to their liking.
Then they came up with this idea of getting rid of KDE altogether.
Please name the distribution that has "got rid of KDE altogether". I suspect what you meant is "Red Hat and Ubuntu decided to use Gnome as a default desktop", but you can easily install KDE on either.
They do it in Brussels too. The classical music is played on the Metro there in evenings, during the day they play English language pop (no French or Dutch to avoid antagonising people). I'm not aware of any crime statistics, but a local told me that when they introduced it she did notice a big effect on the groups of youths that used to hang around the stations. The article says something similar about this latest experiment, "Young people quit hanging out at one Portland station 'almost immediately' after classical music began playing, Scruggs said."
There is a big difference between a child predator and someone who trades or views child pornography. The larger question is whether it should be legal to publish materials if a person is not involved in the original crime. E.g. should a video or photo of a crime be illegal if it may lead to incitement to others to commit the same crime, as is the case for child porn? At the moment this is treated differently by various legal systems, some ban racist stuff, Nazi stuff, rape stuff, racist stuff, blasphemous stuff... most people accept that there must be limits to freedom of speech, the question is what and the precise reasoning why.
Google already offers additional storage space for Docs, Gmail, and Picasa at very competitive prices, starting at $5 per year for 20GB, or $20 per year for 80GB. In comparison, Dropbox is $9.99 per month for 50GB, SugarSync is $4.99 per month for 30GB, and Box.net is $9.99 per month for just 25GB. In short, Google is 10 times cheaper than the competition. There’s no confirmation that Google Drive will use the same pricing structure, but in all likelihood it will.
would Google analyze your documents to provide targeted advertisement
There is another big question - would they analyze your documents to prevent copyright infringement? I predict that, within a few years, Dropbox and the other big U.S. based services are going to be rejecting storage of files that match known pirated movies, video games etc. This is obviously one danger of using a de-duplicating cloud drive service. You could try using client-side encryption, but I have read that Dropbox either prohibit client-side encryption in their terms or drop customers that use it extensively, as it breaks their file de-duplicating model and they therefore have to provide many times more disk space and bandwidth for these customers.
the latter would provide no upside for Google
Sure it would. In the battle for mindshare, if a customer uses Google Drive, then they are inside the Google services sphere. If there is a service that Google doesn't offer, then some customers are going to go elsewhere, and the next time that customer wants to embrace some new service, they will be a bit less likely to choose Google.
It took me awhile to understand this, and on a techie note, to understand how damaged the former-BBSer women of the early to mid nineties at the tail end of the craze were.
BBSer: "A person who uses a BBS (bulletin board system)."
I thought that was what it meant. I still don't know what it means.
From the summary: "Four textbooks were relicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY 3.0) Unported license, the most open of the CC licenses, and in return the authors were awarded a prize of $20,000 for each book."
That is all that the text you quote is saying: this book is distributed as Creative Commons thanks to the prize money from the Textbook Challenge.
AMD/ATI isn't really any better. The open source drivers suck just like Nouveau.
Not my experience. I've been using ATI with open source drivers for years now and have had very few issues. I did have problems with Nouveau though and ended up swapping out the card out for an ATI one.
(the multiple monitor support is absolute shit compared to Windows or OSX).
I have a dualhead DVI setup with an AMD DMS-59 card and it works fine. What exactly do you think is missing in Linux? Last time I installed, Ubuntu auto-detected the dualhead setup, and it was a single mouse click to swap from mirror image to left/right screen. I know that using multiple cards for a multiple monitor setup doesn't work very well in Xorg - but I've also heard the same about Windows.
The US and her allies went to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties
... and sometimes they refused to let civilians leave and then flattened the city with 500lb bombs and heavy artillery.
It is odd that your military experience of Iraq is so different to that of these guys:
American soldier "I killed innocent people"
Amazing speech by war veteran
Also, that 100,000 number is bullshit.
Not true. The Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser said "The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to 'best practice' in this area, given the difficulties of data collection and verification in the present circumstances in Iraq." And that is coming from a country that was part of the coalition. Iraqi deaths survey 'was robust'