Not really. Some words have specific defined definitions. Race is not clearly defined. If it were, then people wouldn't be arguing about whether Barack Obama is black or not. And if you think that's crazy, wait until you see the Wikipedia discussions...
My old university dropped C and replaced it with Java for all CS courses apart from Operating Systems. I asked one of the professors why - he said many students complained that dealing with pointers was too hard, and that the rise of Java and Java programming jobs meant C was obsolete and pointless, that the issue of programming languages came up on prospective student visit days, and that in order to be "commercially attractive" to these potential students they had to switch. We even used to do assembly language programming in the first year - now, the replacement course teaches students how to use Eclipse for Java programming.
Several years later I was back tutoring, and I was very disappointed to find out that I had to explain pointers and pointer arithmetic to people who were almost at the end of their Computer Science degree, and who didn't understand why their code was crashing with "null references" when "Java was supposed to get rid of all that memory stuff!".
Microkernels have to context switch between their different components - that's how they get memory protection between the components, and it's also one of the reasons why they tend to be slower.
Conservatives (Read: Classical Liberals), OTOH tend to value the free exchange of ideas. It falls back to their love of the Free Market. It works for finance, it can work for ideas. Conservatives hold to the notion that "while I disagree vehemently with your ideas, I will fight to the death for your right to express them."
Yes, Conservatives love all those Osama bin Laden videos coming out every September, and would definitely fight for the right of Islamists to publicise their point of view. In fact, I've never seen any Conservatives advocate closing down Islamist web sites, and they all support the work of Al Jazeera in putting forward an alternative world view point - I remember the moral outrage from the Republican web sites when the U.S. bombed the Al Jazeera offices, oh how they raged! There certainly weren't any calls of "serves them right" or "we should bomb them all", oh no.
On the other hand, some ideas can be dangerous things. All Hitler did was make long speeches, suggesting that it was a good idea to build up the military and throw out the Jews, and look how that turned out. The free market of ideas doesn't always turn out as you would hope.
I would like to see a stabilized and standardized device interface API for standard devices, something exposing a limited subset of the kernel that would simplify simple devices like block, serial, and network types of devices.
FUSD. Seriously, closed source drivers running in kernel space are a bad idea. If companies want to release closed source drivers, and apparently they do since this whining about the lack of a fixed-forever ABI comes up every now and again, then those drivers should run in their own process space and not as part of the kernel.
(4)Native File Versioning Bzzt. Its called automatic backup people.
If you care about recovering previous versions of files, then you should be using a proper Revision Control System. What the article author really wants is RCS integrated and used as default for his desktop file browser in $HOME.
(6)Graphical User Interface He sort of has a point about this and it has often been a problem.
The "committee" that he advocates sounds very similar to freedesktop.
(8)Commercially Hosted Backup And Restore Bzzt Wrong. This is not "Linux" being broken, it is 3rd party vendors being stupid.
There are plenty of providers which give some remote storage space which you can ssh or rsync to for backup. What he wants is something like the Bacula Systems reseller deal with Mandriva expanded to all distributions.
how is it that saying mean things to someone is worse when done on the internet than when it is done face-to-face?
Because actions carried out across the internet are physically and socially disconnected from the victim. In the class room there are limits to what one can say, because the speaker fears the consequences of provoking a situation that could turn to violence, and because even in this scenario there is a certain amount of peer pressure to not go too far, and because the victim is likely to have some amount of support from friendly peers or adults. Once bullying shifts on to the internet, the limitations fade away - essentially, the social disconnect makes it more likely that much more extreme things will be said. And because the victim is more more likely to be alone at the time of receiving the messages, whatever support they might have in the real world is less likely to be there.
if you choose to engage in an activity then it is your choice and you are responsible.
But your actions have an effect on society. Who do you think has to pay for those police officers, firemen, and medical emergency responders, who are needed to clean up after all the drug overdoses, car accidents, and fire starters?
We are all connected. You can argue that the heroin dealer has no responsibility for the dead addict, or the crimes that they commit to feed the habit, but I doubt the families of the addict, or the victims of their crimes, will agree with you. Saying that everybody has a choice, whilst technically true, ignores the fact that people are flawed, that even the best of us fail to live our lives as beings of perfect reason, and that certain sensory perceptions like drugs and unprotected sex, whilst obviously risky, suddenly become more attractive when rational reasoning is broken down by desire, alcohol, and other temptations. Sure, everybody has a choice, but there are ways to structure society to change the probability of people making certain choices. And if that were not true, then there would be no point in having laws in the first place.
McDonald's bears some responsibility for serving such fare, and likewise, Lori Drew bears some responsibility for her words. But does the level of responsibility rise to a criminal level? I don't think so.
We hold car manufactures responsible to a criminal level for ensuring that cars meet safety standards. We hold the operators of fairground rides responsible to a criminal standard for maintaining and ensuring that their rides are safe. We hold food manufacturers responsible to a criminal level for ensuring that there are no unsafe ingredients in their produce. We hold alcohol producers responsible to a criminal level to ensure that they produce beverages that are below around 40% alcohol. We hold cannabis sellers responsible to a criminal level for selling a soft drug. We hold cigarette manufactures responsible to a criminal level for marketing their product towards children. We hold a man who orders a hit on another man responsible to a criminal level, even though he was not the killer, and may have been far from the victim at the time of his death.
In each of these cases, it could be argued that the customer of said company is better placed to gauge the level of risk that they are willing to accept than the government. In each of these cases, regulation imposes financial costs for the manufacturer or seller, which it would be financially beneficial to avoid. And yet, in each of these cases, the general public supports regulation.
The case isn't black or white like some people think. What if the fat content of McDonalds fries was shown to increase the likelihood of a heart attack in a regular consumer to 20%? Or 80%? Where do you draw the line? In the case of the car manufacturer, why should they be forced to implement expensive collapsible steering columns, when it is drivers that cause accidents, not steering columns? And why should ordering a hit on someone be illegal, when you are not the person carrying out the murder? Surely when you sub-contract, it is the contractor who should take legal liability?
And in the case of a mentally ill person, where do you draw the line? If you mistreat someone every day of their lives, tell them they are worthless, that nobody will ever love them, and then hand them a gun and tell them that the world will be better off without them, then technically you didn't pull the trigger, right? But as a competent adult you should know the likely end result of your actions will be the death of an individual, and if you engage in a series of actions that is likely to end with that scenario then you are guilty of either murder or manslaughter. I have little sympathy for those who are sound of mind and who utilise their intelligence to abuse and mistreat those who suffer from mental illness, just as I have little sympathy for those who are physically strong and yet use that strength to prey on those who are weak.
In the UK the professional teaching qualifications are gained after a subject specific university degree course, so all new state school teachers should be appropriately qualified in both their subject and teaching. In private schools, qualifications are not necessary, though most schools will obviously select teachers with some qualifications.
Whether university professors require teaching qualifications is dependent on the university that employs them, and exactly what they do. Professors that only do research may not require any qualifications. Those that lecture and tutor may be required to have teaching qualifications, indeed, it has been a common complaint at the undergraduate level that some professors are notoriously bad lecturers who really shouldn't be doing what they do. The tide is certainly turning towards requiring evidence of teaching ability; I know some of the major UK universities are now requiring tutors of undergraduate level courses to have attended formal training courses.
Having quickly skimmed the paper, it seems there is an obvious error: when comparing salaries, the authors don't take into account the state teachers final salary pension scheme, which is very generous - the teacher pays about 5% of salary (6.4% with 20% tax relief), and government pays 13.5% contribution. This obviously makes a huge difference to real income over a lifetime, so it is entirely possible that state teachers still come out on top once pension benefits are taken into account.
One of the linked articles sort of answers that question: "The commission accepts that public schools may argue that their benefits include educating 508,000 pupils who would be taught in the tax-funded state system, but that alone is not considered sufficient."
Offering an education to a particular group is done for the benefit of that group, not the public at large. e.g. the main purose of a madrassa is to educate Muslims, not to benefit the whole of society, so should they be classified as charities? Of course, you can take the view that educating anyone ultimately benefits society as a whole, however, the Charities Commission have decided that this is not enough in itself to qualify as charitable work.
"Independent school teachers work with fewer pupils and enjoy longer holidays and, in the case of women, shorter weekly hours. The level of job satisfaction over hours and the work itself was higher in private schools in the early to mid 1990s, but there is evidence of some convergence in job satisfaction since then. Among women, pay is lower in the private sector, which we interpret as a compensating differential. For men, there is no significant inter-sectoral difference in pay. However, for both men and women there is evidence of a substantial pay premium for independent- school teachers trained in shortage subjects"
The Charities Act 2006 brought in new rules, stating that a "charity" has to be operated for the public good, rather than merely being a non-profit organisation. This isn't specific to private schools, but also affects religious organisations etc. To many, it seems absurd that someone could gain charitable status for an organisation that is set up to only benefit certain racial, religious or social groups, and it is true that charitable status was being used by some as a blatant tax dodge.
"Under the 2006 Charities Act, for the first time all charities - including charities which advance education or religion, or relieve poverty - must show they are established for the public benefit. The Act gives the Commission, as the independent regulator, responsibility for raising awareness about the public benefit requirement and carrying out public benefit checks on charities" (Charity Commission, 2007, p.1).
It is hard to see how a school that generates an income of tens of millions of pounds a year from the wealthiest families in society, like Eton, is run for the public good. Certainly, it is hard to see why it should be given the same tax breaks as a real charity that, say, provides care and support for children with cancer.
And the changes aren't opposed by everyone in the private school system - "Jonathan Shephard, general secretary of the Independent Schools Council, said he could find 'no quarrel with the principles set out'". (source)
What exactly is wrong with a charity having to show that it does some work to benefit the public good? Otherwise there would be no difference between a charity and a NFP organisation, and every small business owner would be registering as a "charity" for the tax breaks (NFP status doesn't mean you can't pay employees whatever you wish, it just means the parent organisation should break even at the end of the year).
#4 is wrong - private school teachers generally get paid less than those in state schools in the UK. See Private school teachers complain about pay. In particular "The motions follow the recent case of Barbara White, assistant housemistress at Malvern College, who was contracted to work for 121.5 hours a week for less than the minimum wage."
Also private schools are allowed to employ people with no teaching qualifications - this opens the field to essentially anyone with a degree (or even A-level in some cases), thus increasing competition for jobs and lowering salaries.
You may find the story of Curveball interesting. The German Federal Intelligence Service warned the CIA that the information it was receiving about WMDs was extremely suspect. But the reality was ignored if favour of the fantasy - like Tyler Drumheller said "Everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening"
So 17 UN resolutions referencing WMDs represents what to you, moron?
And what about the UN resolutions regarding Israel and the occupied territories? I'm not saying whether those resolutions are right or wrong, but merely pointing out that when the U.S. government talks about Iraq and tries to back up its argument with reference to the UN resolutions it likes, whilst seeking to discredit those it doesn't, it seems more than a little hypocritical.
AP stands for associated press, which is not American AFP stands for "agence france-presse" which is french....
So 1/3rd (in theory, in practice more) of all the news you see has been collected by French reporters, or at least reporters paid by french people.
Do you really believe that this is true? For a start, the world's largest broadcasting news gathering organisation is the BBC, which is British. Secondly, I was under the impression that U.S. news broadcasters mostly ignore international issues and focus on domestic issues instead. It is unlikely that more than one third of U.S. domestic news is gathered by French men. You may also be interested to learn that the Associated Press (AP) is an American news agency and Reuters Group Limited is a British based news service.
As a non-U.S. citizen, the idea that over 1/3rd of U.S. news content is written by the French is an amusing idea - kind of on the same intellectual level as ranting about Freedom Fries and Surrender Monkeys.
So true. Hit citeseer and you will find thousands of papers on robot walking, including many PhD theses. For some reason, the academic way seems to be to carry out almost identical research again, and again, and again, rather than actually trying to build the damn thing. Let's be clear, Wu's walking robot isn't going to set the world on fire, but just by building a real robot that can actually walk he's already got further than the robotics departments of many of the world's leading universities.
You are not testing the same thing. The UK advert was promoting fast 3G browsing speed on the O2 network. Your video is clearly not using O2's 3G network - Google maps takes a lot longer to load up tiles than the 1/2 second or so it does in your video. And you don't do the full claim - "finding directions" is not the same as starting Google maps, zooming in, and exiting. In fact, you don't appear to use the keyboard at all in your video, so apparently you're just loading pre-generated data, and not actually carrying out any of the tasks the adverts says are being carried out.
What you are advocating is fascism, not a democracy. Do you really think that the UK should have been torturing and killing civilians who supported Sinn Fein and the IRA? Do you realise that ultimately the UK could have nuked Northern Ireland? Do you think that there would be a political settlement that has brought peace to the region (and also put some convicted terrorists into positions of political power) if the British government had engaged in a process of torture-based intelligence gathering and open-ended war, U.S. style, rather than encouraging Sinn Fein and the IRA to engage politically and talk at the negotiating table?
The fact is that if the government regards people who have some amount of broad-based support (e.g. the IRA, supported by maybe 30% of the population) as a classical enemy, and engages them in war, then the people will come to see the government as the enemy. Imagine how much more true this is when your government is propped up by a disliked occupying foreign invasion force.
Killing civilians doesn't work, it just makes people angry, and prolongs the war. What we need are intelligent solutions, to turn the will of the populace against those who would utilise violence for political ends.
Democracy is the theory that the common idiots know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
It isn't quite that simple on a ThinkPad - the BIOS password is tied in to the TPM chip. And I really doubt your average thief is going to be building custom hardware and soldering it to the laptop mainboard...
Where does it say the trigger is in the OS? It would make less sense to do it that way, since you'd have to write a new driver for each OS. Since TFA says "Phoenix Technologies, developed this security feature and embedded the technology within the notebookâ(TM)s BIOS" I would assume that means it is OS independent.
Why do you think the BIOS would hog the wireless 100% of the time? The architecture would obviously be interrupt driven - the BIOS doesn't hog any other piece of hardware whilst waiting for an event.
It looks like the disable is handled in the BIOS, so either the GPS hardware is capable of receiving SMS texts while the laptop is hibernating, or the text is received when the BIOS boots up. Either way, you just have to send one text - your cell network provider will store and forward it to the receiver, it's just a regular text.
The shutdown is supposed to be utilised with hard disk encryption - the whole point is that your data is better protected. The disabling is carried out by the BIOS; presumably it checks the disable bit before booting the OS and allows the legal user to enter a recovery password.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Some words have specific defined definitions. Race is not clearly defined. If it were, then people wouldn't be arguing about whether Barack Obama is black or not. And if you think that's crazy, wait until you see the Wikipedia discussions...
My old university dropped C and replaced it with Java for all CS courses apart from Operating Systems. I asked one of the professors why - he said many students complained that dealing with pointers was too hard, and that the rise of Java and Java programming jobs meant C was obsolete and pointless, that the issue of programming languages came up on prospective student visit days, and that in order to be "commercially attractive" to these potential students they had to switch. We even used to do assembly language programming in the first year - now, the replacement course teaches students how to use Eclipse for Java programming.
Several years later I was back tutoring, and I was very disappointed to find out that I had to explain pointers and pointer arithmetic to people who were almost at the end of their Computer Science degree, and who didn't understand why their code was crashing with "null references" when "Java was supposed to get rid of all that memory stuff!".
Microkernels have to context switch between their different components - that's how they get memory protection between the components, and it's also one of the reasons why they tend to be slower.
Yes, Conservatives love all those Osama bin Laden videos coming out every September, and would definitely fight for the right of Islamists to publicise their point of view. In fact, I've never seen any Conservatives advocate closing down Islamist web sites, and they all support the work of Al Jazeera in putting forward an alternative world view point - I remember the moral outrage from the Republican web sites when the U.S. bombed the Al Jazeera offices, oh how they raged! There certainly weren't any calls of "serves them right" or "we should bomb them all", oh no.
On the other hand, some ideas can be dangerous things. All Hitler did was make long speeches, suggesting that it was a good idea to build up the military and throw out the Jews, and look how that turned out. The free market of ideas doesn't always turn out as you would hope.
FUSD. Seriously, closed source drivers running in kernel space are a bad idea. If companies want to release closed source drivers, and apparently they do since this whining about the lack of a fixed-forever ABI comes up every now and again, then those drivers should run in their own process space and not as part of the kernel.
If you care about recovering previous versions of files, then you should be using a proper Revision Control System. What the article author really wants is RCS integrated and used as default for his desktop file browser in $HOME.
The "committee" that he advocates sounds very similar to freedesktop.
There are plenty of providers which give some remote storage space which you can ssh or rsync to for backup. What he wants is something like the Bacula Systems reseller deal with Mandriva expanded to all distributions.
Because actions carried out across the internet are physically and socially disconnected from the victim. In the class room there are limits to what one can say, because the speaker fears the consequences of provoking a situation that could turn to violence, and because even in this scenario there is a certain amount of peer pressure to not go too far, and because the victim is likely to have some amount of support from friendly peers or adults. Once bullying shifts on to the internet, the limitations fade away - essentially, the social disconnect makes it more likely that much more extreme things will be said. And because the victim is more more likely to be alone at the time of receiving the messages, whatever support they might have in the real world is less likely to be there.
But your actions have an effect on society. Who do you think has to pay for those police officers, firemen, and medical emergency responders, who are needed to clean up after all the drug overdoses, car accidents, and fire starters?
We are all connected. You can argue that the heroin dealer has no responsibility for the dead addict, or the crimes that they commit to feed the habit, but I doubt the families of the addict, or the victims of their crimes, will agree with you. Saying that everybody has a choice, whilst technically true, ignores the fact that people are flawed, that even the best of us fail to live our lives as beings of perfect reason, and that certain sensory perceptions like drugs and unprotected sex, whilst obviously risky, suddenly become more attractive when rational reasoning is broken down by desire, alcohol, and other temptations. Sure, everybody has a choice, but there are ways to structure society to change the probability of people making certain choices. And if that were not true, then there would be no point in having laws in the first place.
We hold car manufactures responsible to a criminal level for ensuring that cars meet safety standards.
We hold the operators of fairground rides responsible to a criminal standard for maintaining and ensuring that their rides are safe.
We hold food manufacturers responsible to a criminal level for ensuring that there are no unsafe ingredients in their produce.
We hold alcohol producers responsible to a criminal level to ensure that they produce beverages that are below around 40% alcohol.
We hold cannabis sellers responsible to a criminal level for selling a soft drug.
We hold cigarette manufactures responsible to a criminal level for marketing their product towards children.
We hold a man who orders a hit on another man responsible to a criminal level, even though he was not the killer, and may have been far from the victim at the time of his death.
In each of these cases, it could be argued that the customer of said company is better placed to gauge the level of risk that they are willing to accept than the government. In each of these cases, regulation imposes financial costs for the manufacturer or seller, which it would be financially beneficial to avoid. And yet, in each of these cases, the general public supports regulation.
The case isn't black or white like some people think. What if the fat content of McDonalds fries was shown to increase the likelihood of a heart attack in a regular consumer to 20%? Or 80%? Where do you draw the line? In the case of the car manufacturer, why should they be forced to implement expensive collapsible steering columns, when it is drivers that cause accidents, not steering columns? And why should ordering a hit on someone be illegal, when you are not the person carrying out the murder? Surely when you sub-contract, it is the contractor who should take legal liability?
And in the case of a mentally ill person, where do you draw the line? If you mistreat someone every day of their lives, tell them they are worthless, that nobody will ever love them, and then hand them a gun and tell them that the world will be better off without them, then technically you didn't pull the trigger, right? But as a competent adult you should know the likely end result of your actions will be the death of an individual, and if you engage in a series of actions that is likely to end with that scenario then you are guilty of either murder or manslaughter. I have little sympathy for those who are sound of mind and who utilise their intelligence to abuse and mistreat those who suffer from mental illness, just as I have little sympathy for those who are physically strong and yet use that strength to prey on those who are weak.
In the UK the professional teaching qualifications are gained after a subject specific university degree course, so all new state school teachers should be appropriately qualified in both their subject and teaching. In private schools, qualifications are not necessary, though most schools will obviously select teachers with some qualifications.
Whether university professors require teaching qualifications is dependent on the university that employs them, and exactly what they do. Professors that only do research may not require any qualifications. Those that lecture and tutor may be required to have teaching qualifications, indeed, it has been a common complaint at the undergraduate level that some professors are notoriously bad lecturers who really shouldn't be doing what they do. The tide is certainly turning towards requiring evidence of teaching ability; I know some of the major UK universities are now requiring tutors of undergraduate level courses to have attended formal training courses.
Having quickly skimmed the paper, it seems there is an obvious error: when comparing salaries, the authors don't take into account the state teachers final salary pension scheme, which is very generous - the teacher pays about 5% of salary (6.4% with 20% tax relief), and government pays 13.5% contribution. This obviously makes a huge difference to real income over a lifetime, so it is entirely possible that state teachers still come out on top once pension benefits are taken into account.
One of the linked articles sort of answers that question: "The commission accepts that public schools may argue that their benefits include educating 508,000 pupils who would be taught in the tax-funded state system, but that alone is not considered sufficient."
Offering an education to a particular group is done for the benefit of that group, not the public at large. e.g. the main purose of a madrassa is to educate Muslims, not to benefit the whole of society, so should they be classified as charities? Of course, you can take the view that educating anyone ultimately benefits society as a whole, however, the Charities Commission have decided that this is not enough in itself to qualify as charitable work.
There's an interesting research paper on this exact subject published by the London School of Economics in January 2008. Conclusion:
"Independent school teachers work with fewer pupils and enjoy longer holidays
and, in the case of women, shorter weekly hours. The level of job satisfaction over
hours and the work itself was higher in private schools in the early to mid 1990s, but
there is evidence of some convergence in job satisfaction since then. Among women,
pay is lower in the private sector, which we interpret as a compensating differential.
For men, there is no significant inter-sectoral difference in pay. However, for both
men and women there is evidence of a substantial pay premium for independent-
school teachers trained in shortage subjects"
The Charities Act 2006 brought in new rules, stating that a "charity" has to be operated for the public good, rather than merely being a non-profit organisation. This isn't specific to private schools, but also affects religious organisations etc. To many, it seems absurd that someone could gain charitable status for an organisation that is set up to only benefit certain racial, religious or social groups, and it is true that charitable status was being used by some as a blatant tax dodge.
"Under the 2006 Charities Act, for the first time all charities - including charities which advance education or religion, or relieve poverty - must show they are established for the public benefit. The Act gives the Commission, as the independent regulator, responsibility for raising awareness about the public benefit requirement and carrying out public benefit checks on charities" (Charity Commission, 2007, p.1).
It is hard to see how a school that generates an income of tens of millions of pounds a year from the wealthiest families in society, like Eton, is run for the public good. Certainly, it is hard to see why it should be given the same tax breaks as a real charity that, say, provides care and support for children with cancer.
And the changes aren't opposed by everyone in the private school system - "Jonathan Shephard, general secretary of the Independent Schools Council, said he could find 'no quarrel with the principles set out'". (source)
What exactly is wrong with a charity having to show that it does some work to benefit the public good? Otherwise there would be no difference between a charity and a NFP organisation, and every small business owner would be registering as a "charity" for the tax breaks (NFP status doesn't mean you can't pay employees whatever you wish, it just means the parent organisation should break even at the end of the year).
#4 is wrong - private school teachers generally get paid less than those in state schools in the UK. See Private school teachers complain about pay. In particular "The motions follow the recent case of Barbara White, assistant housemistress at Malvern College, who was contracted to work for 121.5 hours a week for less than the minimum wage."
Also private schools are allowed to employ people with no teaching qualifications - this opens the field to essentially anyone with a degree (or even A-level in some cases), thus increasing competition for jobs and lowering salaries.
You may find the story of Curveball interesting. The German Federal Intelligence Service warned the CIA that the information it was receiving about WMDs was extremely suspect. But the reality was ignored if favour of the fantasy - like Tyler Drumheller said "Everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening"
And what about the UN resolutions regarding Israel and the occupied territories? I'm not saying whether those resolutions are right or wrong, but merely pointing out that when the U.S. government talks about Iraq and tries to back up its argument with reference to the UN resolutions it likes, whilst seeking to discredit those it doesn't, it seems more than a little hypocritical.
Do you really believe that this is true? For a start, the world's largest broadcasting news gathering organisation is the BBC, which is British. Secondly, I was under the impression that U.S. news broadcasters mostly ignore international issues and focus on domestic issues instead. It is unlikely that more than one third of U.S. domestic news is gathered by French men. You may also be interested to learn that the Associated Press (AP) is an American news agency and Reuters Group Limited is a British based news service.
As a non-U.S. citizen, the idea that over 1/3rd of U.S. news content is written by the French is an amusing idea - kind of on the same intellectual level as ranting about Freedom Fries and Surrender Monkeys.
So true. Hit citeseer and you will find thousands of papers on robot walking, including many PhD theses. For some reason, the academic way seems to be to carry out almost identical research again, and again, and again, rather than actually trying to build the damn thing. Let's be clear, Wu's walking robot isn't going to set the world on fire, but just by building a real robot that can actually walk he's already got further than the robotics departments of many of the world's leading universities.
You are not testing the same thing. The UK advert was promoting fast 3G browsing speed on the O2 network. Your video is clearly not using O2's 3G network - Google maps takes a lot longer to load up tiles than the 1/2 second or so it does in your video. And you don't do the full claim - "finding directions" is not the same as starting Google maps, zooming in, and exiting. In fact, you don't appear to use the keyboard at all in your video, so apparently you're just loading pre-generated data, and not actually carrying out any of the tasks the adverts says are being carried out.
It's not absurd at all. Democracies are supposed to fight terrorists with one hand behind their backs. You can't have a democracy that respects civil liberties, and at the same time allows citizens to be abducted, tortured and killed by agents of the state. Even the Israeli Supreme Court has recognised this fact: "This is the essence of a democracy - it does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of its enemies are not always open before it. A democracy must sometimes fight with one hand tied behind its back. Even so, a democracy has the upper hand. The rule of law and the liberty of an individual constitute important components of its understanding of security. At the end of the day, they strengthen its spirit and this strength allows it to overcome its difficulties."
What you are advocating is fascism, not a democracy. Do you really think that the UK should have been torturing and killing civilians who supported Sinn Fein and the IRA? Do you realise that ultimately the UK could have nuked Northern Ireland? Do you think that there would be a political settlement that has brought peace to the region (and also put some convicted terrorists into positions of political power) if the British government had engaged in a process of torture-based intelligence gathering and open-ended war, U.S. style, rather than encouraging Sinn Fein and the IRA to engage politically and talk at the negotiating table?
The fact is that if the government regards people who have some amount of broad-based support (e.g. the IRA, supported by maybe 30% of the population) as a classical enemy, and engages them in war, then the people will come to see the government as the enemy. Imagine how much more true this is when your government is propped up by a disliked occupying foreign invasion force.
Killing civilians doesn't work, it just makes people angry, and prolongs the war. What we need are intelligent solutions, to turn the will of the populace against those who would utilise violence for political ends.
So, you are actually against democracy?
It isn't quite that simple on a ThinkPad - the BIOS password is tied in to the TPM chip. And I really doubt your average thief is going to be building custom hardware and soldering it to the laptop mainboard...
Where does it say the trigger is in the OS? It would make less sense to do it that way, since you'd have to write a new driver for each OS. Since TFA says "Phoenix Technologies, developed this security feature and embedded the technology within the notebookâ(TM)s BIOS" I would assume that means it is OS independent.
Why do you think the BIOS would hog the wireless 100% of the time? The architecture would obviously be interrupt driven - the BIOS doesn't hog any other piece of hardware whilst waiting for an event.
It looks like the disable is handled in the BIOS, so either the GPS hardware is capable of receiving SMS texts while the laptop is hibernating, or the text is received when the BIOS boots up. Either way, you just have to send one text - your cell network provider will store and forward it to the receiver, it's just a regular text.
Hardly. You can regain access to the laptop just by typing in a recovery password.
The shutdown is supposed to be utilised with hard disk encryption - the whole point is that your data is better protected. The disabling is carried out by the BIOS; presumably it checks the disable bit before booting the OS and allows the legal user to enter a recovery password.