Of course it's just PR. But on the off chance the line was coined by the founders and the even offer chance they might insist on adhering to it, as of now they still could.
Mr Page and Mr Brin hold a combined voting power of 59%, of which they expect to sell 11% over the next five years. That'll bring 'em down to 48% and leave room for a more or less unanimous vote by the rest of the stakeholders to, well, do evil.
Ah well, as long as they stick to doing less evil than the rest, they're, well, finer the rest in my book.:)
Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of some RF-to-the-home. Google's products tend to be automated to the max, requiring as little of their manpower as possible. Maintaining a fibre infrastructure to millions of homes is bound to require more manpower than one connecting dozens of datacentres with thousands of access points. Also, it'd save them years of negotiation work. If they can get their hands on a nationwide 700 MHz license, setting up and connecting a bunch of base stations is quite trivial, actually. And after they're done with the U.S., I'd expect them to head for the U.K., Singapore and Hong Kong, mirroring their Nexus One strategy. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, an industry standard for wireless broadband might emerge. And if Google's lucky, a lot of countries might try to capitalize on that, auctioning off licenses.
Fibre-to-the-home may come later, but my money's on a more wireless focus for the next couple of years.
This is anything but an unrelated "business opportunity". Google owns huge datacenters. Google has been known to purchase gobs of dark fibre, at this point I imagine they might very well have sufficient connectivity between their datacenters to sustain operations. Throw in their own little grid (a bunch of thorium reactors, perhaps?) and, given enough thorium, they become self-sufficient. Throw in some wireless connectivity with base stations (remember the 700 MHz spectrum auction? Remember Google's bid?) linked to their fibre network and powered through their grid and you get a self-sustaining ad distribution network that'll reach the whole U.S. without needing any partners.
"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." Will "don't be evil" cancel that?
By using any of their binaries on the same system you do whatever it is you do on encrypted web pages, you trust whomever compiled that binary implicitly. The end-to-"end" encryption of Opera Mini terminates at an Opera, ASA server. The end-to-end encryption of Opera (Desktop) terminates at the control of just that closed-source browser. If they were in it to fuck you over, well, they can. The same applies to MSIE and Safari (even more, since they're distributed by the OS manufacturers), Chrome (a lot; seeing how much data is exchanged between a typical computer and Google's servers, a lot could be hidden somewhere in there), Firefox (slightly less because development is more visible and done by Mozilla, Google only bankrolls it), for binary-distributions.
Hm, if I'm not mistaken, each wafer will be exposed only once through a photomask for a couple (dozen) chips. Since all it takes would be a bunch of rearranged paths, developing a photomask for several unique chips shouldn't be much more than a couple of clicks and a bit of computation work. If each wafer has space for 30 chips, that simple step would have decimated the success chance of the drill method by 96%. QA can be kept to a minimum and different flavours of the chip left unmarked because this really only would have to affect some of the internal wiring. All of the logic could stay the same and checking for problematically long signal paths or similar problems could be done in a simulation.
[...] then swap TPM chips and hard drives at the same time.
If I'm not totally mistaken, that'd amount to quite precisely zilch. As far as I understand, the BIOS password (or fingerprint, retinal scan,...) is stored within the TPM along with the decryption key. Swapping just the TPM will amount to nothing because you'd be missing the decryption key; swapping the hard drive would be useless anyways and swapping both alongside ought to get you to quite exactly where you started: Enter your password to have the data decrypted or don't and don't get to the stored data. In some models, I imagine it'd be even more difficult -- the TPM might be tied to a BIOS chip or the other, so BIOS and TPM only work in conjunction.
In the end, by it's very definition, such a system will never achieve perfect security. As long as the system has knowledge of it's own decryption codes, man can take apart what man built. It'll get really difficult as soon as the TPM is moved onto CPU silicon, but if the technology to build it is available, the technology to take it apart will be there, too.
Opera runs pretty well on macs. With Opera Link, it'll synchronize your bookmarks to any of your other Opera installations (not to other browsers, though). Say goodbye to Fx and make the web a better place today!;)
Bullshit. Being able to choose what port a request is directed to is covered by specifications, expected to work and built on in several real-world situations. Most commonly, configuration interfaces: If you're using some kind of shared hosting, chances are they might be running Plesk (defaults to alt-https, i.e. 8443) or ispCP (defaults to https on 81) or a similar project. Use webmin? The httpd that runs the config interface requires permissions you wouldn't want the http that serves your normal pages to have. Going on, ever used CoralCDN? That's.nyud.net:8080 (alt-http) or 8070 for you. Maybe you'd like to configure an irc daemon or bouncer? Another non-standard port there. Most application servers don't run on port 80, either. The load balancer will, but you might want to get around it for testing purposes or some such. What I'm saying: It's all expected behaviour. Throw in a PING Math.rand() from the server before actually throwing out those RAW001-4 and the spamming problem is instanty solved. Or, to make things even simpler: If you're an ircd, kill whatever starts it's requests with HTTP POST. Chances are, it's not an IRC client.
It works and it's a common practice, used extensively e.g. in Futurama. I've read an interview with David X. Cohen (IIRC) not too long ago and he basically said they were quite fond of using jokes that only 5% of the audience would get as long as they wouldn't throw off the rest of the viewers. Ideally, it works on two levels. The 5% you're actually trying to reach will feel special and love the show from there on out, the rest of the audience just sees it as another possibly absurd joke.
Your example, from The Matrix, does that quite excellently. 95% of the audience sees black background, glowing green text, a blinking cursor and some numbers and stuff blazing past, instantly recognizing it as Very Advanced Hackery, and 5% bump their iMDB rating up two points cause nmap and an actual RFC1918 IP address and sshnuke, ohmygod!
Nobody's at fault. The standard defines how authors (including Google) are to write their pages and how User-Agents (including Firefox) are to render it. It doesn't define how the browser chrome's supposed to look (heh, d'you really think the fugly hack Firefox' interface is or that cluttered mess called Internet Explorer would've made it through?). What's defined, almost down to the pixel, is the rendered page, bordered on top by the tab, on the right by the scroll and on the bottom by the status bar.
Google uses two attributes of the A tag in conjunction: HREF and ONCLICK. Href tells the user-agent where to send the client if the link is interacted with, i.e. clicked on or highlighted and confirmed with a press of return. This is meant to be the destination site. Most user-agents reveal this information to their user when hovering over the link. This can be helpful when deciding whether to visit the page or not. Sending it through a forwarder is allowed but generally considered bad behaviour, because it removes the ability to "look ahead" from the user. The onclick attribute is a call to an embedded script in the page. This could be used to do additional processing when clicking a link. For example, href could be used with target to open a link in a new window. Onclick could be used to open a window of a specified size and configuration for all clients who run scripts, while those who don't will get the default window. With smaller capabilities from the browser, the experience would degrade gracefully. Onclick can, as Google prominently demonstrates, also be used to track which search results their users click on for a given query. Their rationale is most likely getting feedback in order to improve their search results. Obviously, there is a slight loss of privacy.
Now on to "Copy Link Location". This feature is a part of the browser. HTML or related standards won't touch this, so Firefox doesn't violate any standards there. Applicable standards would be along the lines of the Gnome Human Interface Guideline or the equivalents for other platforms. None of those define the expected behaviour of "Copy Link Location" in relation to a hypertext document. The only standard that applies is user expectation, which should be copying the href attribute. Fx tries to go above and beyond that and catch the actual location the user might be forwarded to by extended onclick attributes. For some combinations of href and onclick, this can yield better results. For some (including Google), it won't.
TL;DR: No standard applies. Firefox attempts to go above and beyond user expectations, fails to deliver and is somewhat at fault.
I could never really figure out a pattern when Google would distort the links and when it wouldn't, but trusting them to look over live code in their main app, I'm guessing this may be browser-dependent. If the client is a Version of Firefox with the HREF PING "feature", they might make use of that; if the client is known to run JavaScript, onclick is the way to go and finally, if none of the others apply, the links are rewritten to go through google.com/url.
Also, did you really see an a href attribute containing javascript in your Google search results? The whole idea sounds too dumb for Google to me.
Maybe 'example.com' points to my mail server, because I am an email company.
Out of all the examples in the world you could pick, you went for the wrong one like a cartoon character falling into the desert and hitting the only cactus in a three-mile radius. There's a DNS record type called MX to identify Mail eXchanges for that domain. example.org. A may point to 10.2.3.4, which could be your web, telnet, irc and quake server yet example.org. MX would point to pizza.example.org. (which in turn has an A record to 10.4.5.6) and spaghetti.example.org. (10.1.1.1). You can even add several MX records with different priorities, so in the event of pizza failing, clients will try spaghetti. It's quite awesome.
I'm reasonably happy with my X61 tablet. It's not quite a *40, but it gets quite close. You won't be able to dodge the wifi switch, Windows key and similar "evolution", but the build quality is okay. Mine has accompanied me through a dozen countries or so, suffered occasional drops onto concrete, smashings into walls and bike accidents while in a backpack and is still ticking along just fine. Linux support is reasonable as well, the wifi driver can be somewhat spotty and Ubuntu 9.10 introduced the occasional crashed X session after waking up from standby, but that's probably related to experimental settings for the vga driver.
Getting your hands onto ThinkPad quality with recent innards doesn't strike me as realistic. HP builds some nice laptops, but they're not really better than Lenovo. Apple builds shiny toys with a keyboard layout even more fucked up than a ThinkPad Edge. Dell? Heh. The four-letter As (Abit, Acer, Asus)? Bleh. Sony? Shiny!
Actually, make it simple. Buy a T410, crack it open, put the innards into the T42's shell, repeat whenever new hardware generations are available.
That's the spirit. Now how many more participants do we have to find to make this a bona fide suicide cult? And how many mass suicides will it take for Lenovo to bring the ThinkPad brand back to it's former glory?
The regular T and X series are staying as they were[...]
Wrong. (I realize the X100e is positioned more along the lines of the Edge and SL models, but if Lenovo considers the changes viable, they'll most probably expand them to affect T and X2/3 series, too.)
If this change is indicative of what'll happen to the "serious business" series (T, X, R), then the ThinkPad has, after some 18 years or so, finally jumped the shark.
One of the main selling points of a ThinkPad was the keyboard. When all the other brands went completely nuts and placed the PrtSc/ScrLk/Pause/Insert/Delete/Home/End/PgUp and PgDn keys at a whim, on a ThinkPad you could blindly hit the spot where the key was supposed to be and actually hit it. They were quiteproud of that, and nobody minded. Now, you get a chiclet keyboard with the F-keys disabled by default and six rows. Well, congrats Lenovo, you've just went from top-of-the-line in 2010 to consumer-grade-sony-vaio in 1999 or so.
Another thing were the displays. Great, high-resolution, matte 4:3 screens one could work with. I own a 12" X61 with 1050 horizontal lines. Nowadays, it's WXGA with less than 800 lines in everything up to 14.1", and half of the models come in glare-type finish. Thanks to the shiny finish you can't see the screen contents anyways, so that slightly mitigates the lack of resolution.
What's next, Lenovo? Get rid of the high-quality finish of the Notebooks and switch to cheap plastic? Fuck up the support infrastructure IBM built? Oh wait, already happened. I guess it's down to the nipple mouse as the last true hallmark of a ThinkPad. And that, I won't give up 'til you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Apparently, the affected sites were not clients of Serverloft but of a web hoster whose servers are located in Serverloft's datacentre, connected through Serverloft's routing system. Serverloft apparently got really impressed by the Canucks' request for a takedown and, not having electronic access to the servers just shut down the entire IP range of their client, that hosting company.
Nah, I'm in Switzerland, quite near to a major city but miles away from even a grocery store open past midnight. It's scary how the whole country seems to fall into deep hibernation around 9 pm (10 pm on weekends;)). Anyways, what exactly do you mean by personal accountability complex? Are you talking about taking responsibility for one's actions, acting in accordance with common sense, and that kind of stuff? If so, where'd you get that from? It hardly feels that way to me. Booze may be easier to get by (minimum age of 16 for beer, wine and ciders; 18 for liquor), but all other substances are as illegal here as they are illegal in the U.S. Patronization instead of accountability on that front. Traffic is even more strictly regulated than in the U.S., a lot of your "first cars" wouldn't probably get a license plate around here. Accordingly, road safety is better, speed limits slightly higher, but everything is tightly regulated; again, little room for personal accountability. Then, there's that whole insurance cult. You are required by law to have e.g. health insurance. Now, despicably, most insurers spend millions on ads, staff cold callers and pay huge commissions to their agents, and thanks to mandatory insurance you can't get by without feeding them cash. Car insurances are great, too. Liability insurance is mandatory in order to get a license plate, most people also throw in a policy against damages to their own car. Now there's a system of bonus levels. Don't file any claims for a year, get bumped up one level; have an accident and lose four. After ten accident-free years, premiums can be as low as 30%. Great, so far, but there's more: insurance policies on the bonus level. Pay a bit more, and crashing won't cause you to lose the bonus. Also, insurance against gross negligence is standard on most policies now. Not really a sign of accountability, if you ask me. Moving on, what may have prompted your question in the first place: finances. Yeah, that's where the Swiss are more accountable in that discipline. In fact, the circumstances are completely different. Switzerland has very decent social nets to catch people in danger of falling through. What'd be considered minimum wage jobs in the U.S., pay some $800 per week in Switzerland with marginally higher cost of living. Even single parents with not too many children can get by on one job. Their children will attend 9 years of schooling and after that, in order of academic performance either throw on another three for a higher degree, an paid apprenticeship over four or three years or be done with it. All of this is, of course, free. Afterwards, grades permitting, there's the option of attending University, at $600-$1k for even the best schools in the country. Working Fridays and Saturdays as a bartender pays some $20 per hour, enough to make it through University without piling on any debt and still have the time to study. For that new generation, jobs still pay well. Starting salaries $800 weekly without, $1k weekly with a trade diploma and $1.5k weekly with a University degree don't really force anybody into debt. I guess you can get hooked on that fuzzy feeling of having more assets than liabilities. Also, Switzerland is slow. The political system is very solid; bordering on boring. The same goes for the economic system. The big banks skew the growth rates a bit, but apart from that, everything moves slowly in Switzerland. After a few years of experience, most people won't expect their income to rise by 20% by next year, so they don't spend 120% of what they have today. And those who do, working mostly in the banking and insurance sectors, they tend to either get large enough bonuses to cover their mess or, well, support the market for nice second-hand cars.
All things considered, I don't really see where we would excel on some kind of accountability complex. We make somewhat sane decisions when it comes to not getting into debt, but apart from that, I fail to see anything exceptional. We may look good compared to the average American, but that's to be expected, not exceptional.
Pray tell, where and how did you get the idea of that Swiss accountability complex?
I call bullshit on that statistic. Their numbers for RIM, Palm and Apple add up to 77%, leaving 23% for Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android and others which, according to the linked Wikipedia article make up over 60% of (global) sales. The U.S. situation may be tilted in favour of RIM, Apple, and to a lesser extent Palm; but the numbers don't add up.
To me, it looks closer to a moped than a motorcycle, performs (70cc displacement, 40 mph top speed) closer to a moped (50cc displacement, 35 or so mph top speed) than a motorcycle (125+cc, 100+mph) and seems more similar in cost ($855) to a moped ($$2000). Duck typing tells me it's a moped.
I don't mean to disdain it; used within it's scope (commuting a couple of kilometres through a busy congested metropolitan area) it's probably superior to a fully-grown motorcycle, but I don't see where, how or why it should be one.
This is at best a moped, a far cry even from 2-stroke 125cc motorcycles. The ET-120 has some 70 ccs of displacement, producing (that's according to TFA) enough power to reach a top speed of 40 mph, no actual numbers on power or torque given. A modern 125cc 2-stroke motorcycle will produce some 33 bhp of power, 20 Nm of torque and reach top speeds in excess of 100 mph. At 280 mpg, its fuel consumption is quite nice, though, especially when compared to some 45 mpg one would get out of a standard 125cc motorcycle.
I, for one, am absolutely convinced that a train crossing the ocean (apart from that pesky tunnel) would be fucking awesome. And you know what else is awesome? Monster trucks. So what's the logical conclusion? Stick monster truck wheels on a train and it will cross the ocean. But it doesn't end there. Monster trucks are like SUVs but more awesome. Throw a bunch of trains with monster truck wheels into suburbia and they'll crush all the SUVs there. And just like that, BAM, global warming is solved. The only cars around will be Priuses because Prius owners are gay and don't fashion monster trucks. So paint the monster truck wheeled train pink and that's solved, too, killing not only Detroit but also Japan, which is mostly Toyota and a little bit of Honda. Whales around the world will rejoice. For three days. Then monster truck train safari is invented. Whales around the world are deep fried in monster truck train kitchens around the world. Now you can have your Fillet-O-Fish and eat another one, too. Also, whale cake, which is awesome!
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Of course it's just PR. But on the off chance the line was coined by the founders and the even offer chance they might insist on adhering to it, as of now they still could.
Mr Page and Mr Brin hold a combined voting power of 59%, of which they expect to sell 11% over the next five years. That'll bring 'em down to 48% and leave room for a more or less unanimous vote by the rest of the stakeholders to, well, do evil.
Ah well, as long as they stick to doing less evil than the rest, they're, well, finer the rest in my book. :)
Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of some RF-to-the-home. Google's products tend to be automated to the max, requiring as little of their manpower as possible. Maintaining a fibre infrastructure to millions of homes is bound to require more manpower than one connecting dozens of datacentres with thousands of access points.
Also, it'd save them years of negotiation work. If they can get their hands on a nationwide 700 MHz license, setting up and connecting a bunch of base stations is quite trivial, actually. And after they're done with the U.S., I'd expect them to head for the U.K., Singapore and Hong Kong, mirroring their Nexus One strategy.
Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, an industry standard for wireless broadband might emerge. And if Google's lucky, a lot of countries might try to capitalize on that, auctioning off licenses.
Fibre-to-the-home may come later, but my money's on a more wireless focus for the next couple of years.
This is anything but an unrelated "business opportunity".
Google owns huge datacenters. Google has been known to purchase gobs of dark fibre, at this point I imagine they might very well have sufficient connectivity between their datacenters to sustain operations. Throw in their own little grid (a bunch of thorium reactors, perhaps?) and, given enough thorium, they become self-sufficient. Throw in some wireless connectivity with base stations (remember the 700 MHz spectrum auction? Remember Google's bid?) linked to their fibre network and powered through their grid and you get a self-sustaining ad distribution network that'll reach the whole U.S. without needing any partners.
"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." Will "don't be evil" cancel that?
Are you sure this switch hasn't happened yet? All those obesity problems sure make it look like it did. ;)
By using any of their binaries on the same system you do whatever it is you do on encrypted web pages, you trust whomever compiled that binary implicitly. The end-to-"end" encryption of Opera Mini terminates at an Opera, ASA server. The end-to-end encryption of Opera (Desktop) terminates at the control of just that closed-source browser. If they were in it to fuck you over, well, they can.
The same applies to MSIE and Safari (even more, since they're distributed by the OS manufacturers), Chrome (a lot; seeing how much data is exchanged between a typical computer and Google's servers, a lot could be hidden somewhere in there), Firefox (slightly less because development is more visible and done by Mozilla, Google only bankrolls it), for binary-distributions.
Hm, if I'm not mistaken, each wafer will be exposed only once through a photomask for a couple (dozen) chips. Since all it takes would be a bunch of rearranged paths, developing a photomask for several unique chips shouldn't be much more than a couple of clicks and a bit of computation work. If each wafer has space for 30 chips, that simple step would have decimated the success chance of the drill method by 96%.
QA can be kept to a minimum and different flavours of the chip left unmarked because this really only would have to affect some of the internal wiring. All of the logic could stay the same and checking for problematically long signal paths or similar problems could be done in a simulation.
If I'm not totally mistaken, that'd amount to quite precisely zilch. As far as I understand, the BIOS password (or fingerprint, retinal scan, ...) is stored within the TPM along with the decryption key. Swapping just the TPM will amount to nothing because you'd be missing the decryption key; swapping the hard drive would be useless anyways and swapping both alongside ought to get you to quite exactly where you started: Enter your password to have the data decrypted or don't and don't get to the stored data.
In some models, I imagine it'd be even more difficult -- the TPM might be tied to a BIOS chip or the other, so BIOS and TPM only work in conjunction.
In the end, by it's very definition, such a system will never achieve perfect security. As long as the system has knowledge of it's own decryption codes, man can take apart what man built. It'll get really difficult as soon as the TPM is moved onto CPU silicon, but if the technology to build it is available, the technology to take it apart will be there, too.
Opera runs pretty well on macs. With Opera Link, it'll synchronize your bookmarks to any of your other Opera installations (not to other browsers, though). Say goodbye to Fx and make the web a better place today! ;)
Bullshit. Being able to choose what port a request is directed to is covered by specifications, expected to work and built on in several real-world situations. Most commonly, configuration interfaces: If you're using some kind of shared hosting, chances are they might be running Plesk (defaults to alt-https, i.e. 8443) or ispCP (defaults to https on 81) or a similar project. Use webmin? The httpd that runs the config interface requires permissions you wouldn't want the http that serves your normal pages to have. .nyud.net:8080 (alt-http) or 8070 for you. Maybe you'd like to configure an irc daemon or bouncer? Another non-standard port there. Most application servers don't run on port 80, either. The load balancer will, but you might want to get around it for testing purposes or some such.
Going on, ever used CoralCDN? That's
What I'm saying: It's all expected behaviour. Throw in a PING Math.rand() from the server before actually throwing out those RAW001-4 and the spamming problem is instanty solved. Or, to make things even simpler: If you're an ircd, kill whatever starts it's requests with HTTP POST. Chances are, it's not an IRC client.
It works and it's a common practice, used extensively e.g. in Futurama. I've read an interview with David X. Cohen (IIRC) not too long ago and he basically said they were quite fond of using jokes that only 5% of the audience would get as long as they wouldn't throw off the rest of the viewers. Ideally, it works on two levels. The 5% you're actually trying to reach will feel special and love the show from there on out, the rest of the audience just sees it as another possibly absurd joke.
Your example, from The Matrix, does that quite excellently. 95% of the audience sees black background, glowing green text, a blinking cursor and some numbers and stuff blazing past, instantly recognizing it as Very Advanced Hackery, and 5% bump their iMDB rating up two points cause nmap and an actual RFC1918 IP address and sshnuke, ohmygod!
Nobody's at fault. The standard defines how authors (including Google) are to write their pages and how User-Agents (including Firefox) are to render it. It doesn't define how the browser chrome's supposed to look (heh, d'you really think the fugly hack Firefox' interface is or that cluttered mess called Internet Explorer would've made it through?). What's defined, almost down to the pixel, is the rendered page, bordered on top by the tab, on the right by the scroll and on the bottom by the status bar.
Google uses two attributes of the A tag in conjunction: HREF and ONCLICK. Href tells the user-agent where to send the client if the link is interacted with, i.e. clicked on or highlighted and confirmed with a press of return. This is meant to be the destination site. Most user-agents reveal this information to their user when hovering over the link. This can be helpful when deciding whether to visit the page or not. Sending it through a forwarder is allowed but generally considered bad behaviour, because it removes the ability to "look ahead" from the user.
The onclick attribute is a call to an embedded script in the page. This could be used to do additional processing when clicking a link. For example, href could be used with target to open a link in a new window. Onclick could be used to open a window of a specified size and configuration for all clients who run scripts, while those who don't will get the default window. With smaller capabilities from the browser, the experience would degrade gracefully. Onclick can, as Google prominently demonstrates, also be used to track which search results their users click on for a given query. Their rationale is most likely getting feedback in order to improve their search results. Obviously, there is a slight loss of privacy.
Now on to "Copy Link Location". This feature is a part of the browser. HTML or related standards won't touch this, so Firefox doesn't violate any standards there. Applicable standards would be along the lines of the Gnome Human Interface Guideline or the equivalents for other platforms. None of those define the expected behaviour of "Copy Link Location" in relation to a hypertext document.
The only standard that applies is user expectation, which should be copying the href attribute. Fx tries to go above and beyond that and catch the actual location the user might be forwarded to by extended onclick attributes. For some combinations of href and onclick, this can yield better results. For some (including Google), it won't.
TL;DR: No standard applies. Firefox attempts to go above and beyond user expectations, fails to deliver and is somewhat at fault.
I could never really figure out a pattern when Google would distort the links and when it wouldn't, but trusting them to look over live code in their main app, I'm guessing this may be browser-dependent. If the client is a Version of Firefox with the HREF PING "feature", they might make use of that; if the client is known to run JavaScript, onclick is the way to go and finally, if none of the others apply, the links are rewritten to go through google.com/url.
Also, did you really see an a href attribute containing javascript in your Google search results? The whole idea sounds too dumb for Google to me.
Out of all the examples in the world you could pick, you went for the wrong one like a cartoon character falling into the desert and hitting the only cactus in a three-mile radius. There's a DNS record type called MX to identify Mail eXchanges for that domain. example.org. A may point to 10.2.3.4, which could be your web, telnet, irc and quake server yet example.org. MX would point to pizza.example.org. (which in turn has an A record to 10.4.5.6) and spaghetti.example.org. (10.1.1.1). You can even add several MX records with different priorities, so in the event of pizza failing, clients will try spaghetti. It's quite awesome.
I'm reasonably happy with my X61 tablet. It's not quite a *40, but it gets quite close. You won't be able to dodge the wifi switch, Windows key and similar "evolution", but the build quality is okay. Mine has accompanied me through a dozen countries or so, suffered occasional drops onto concrete, smashings into walls and bike accidents while in a backpack and is still ticking along just fine. Linux support is reasonable as well, the wifi driver can be somewhat spotty and Ubuntu 9.10 introduced the occasional crashed X session after waking up from standby, but that's probably related to experimental settings for the vga driver.
Getting your hands onto ThinkPad quality with recent innards doesn't strike me as realistic. HP builds some nice laptops, but they're not really better than Lenovo. Apple builds shiny toys with a keyboard layout even more fucked up than a ThinkPad Edge. Dell? Heh. The four-letter As (Abit, Acer, Asus)? Bleh. Sony? Shiny!
Actually, make it simple. Buy a T410, crack it open, put the innards into the T42's shell, repeat whenever new hardware generations are available.
That's the spirit.
Now how many more participants do we have to find to make this a bona fide suicide cult? And how many mass suicides will it take for Lenovo to bring the ThinkPad brand back to it's former glory?
Wrong. (I realize the X100e is positioned more along the lines of the Edge and SL models, but if Lenovo considers the changes viable, they'll most probably expand them to affect T and X2/3 series, too.)
If this change is indicative of what'll happen to the "serious business" series (T, X, R), then the ThinkPad has, after some 18 years or so, finally jumped the shark.
One of the main selling points of a ThinkPad was the keyboard. When all the other brands went completely nuts and placed the PrtSc/ScrLk/Pause/Insert/Delete/Home/End/PgUp and PgDn keys at a whim, on a ThinkPad you could blindly hit the spot where the key was supposed to be and actually hit it. They were quite proud of that, and nobody minded.
Now, you get a chiclet keyboard with the F-keys disabled by default and six rows. Well, congrats Lenovo, you've just went from top-of-the-line in 2010 to consumer-grade-sony-vaio in 1999 or so.
Another thing were the displays. Great, high-resolution, matte 4:3 screens one could work with. I own a 12" X61 with 1050 horizontal lines. Nowadays, it's WXGA with less than 800 lines in everything up to 14.1", and half of the models come in glare-type finish. Thanks to the shiny finish you can't see the screen contents anyways, so that slightly mitigates the lack of resolution.
What's next, Lenovo? Get rid of the high-quality finish of the Notebooks and switch to cheap plastic? Fuck up the support infrastructure IBM built? Oh wait, already happened. I guess it's down to the nipple mouse as the last true hallmark of a ThinkPad. And that, I won't give up 'til you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Apparently, the affected sites were not clients of Serverloft but of a web hoster whose servers are located in Serverloft's datacentre, connected through Serverloft's routing system. Serverloft apparently got really impressed by the Canucks' request for a takedown and, not having electronic access to the servers just shut down the entire IP range of their client, that hosting company.
Nah, I'm in Switzerland, quite near to a major city but miles away from even a grocery store open past midnight. It's scary how the whole country seems to fall into deep hibernation around 9 pm (10 pm on weekends ;)).
Anyways, what exactly do you mean by personal accountability complex? Are you talking about taking responsibility for one's actions, acting in accordance with common sense, and that kind of stuff?
If so, where'd you get that from? It hardly feels that way to me. Booze may be easier to get by (minimum age of 16 for beer, wine and ciders; 18 for liquor), but all other substances are as illegal here as they are illegal in the U.S. Patronization instead of accountability on that front.
Traffic is even more strictly regulated than in the U.S., a lot of your "first cars" wouldn't probably get a license plate around here. Accordingly, road safety is better, speed limits slightly higher, but everything is tightly regulated; again, little room for personal accountability.
Then, there's that whole insurance cult. You are required by law to have e.g. health insurance. Now, despicably, most insurers spend millions on ads, staff cold callers and pay huge commissions to their agents, and thanks to mandatory insurance you can't get by without feeding them cash.
Car insurances are great, too. Liability insurance is mandatory in order to get a license plate, most people also throw in a policy against damages to their own car. Now there's a system of bonus levels. Don't file any claims for a year, get bumped up one level; have an accident and lose four. After ten accident-free years, premiums can be as low as 30%. Great, so far, but there's more: insurance policies on the bonus level. Pay a bit more, and crashing won't cause you to lose the bonus. Also, insurance against gross negligence is standard on most policies now. Not really a sign of accountability, if you ask me.
Moving on, what may have prompted your question in the first place: finances. Yeah, that's where the Swiss are more accountable in that discipline. In fact, the circumstances are completely different. Switzerland has very decent social nets to catch people in danger of falling through. What'd be considered minimum wage jobs in the U.S., pay some $800 per week in Switzerland with marginally higher cost of living. Even single parents with not too many children can get by on one job. Their children will attend 9 years of schooling and after that, in order of academic performance either throw on another three for a higher degree, an paid apprenticeship over four or three years or be done with it. All of this is, of course, free. Afterwards, grades permitting, there's the option of attending University, at $600-$1k for even the best schools in the country. Working Fridays and Saturdays as a bartender pays some $20 per hour, enough to make it through University without piling on any debt and still have the time to study. For that new generation, jobs still pay well. Starting salaries $800 weekly without, $1k weekly with a trade diploma and $1.5k weekly with a University degree don't really force anybody into debt.
I guess you can get hooked on that fuzzy feeling of having more assets than liabilities.
Also, Switzerland is slow. The political system is very solid; bordering on boring. The same goes for the economic system. The big banks skew the growth rates a bit, but apart from that, everything moves slowly in Switzerland. After a few years of experience, most people won't expect their income to rise by 20% by next year, so they don't spend 120% of what they have today.
And those who do, working mostly in the banking and insurance sectors, they tend to either get large enough bonuses to cover their mess or, well, support the market for nice second-hand cars.
All things considered, I don't really see where we would excel on some kind of accountability complex. We make somewhat sane decisions when it comes to not getting into debt, but apart from that, I fail to see anything exceptional. We may look good compared to the average American, but that's to be expected, not exceptional.
Pray tell, where and how did you get the idea of that Swiss accountability complex?
I call bullshit on that statistic. Their numbers for RIM, Palm and Apple add up to 77%, leaving 23% for Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android and others which, according to the linked Wikipedia article make up over 60% of (global) sales. The U.S. situation may be tilted in favour of RIM, Apple, and to a lesser extent Palm; but the numbers don't add up.
Damn, I totally skipped over that underbone in front of your motorcycle there. Hadn't even heard of that class, so thanks for the info :)
From an Aprilia RS125, for example. There are quite a few similar models around.
To me, it looks closer to a moped than a motorcycle, performs (70cc displacement, 40 mph top speed) closer to a moped (50cc displacement, 35 or so mph top speed) than a motorcycle (125+cc, 100+mph) and seems more similar in cost ($855) to a moped ($$2000).
Duck typing tells me it's a moped.
I don't mean to disdain it; used within it's scope (commuting a couple of kilometres through a busy congested metropolitan area) it's probably superior to a fully-grown motorcycle, but I don't see where, how or why it should be one.
Wired has slightly better coverage.
This is at best a moped, a far cry even from 2-stroke 125cc motorcycles. The ET-120 has some 70 ccs of displacement, producing (that's according to TFA) enough power to reach a top speed of 40 mph, no actual numbers on power or torque given. A modern 125cc 2-stroke motorcycle will produce some 33 bhp of power, 20 Nm of torque and reach top speeds in excess of 100 mph. At 280 mpg, its fuel consumption is quite nice, though, especially when compared to some 45 mpg one would get out of a standard 125cc motorcycle.
I, for one, am absolutely convinced that a train crossing the ocean (apart from that pesky tunnel) would be fucking awesome. And you know what else is awesome? Monster trucks. So what's the logical conclusion? Stick monster truck wheels on a train and it will cross the ocean. But it doesn't end there. Monster trucks are like SUVs but more awesome. Throw a bunch of trains with monster truck wheels into suburbia and they'll crush all the SUVs there. And just like that, BAM, global warming is solved. The only cars around will be Priuses because Prius owners are gay and don't fashion monster trucks. So paint the monster truck wheeled train pink and that's solved, too, killing not only Detroit but also Japan, which is mostly Toyota and a little bit of Honda. Whales around the world will rejoice. For three days. Then monster truck train safari is invented. Whales around the world are deep fried in monster truck train kitchens around the world. Now you can have your Fillet-O-Fish and eat another one, too. Also, whale cake, which is awesome!