There is a difference between google's 10 year old, blurry images that can hardly see houses and military satellites that are practically live feeds, and can count the hairs on your head... unless you wear a hat.
I had a dataplan in Poland when I lived there a year, $40/mo for their "up to 3.7mbps" service. Realistically, I often got no more than 128kbps due to over-subscription, but towards the end, I was getting over 1mbps often enough. Regardless, there is no way am I going to pay $80-90/mo for a data plan in the US.
The nice thing in the US is that a few carriers have inexpensive non-tethering data plans that while not permitted, have no technical barriers to doing so. Thats good for occasional access, for when you can't find anywhere else, or are otherwise tied to a non-wifi location.
As I noted earlier in this thread, I'm considering coworking opportunities as an alternative to the coffee-shop.
Panera, at least here, really pushes to get people out of there in 30 minutes or less. Their Wifi splash page clearly says that if your plate is empty, get out!
The two B&N' near me have power outlets. Too few, but some. Actually, I suspect they're trying to minimize laptop usage because they recently changed their table layout which significantly reduced the number of laptops that could be powered... I wonder how much these store owners think about the power outlet availability, if at all.
The next great thing right now might just be coworking spots, providing hotdesking for telecommuters. Such a place just opened up in Philadelphia, Independents Hall, and there are a few other such areas scattered around the country. I'm thinking of getting a desk there.
I work from "home" and often head out for a change of venue. I normally go to Barnes & Noble because they have AT&T Wifi which has partnered with Boingo. The nice thing about Boingo is that it is only $20/mo, month-to-month. Both AT&T or TMobile are about $40/mo, month-to-month. Unfortunately, I still ended up paying some nasty fees to TMobile for the few times I've chosen to, or had to work from Starbucks. Now, I'll be able to use both, and thats a great thing, as where I am there isn't a whole lot of other choice. With a typical month including over 40 hours of coffee-shop patronage, a change of venue is much appreciated.
For the 'just use free hotspots' crowd, my area generally has no coffee shops other than at Barnes & Noble and Starbucks. Both charge for their Wifi. We also have Burger Kings and Panara Bread with free internet. Unfortunately my area Burger King's don't have open power outlets and smell like burgers; Panara Bread requests that patrons limit their sessions to 30-minutes, and at least where I am, have had sub-par connectivity.
"In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning." - George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946
I agree, that is better than I normally do as well. Maybe someone could make this a firefox plugin so that mere mortals can actually access webpages that use CAPTCHAs.
It is sad because with corrective lenses, my vision is 20/20, and I'm highly technical. I should not have any problems with CAPTCHAs; However, my grandmother is another story. She has poor vision, can't figure out how to do a carriage return on her computer, has difficulty understanding the concept of scrollbars, and I'm sure would not be able to deal with even the easiest CAPTCHAs in use today. This is not usability. Granted, given the choice between SPAM or CAPTCHAs, I'll chose the lesser of the two evils...
While you're correct in saying that they do not authorize non-GPL products to use their GPL'ed version of MySQL, this is because the client libraries are GPL, not LGPL. There is already a fork of the client libraries licensed as LGPL for the intention of allowing non-GPL applications to link to a compatible client library. Debian, and likely other distributions, ship these libraries to minimize legal troubles.
It should also then be noted that running a GPL mysql server is legal for both commercial or non-commercial purposes, it is only a question of what libraries the clients are using.
In many cases/proc/cpuinfo file will tell you, although indirectly, how many physical processors you have versus threads. Or at least it used to... with threading, traditionally, Linux would assign each a processor id, but then use a shared physical id. With multi-core cpus, they added 'cpu cores' and 'siblings' but these seem unreliable on my systems; though, I've read that this may be related to whether or not you've enabled ACPI...
Curious... what is wrong with HR 1955? I read through it, and it seemed to only establish an organization for the research of "homegrown terrorism". Their strongest power would be the provisions through which their research may be used in a court of law. That could be an issue if that research is taken with greater merit than third-party research, or if third-party research not admitted. However, under no way did I read that bill as to indicate that it would "send outspoken people to gitmo"; but please, do clarify!
It is interesting that you note the distance required. It isn't mentioned at the Register, but the Polish news sources have said that he was riding inside of the trams that were being controlled.
While MAC address filtering will not block even a non-determined attacker, it may be enough to block some automated attacks. This is especially true of those originating from limited-size firmwares, eg... worms in other nearby routers.
All else aside, MAC address filtering does no damage other than increased administrative burden... it makes wireless security no worse, even if its benefits are only marginal.
Oh.. yeah, I don't really see their efforts to enforce this "copyright" going very far considering Egypt can't enforce do anything about building code violations, or remove the estimated 5 million living residents of Cairo's cemetery. If you browse google news, you will see countless bus, train, and airplane accidents causing countless related to poor maintenance and ineffective or non-existent laws. Really, Egyptians have more to worry about than enforcing IP.
When visiting Giza, I was told by my hired Egyptologist that Egyptian authorities believed all artifacts of ancient Egypt were the rightful property of the Egyptians. As their national treasure and a grand source of revenue, they wish to keep a monopoly on Ancient Egypt. The basis of that argument is in regard to intellectual property, as well as physical.
Apparently, the Egyptian Museum won't loan anything to a museum that claims ownership over any of "their" artifacts foreign or domestic. Their argument being that they were robbed, either by simple theft, or by foreign invading forces.
Personally, my belief is that although the Egyptians may have some right to claim ownership, it is in the better interest of the world to spread knowledge and education of Ancient Egypt. Rather than allow Egypt an unlimited monopoly on their history, history should be available to all with independent and unbiased opinions based on uncensored access to factual record.
Unfortunately, it is also my opinion, from personal observation, that the conditions of the Egyptian Museum may not be the most suitable place for these priceless artifacts of history, and... fair or unfair, for the benefit of preservation, it may be best that Egyptians have not succeeded in re-obtaining all "their" artifacts.
Companies do not need to retain a copy of every piece of paper sent or received, why make them store the digital equivalents? If they receive a letter from an outside party, they're not required to keep a copy. Moreover, private companies that act as common carriers, such as UPS and Fedex, do not need to maintain a copy of every document that they provide temporary storage for. While it would be much more difficult for UPS and Fedex to produce copies, they too would have significant problems providing the necessary storage for such copies.
Requiring companies to maintain copies of all internal memorandums, reports, and manuals would be one thing... to require companies to maintain logs of all communications would fail as a dead-end law, as it is either too expensive or impossible to implement.
Exactly.. what is the actual cost of this? What if a company's currently stored documents already reaches into hundreds of terabytes? I haven't looked into the law, but what about ISPs, email hosting providers? Does google need to store every email that has ever been stored on their servers? What about Yahoo, which often removes emails from user's inboxes automatically after a certain amount of time? Heck, what about standard hosting providers -- if someone bypasses your quotas and uploads a terabyte of video, do you need to retain that? Maybe there are exceptions to these issues, and if so, great... but it seems that there are too many exceptions needed.
If companies need retention to this extent, you will either see bankruptcy or non-compliance.
It would be a valid decision for the post office to prefer covering the cost of extra work. This employs more people. It also generates more cash flow. The worst thing is that they're *already* doing this extra work, so if Netflix fixes their envelopes, the post office will likely lay off employees.
I actually prefer playing WoW on my laptop. I have a keybinding for literally every key on my keyboard, and use the trackpad to minimize movement of my mouse hand. Using a mouse, there is much more hand movement and thus a slower reaction time.
I just got my Barcelona system running last month, paid very good money for what was supposed to be a revolutionary platform, and for what? Sub-par performance? Really not cool AMD, really not cool.
I might hope that the RH patch hits mainstream Linux, but I'm not sure how that affects Xen...
With a few exceptions, there is usually more than one well-known application under MacOS (or Linux, for that matter) to perform any given task. Also, the pure number of applications has nothing to do with the usefulness of said applications. There may only be 200 text editors for MacOS, as opposed to 20000 text editors for Windows, but on either platform there will be less than 10 that are really worth using.
The popularity of Parallels and VMWare Fusion is boggling because there really isn't that much of a need or desire to run applications from one OS, from another; if there was, those users wouldn't have bought a Mac in the first place. Personally, I use virtualization for testing and deployment, usually of Linux systems, not for "running Windows apps" because I have every application that I need on my OS -- if I couldn't run all the applications that I needed on MacOS or Linux, I would be running Windows. The fact that I'm not running Windows only shows that I don't need those Windows applications -- 200 text editors is enough, thank you.
They need stricter rules against the organizations not the officials! I have seen this happen repeatedly... In Poland, the employee is ultimately responsible. If a grocery store is robbed, the cashier will owe the store. This does not strengthen the security of the store, because there is no incentive for the business to improve security, it only puts the employees at great risk!
In this case, you will have organizations providing important information to non-technical employees that know nothing about encryption or the law. If information is stolen, the risk is on the employee, so the company makes no effort to properly secure the data. On the other hand, if the organization was at greater risk, they would make an effort to educate their employees and enforce fool-proof security measures.
A law such as this that shifts responsibility to the employee will do nothing to prevent such things from happening in the first place, it will only mean certain financial ruin for a number of unfortunate families.
It is not racist for someone to be unable to visually determine some else's age. Neither is it racist for someone to be unable to tell two people apart (eh, "all asians look the same to me"). If he was blind and he said, "all asians, blacks, and whites look the same to me", would that be an issue? No, it would be the truth, because to a blind person, they do look the same. Someone with an untrained eye is nearly as incapable as a blind person at facial pattern recognition.
The whole "you're being racist" thing itself is racism, making an assumption that the other person might be racist just because the other person isn't of your race, is racist. If the parent post was asian, but adopted by a white family without contact with other asians, and said, "I cannot tell two asians apart", would it still be racist?
Facial pattern recognition is a learned ability, and each race has a unique set of facial patterns. You cannot expect someone that has had minimal contact with people outside their own race to be able to detect these differences.
I think the only reason that people get offended because they hear someone say, "<race> all look alike" is because people dislike being grouped by their race, even if there is no ill-will meant. If you're going to be upset by this, you shouldn't stop there. Tell doctors to stop testing black people for Sickle Cell Anemia, because it is racist for them to think that the decease could possibly be more prevalent in those with a particular heritage or skin color -- after all, "race is only skin deep", right? Oh, thats right, those people would rather be healthy than complain that they're being singled out for screenings based on their race.
The truth is that different races have different physical attributes which can cause certain challenges for those not intimately familiar with those differences; be it facial recognition to recognize someone's age or sex, or be it differences that affect a medical practitioner's ability to save a life.
I'm repeatedly annoyed by these calls for an "easier" interface. As others have said, the Gimp 's interface is quite 'moddable', tearable menus, tearable toolbars, configurable shortcuts... In my opinion, a lot of the "improvements" made to appease the Photoshop users have largely made Gimp 2.4 an unusable mess compared to earlier versions, especially for long-time Gimp users.
If I had to complain about the Gimp compared to photoshop, the interface would be the *last* thing I would change. The first thing would be adding CYMK, the second thing would be layer effects (ala photoshop's layer shadows, etc)
Neverwinter Nights I. I would have them for NWN 2, but they dramatically increased the size of the save file - around 100MB if I remember right.
Neverwinter Nights I would easily create save files over 100MB for me, and I didn't get through more than probably 10-20% of that game. In fact, I have two DVDs of "saves" for that game.
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There is a difference between google's 10 year old, blurry images that can hardly see houses and military satellites that are practically live feeds, and can count the hairs on your head... unless you wear a hat.
I know its been said a thousand times before, but unless the machine has 4GB of ram or more, they would be hobbling it by installing a 64-bit OS...
I had a dataplan in Poland when I lived there a year, $40/mo for their "up to 3.7mbps" service. Realistically, I often got no more than 128kbps due to over-subscription, but towards the end, I was getting over 1mbps often enough. Regardless, there is no way am I going to pay $80-90/mo for a data plan in the US.
The nice thing in the US is that a few carriers have inexpensive non-tethering data plans that while not permitted, have no technical barriers to doing so. Thats good for occasional access, for when you can't find anywhere else, or are otherwise tied to a non-wifi location.
As I noted earlier in this thread, I'm considering coworking opportunities as an alternative to the coffee-shop.
Panera, at least here, really pushes to get people out of there in 30 minutes or less. Their Wifi splash page clearly says that if your plate is empty, get out!
The two B&N' near me have power outlets. Too few, but some. Actually, I suspect they're trying to minimize laptop usage because they recently changed their table layout which significantly reduced the number of laptops that could be powered... I wonder how much these store owners think about the power outlet availability, if at all.
The next great thing right now might just be coworking spots, providing hotdesking for telecommuters. Such a place just opened up in Philadelphia, Independents Hall, and there are a few other such areas scattered around the country. I'm thinking of getting a desk there.
I work from "home" and often head out for a change of venue. I normally go to Barnes & Noble because they have AT&T Wifi which has partnered with Boingo. The nice thing about Boingo is that it is only $20/mo, month-to-month. Both AT&T or TMobile are about $40/mo, month-to-month. Unfortunately, I still ended up paying some nasty fees to TMobile for the few times I've chosen to, or had to work from Starbucks. Now, I'll be able to use both, and thats a great thing, as where I am there isn't a whole lot of other choice. With a typical month including over 40 hours of coffee-shop patronage, a change of venue is much appreciated.
For the 'just use free hotspots' crowd, my area generally has no coffee shops other than at Barnes & Noble and Starbucks. Both charge for their Wifi. We also have Burger Kings and Panara Bread with free internet. Unfortunately my area Burger King's don't have open power outlets and smell like burgers; Panara Bread requests that patrons limit their sessions to 30-minutes, and at least where I am, have had sub-par connectivity.
I agree, that is better than I normally do as well. Maybe someone could make this a firefox plugin so that mere mortals can actually access webpages that use CAPTCHAs.
It is sad because with corrective lenses, my vision is 20/20, and I'm highly technical. I should not have any problems with CAPTCHAs; However, my grandmother is another story. She has poor vision, can't figure out how to do a carriage return on her computer, has difficulty understanding the concept of scrollbars, and I'm sure would not be able to deal with even the easiest CAPTCHAs in use today. This is not usability. Granted, given the choice between SPAM or CAPTCHAs, I'll chose the lesser of the two evils...
While you're correct in saying that they do not authorize non-GPL products to use their GPL'ed version of MySQL, this is because the client libraries are GPL, not LGPL. There is already a fork of the client libraries licensed as LGPL for the intention of allowing non-GPL applications to link to a compatible client library. Debian, and likely other distributions, ship these libraries to minimize legal troubles.
It should also then be noted that running a GPL mysql server is legal for both commercial or non-commercial purposes, it is only a question of what libraries the clients are using.
In many cases /proc/cpuinfo file will tell you, although indirectly, how many physical processors you have versus threads. Or at least it used to... with threading, traditionally, Linux would assign each a processor id, but then use a shared physical id. With multi-core cpus, they added 'cpu cores' and 'siblings' but these seem unreliable on my systems; though, I've read that this may be related to whether or not you've enabled ACPI...
Curious... what is wrong with HR 1955? I read through it, and it seemed to only establish an organization for the research of "homegrown terrorism". Their strongest power would be the provisions through which their research may be used in a court of law. That could be an issue if that research is taken with greater merit than third-party research, or if third-party research not admitted. However, under no way did I read that bill as to indicate that it would "send outspoken people to gitmo"; but please, do clarify!
It is interesting that you note the distance required. It isn't mentioned at the Register, but the Polish news sources have said that he was riding inside of the trams that were being controlled.
While MAC address filtering will not block even a non-determined attacker, it may be enough to block some automated attacks. This is especially true of those originating from limited-size firmwares, eg... worms in other nearby routers.
All else aside, MAC address filtering does no damage other than increased administrative burden... it makes wireless security no worse, even if its benefits are only marginal.
Oh.. yeah, I don't really see their efforts to enforce this "copyright" going very far considering Egypt can't enforce do anything about building code violations, or remove the estimated 5 million living residents of Cairo's cemetery. If you browse google news, you will see countless bus, train, and airplane accidents causing countless related to poor maintenance and ineffective or non-existent laws. Really, Egyptians have more to worry about than enforcing IP.
When visiting Giza, I was told by my hired Egyptologist that Egyptian authorities believed all artifacts of ancient Egypt were the rightful property of the Egyptians. As their national treasure and a grand source of revenue, they wish to keep a monopoly on Ancient Egypt. The basis of that argument is in regard to intellectual property, as well as physical.
Apparently, the Egyptian Museum won't loan anything to a museum that claims ownership over any of "their" artifacts foreign or domestic. Their argument being that they were robbed, either by simple theft, or by foreign invading forces.
Personally, my belief is that although the Egyptians may have some right to claim ownership, it is in the better interest of the world to spread knowledge and education of Ancient Egypt. Rather than allow Egypt an unlimited monopoly on their history, history should be available to all with independent and unbiased opinions based on uncensored access to factual record.
Unfortunately, it is also my opinion, from personal observation, that the conditions of the Egyptian Museum may not be the most suitable place for these priceless artifacts of history, and... fair or unfair, for the benefit of preservation, it may be best that Egyptians have not succeeded in re-obtaining all "their" artifacts.
Companies do not need to retain a copy of every piece of paper sent or received, why make them store the digital equivalents? If they receive a letter from an outside party, they're not required to keep a copy. Moreover, private companies that act as common carriers, such as UPS and Fedex, do not need to maintain a copy of every document that they provide temporary storage for. While it would be much more difficult for UPS and Fedex to produce copies, they too would have significant problems providing the necessary storage for such copies.
Requiring companies to maintain copies of all internal memorandums, reports, and manuals would be one thing... to require companies to maintain logs of all communications would fail as a dead-end law, as it is either too expensive or impossible to implement.
Exactly.. what is the actual cost of this? What if a company's currently stored documents already reaches into hundreds of terabytes? I haven't looked into the law, but what about ISPs, email hosting providers? Does google need to store every email that has ever been stored on their servers? What about Yahoo, which often removes emails from user's inboxes automatically after a certain amount of time? Heck, what about standard hosting providers -- if someone bypasses your quotas and uploads a terabyte of video, do you need to retain that? Maybe there are exceptions to these issues, and if so, great... but it seems that there are too many exceptions needed.
If companies need retention to this extent, you will either see bankruptcy or non-compliance.
It would be a valid decision for the post office to prefer covering the cost of extra work. This employs more people. It also generates more cash flow. The worst thing is that they're *already* doing this extra work, so if Netflix fixes their envelopes, the post office will likely lay off employees.
I actually prefer playing WoW on my laptop. I have a keybinding for literally every key on my keyboard, and use the trackpad to minimize movement of my mouse hand. Using a mouse, there is much more hand movement and thus a slower reaction time.
I just got my Barcelona system running last month, paid very good money for what was supposed to be a revolutionary platform, and for what? Sub-par performance? Really not cool AMD, really not cool.
I might hope that the RH patch hits mainstream Linux, but I'm not sure how that affects Xen...
With a few exceptions, there is usually more than one well-known application under MacOS (or Linux, for that matter) to perform any given task. Also, the pure number of applications has nothing to do with the usefulness of said applications. There may only be 200 text editors for MacOS, as opposed to 20000 text editors for Windows, but on either platform there will be less than 10 that are really worth using.
The popularity of Parallels and VMWare Fusion is boggling because there really isn't that much of a need or desire to run applications from one OS, from another; if there was, those users wouldn't have bought a Mac in the first place. Personally, I use virtualization for testing and deployment, usually of Linux systems, not for "running Windows apps" because I have every application that I need on my OS -- if I couldn't run all the applications that I needed on MacOS or Linux, I would be running Windows. The fact that I'm not running Windows only shows that I don't need those Windows applications -- 200 text editors is enough, thank you.
They need stricter rules against the organizations not the officials! I have seen this happen repeatedly... In Poland, the employee is ultimately responsible. If a grocery store is robbed, the cashier will owe the store. This does not strengthen the security of the store, because there is no incentive for the business to improve security, it only puts the employees at great risk!
In this case, you will have organizations providing important information to non-technical employees that know nothing about encryption or the law. If information is stolen, the risk is on the employee, so the company makes no effort to properly secure the data. On the other hand, if the organization was at greater risk, they would make an effort to educate their employees and enforce fool-proof security measures.
A law such as this that shifts responsibility to the employee will do nothing to prevent such things from happening in the first place, it will only mean certain financial ruin for a number of unfortunate families.
Most people only choose one or the other... so, no, we haven't noticed.
It is not racist for someone to be unable to visually determine some else's age. Neither is it racist for someone to be unable to tell two people apart (eh, "all asians look the same to me"). If he was blind and he said, "all asians, blacks, and whites look the same to me", would that be an issue? No, it would be the truth, because to a blind person, they do look the same. Someone with an untrained eye is nearly as incapable as a blind person at facial pattern recognition.
The whole "you're being racist" thing itself is racism, making an assumption that the other person might be racist just because the other person isn't of your race, is racist. If the parent post was asian, but adopted by a white family without contact with other asians, and said, "I cannot tell two asians apart", would it still be racist?
Facial pattern recognition is a learned ability, and each race has a unique set of facial patterns. You cannot expect someone that has had minimal contact with people outside their own race to be able to detect these differences.
I think the only reason that people get offended because they hear someone say, "<race> all look alike" is because people dislike being grouped by their race, even if there is no ill-will meant. If you're going to be upset by this, you shouldn't stop there. Tell doctors to stop testing black people for Sickle Cell Anemia, because it is racist for them to think that the decease could possibly be more prevalent in those with a particular heritage or skin color -- after all, "race is only skin deep", right? Oh, thats right, those people would rather be healthy than complain that they're being singled out for screenings based on their race.
The truth is that different races have different physical attributes which can cause certain challenges for those not intimately familiar with those differences; be it facial recognition to recognize someone's age or sex, or be it differences that affect a medical practitioner's ability to save a life.
I'm repeatedly annoyed by these calls for an "easier" interface. As others have said, the Gimp 's interface is quite 'moddable', tearable menus, tearable toolbars, configurable shortcuts... In my opinion, a lot of the "improvements" made to appease the Photoshop users have largely made Gimp 2.4 an unusable mess compared to earlier versions, especially for long-time Gimp users.
If I had to complain about the Gimp compared to photoshop, the interface would be the *last* thing I would change. The first thing would be adding CYMK, the second thing would be layer effects (ala photoshop's layer shadows, etc)
-- A gimp user since 0.99
Neverwinter Nights I would easily create save files over 100MB for me, and I didn't get through more than probably 10-20% of that game. In fact, I have two DVDs of "saves" for that game.