Well, those seem easy, but many pictures are not that clearcut. And even with your pics, how do you know whether that kid is actually a "kid" rather than a 19 year old woman that happens to look very young?
Actually, I guess I think we might apply a little classical justice to this: if the plumber wants to accuse someone of child pornography, fine. If he was wrong and the accused is found innocent, however, the accuser should get punished.
The model described in the summary is old news; there has also been a lot of work on finding ways of avoiding the resulting traffic jams (for real-world driving, it turns out that it's quite important that drivers don't just look at the car in front of them but look several cars ahead).
Maybe these mathematicians happened to also figure out something new, but if they did, it's not mentioned in the summary.
But if you had pictures hanging on your wall depicting child pornography then yes you would be reported,
As if a plumber is qualified to determine whether pictures of naked children are child pornography or classical art.
Of course, the fundamental flaw here is not primarily that the plumber reports on people, it's that pictures have been made illegal and that people are encouraged to tell on other people. Child pornography is disgusting, but its possession should not be illegal precisely because the enforcement of such laws threatens to turn us into a police state.
What should be illegal, of course, is the production of child pornography because children are clearly harmed by that and because that is enforceable.
The blog entry looks like some roundabout way to try to plant the (erroneous) idea that patents equal innovation. The number of patents a tech company obtains depends mostly on how much money they are willing to spend on patents, nothing more. Microsoft made it their goal to get lots of patents to fight open source a few years ago, they have the money to do it, and they are following through. They are no more innovative now than they were a few years ago.
Just legalize performance enhancing drugs. I mean, why not? These athletes are already wrecking their bodies through sports, what difference does it make if they take drugs as well? Major sports are a freak show.
If you like sports, participate yourself, don't sit in front of the TV cheering on these guys.
Actually, Paul is the exception to his statement. With his policies, he's so likely to run the the country into the ground that no amount of military budget reduction can offset it
I don't think so: since he is willing to cut US defense spending and other expensive programs, even his massive cuts are paid for. US defense spending is the majority of discretionary federal US spending and it is completely disproportionate compared to all other nations.
Besides, Ron Paul's positions are statements of principles and goals; he can't decide many of them by himself and needs to develop a realistic plan with Congress. So, the question is not whether he will achieve all of them in eight years--it's clear he won't--the question is one of direction: do you want government to grow or do you want it to shrink.
Really? How many vendors of proprietary applications have their source repositories sitting on the Internet with a visible public interface and developers who may never have even met each other logging in from all over the world?
What does that have to do with anything? The repository was compromised because one of the developer's accounts was compromised. This also happens in companies.
In addition, I suspect that corporate developers are more likely than FOSS developers to put in backdoors themselves--because they think they are harder to catch.
The Enceladus flagship mission is one of four - along with those to Europa, Titan and Jupiter - competing for funding and currently under review by Nasa.
It's sad that not all four of them get funded. This kind of mission is much more important and interesting than the shuttle.
Our testicles, for example, hang from our undersides dangerously exposed, just because some protein denatures at core body temperatures. Apparently something needs to be redesigned that can't be made to work better with slow incremental improvements.
You're jumping to conclusions. There may be many reasons for this particular arrangement: as a visual signal of sexual maturity, as a way of permitting fights among males to conclude without permanent injury, DNA-related issues, to select against individuals taking dangerous risks, to give females a way of fighting back and controlling their reproduction, as a way of preventing reproduction before full maturity, as a way to prevent reproduction in the presence of certain genetic defects, etc.
so long as fundamental physical constraints are adhered to such as conservation of energy, rising entropy, etc.
There are far more constraints than that. For example, your "wheeled animal", when constructed from flesh and bones, may have a maximum range of 2 miles before it breaks down permanently. If you're trying to create an animal that "grows axles" out of some other material, it may be impractically big. Etc.
Don't believe for a moment that these issues are settled. Unlike people, corporations never give up. Corporate interests have forever to try to get this to pass, and they are going to keep at it. Sooner or later, through some unlucky constellation of political circumstances, popular distractions, etc. it will probably pass.
Apparently once again the 35MPG is a "fleet" standard, so not every vehicle has to meet it as long as the fleet as a whole does.
That's a good thing: it doesn't outright outlaw gas guzzlers (which people may need or want for all sorts of reasons), it just uses the market to price gas guzzlers correctly. If there is a high demand for gas guzzlers, then companies need to almost give away the economy models in order ot meet overall standards.
Add $50 or so worth of corrosion-resistant fittings and seals to that Chevy Subdivision so it can burn E85, and bingo: that 20MPG land bruiser now gets 30MPG in the eyes of the bill, raising fleet averages considerably.
Well, this may be a problem if the car can continue to be used with gasoline (which it can). If it were E85-only, it would be a great way of getting E85 adopted. But even so, if this manages to make most cars E85 compatible quickly, it's still a good thing.
And which in passing gives yet another sop to the corn/ethanol industry.
And what's wrong with that? We want renewable fuels, and those are the people who deliver it.
The best way to improve efficiency is market forces.
That's what fuel efficiency standards do: they raise the cost of producing gas guzzlers, since manufacturers need to adjust the prices of fuel efficient vehicles downwards to make the mix work out.
It's a great free market approach and preferable to simply increasing the price of gas further, which is regressive.
There is no clear and definite answer to what's in an encrypted file. Most importantly, someone may actually have forgotten the key, making it impossible for him to comply. Also, there are some techniques that result in different content for different passwords, meaning that the government can keep claiming that there is more stuff even when the defendant has already produced one password.
So, with a container, at worst, the government can force it open, and then everybody knows. But with encryption, a defendant simply cannot comply in some situations, and there is no way of telling whether an inability to hand over the keys is genuine or just a pretext.
Therefore, the answer is clear: nobody should be forced to hand over encryption keys; it simply doesn't make any sense to have such a requirement.
A lot of Google's projects have been steady gainers rather than swift victories. OpenSocial clearly has a tough road ahead, but I wouldn't count it out just because it's off to a slow start; that's simply to be expected for this kind of project.
I'm pretty convinced there's no app *yet* on Linux as easy/fun to use (as as well integrated with the other apps) as iMovie / iDVD
You know, I initially had high hopes for iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, and iPhoto; it's one of the reasons I got a Mac. But one by one, I gave up on those apps. They look great during demos, and seem like fun initially, but they don't scale, they don't work with many standard formats, they mangle their libraries, move files around, and they really try to make it hard to use anything other than Apple products.
The iApps are designed to sell Macs and other Apple products. In the end, getting my work done was more fun, which is why I do all my multimedia stuff on Linux now (the alternative would have been to shell out thousands for Apple's professional apps).
Hang on, you originally implied that with Linux, you didn't have to install third-party applications. So, it turns out you do have to manually install applications.
No, you don't have to "manually install" applications. You just tell the computer what you want to use, and the rest is automatic.
Most Mac apps are extremely simple to install (usually drag-n-drop to applications folder) - so I don't see how that is any more difficult than installing using a package manager.
That's a typical geek view. For non-technical users, Macintosh installs turn out to be a big source of confusion.
It comes up quite frequently, actually. It's unavoidable when an OS X upgrade fails (which they do from time to time), when the system disk fails, and when installed software makes the system slow or unstable.
No they don't, if they're new Mac users, their Mac comes pre-installed with Mac OS and the iLife suite as well as several third-party apps.
What comes pre-installed on a Mac is not sufficient for regular desktop usage; at the very least, you need an office suite, but many people need even more software.
Anyway, under Linux, how does Linux know which applications the new user wants to use?
Unlike Mac, which comes only with iLife, Linux comes with a full set of desktop applications. All those applications are listed in the "Applications" menu. If you need something unusual, you can select Applications > Add/Remove... and just click on what you want; the rest is automatic.
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Lack of JIT compilation is not a "show stopper"; MATLAB got along fine without it until fairly recently.
Well, those seem easy, but many pictures are not that clearcut. And even with your pics, how do you know whether that kid is actually a "kid" rather than a 19 year old woman that happens to look very young?
Actually, I guess I think we might apply a little classical justice to this: if the plumber wants to accuse someone of child pornography, fine. If he was wrong and the accused is found innocent, however, the accuser should get punished.
The model described in the summary is old news; there has also been a lot of work on finding ways of avoiding the resulting traffic jams (for real-world driving, it turns out that it's quite important that drivers don't just look at the car in front of them but look several cars ahead).
Maybe these mathematicians happened to also figure out something new, but if they did, it's not mentioned in the summary.
But if you had pictures hanging on your wall depicting child pornography then yes you would be reported,
As if a plumber is qualified to determine whether pictures of naked children are child pornography or classical art.
Of course, the fundamental flaw here is not primarily that the plumber reports on people, it's that pictures have been made illegal and that people are encouraged to tell on other people. Child pornography is disgusting, but its possession should not be illegal precisely because the enforcement of such laws threatens to turn us into a police state.
What should be illegal, of course, is the production of child pornography because children are clearly harmed by that and because that is enforceable.
"Bricking" a device means destroying hardware or destroying firmware in a way that cannot be recovered.
Merely destroying a Windows installation is not "bricking" a machine; Windows needs to be reinstalled from time to time anyway.
Get an Iliad or CyBook. They use the same display technology, they can read standard web content, feeds, RSS, and other formats. They also run Linux.
In contrast to those companies, both Amazon and Sony are trying to control the eBook market rather than producing a universal reader.
The blog entry looks like some roundabout way to try to plant the (erroneous) idea that patents equal innovation. The number of patents a tech company obtains depends mostly on how much money they are willing to spend on patents, nothing more. Microsoft made it their goal to get lots of patents to fight open source a few years ago, they have the money to do it, and they are following through. They are no more innovative now than they were a few years ago.
Just legalize performance enhancing drugs. I mean, why not? These athletes are already wrecking their bodies through sports, what difference does it make if they take drugs as well? Major sports are a freak show.
If you like sports, participate yourself, don't sit in front of the TV cheering on these guys.
Actually, Paul is the exception to his statement. With his policies, he's so likely to run the the country into the ground that no amount of military budget reduction can offset it
I don't think so: since he is willing to cut US defense spending and other expensive programs, even his massive cuts are paid for. US defense spending is the majority of discretionary federal US spending and it is completely disproportionate compared to all other nations.
Besides, Ron Paul's positions are statements of principles and goals; he can't decide many of them by himself and needs to develop a realistic plan with Congress. So, the question is not whether he will achieve all of them in eight years--it's clear he won't--the question is one of direction: do you want government to grow or do you want it to shrink.
Really? How many vendors of proprietary applications have their source repositories sitting on the Internet with a visible public interface and developers who may never have even met each other logging in from all over the world?
What does that have to do with anything? The repository was compromised because one of the developer's accounts was compromised. This also happens in companies.
In addition, I suspect that corporate developers are more likely than FOSS developers to put in backdoors themselves--because they think they are harder to catch.
The Enceladus flagship mission is one of four - along with those to Europa, Titan and Jupiter - competing for funding and currently under review by Nasa.
It's sad that not all four of them get funded. This kind of mission is much more important and interesting than the shuttle.
Our testicles, for example, hang from our undersides dangerously exposed, just because some protein denatures at core body temperatures. Apparently something needs to be redesigned that can't be made to work better with slow incremental improvements.
You're jumping to conclusions. There may be many reasons for this particular arrangement: as a visual signal of sexual maturity, as a way of permitting fights among males to conclude without permanent injury, DNA-related issues, to select against individuals taking dangerous risks, to give females a way of fighting back and controlling their reproduction, as a way of preventing reproduction before full maturity, as a way to prevent reproduction in the presence of certain genetic defects, etc.
so long as fundamental physical constraints are adhered to such as conservation of energy, rising entropy, etc.
There are far more constraints than that. For example, your "wheeled animal", when constructed from flesh and bones, may have a maximum range of 2 miles before it breaks down permanently. If you're trying to create an animal that "grows axles" out of some other material, it may be impractically big. Etc.
You thought that was Joe Lieberman? :-)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=3712993&mesg_id=3713030
Don't believe for a moment that these issues are settled. Unlike people, corporations never give up. Corporate interests have forever to try to get this to pass, and they are going to keep at it. Sooner or later, through some unlucky constellation of political circumstances, popular distractions, etc. it will probably pass.
What is that supposed to mean? Fidel Castro is trying to pass as the bearded lady?
CO is oxidised to CO2 in the cat,
Cats generally turn CO into carboxyhemoglobin and then expire.
Apparently once again the 35MPG is a "fleet" standard, so not every vehicle has to meet it as long as the fleet as a whole does.
That's a good thing: it doesn't outright outlaw gas guzzlers (which people may need or want for all sorts of reasons), it just uses the market to price gas guzzlers correctly. If there is a high demand for gas guzzlers, then companies need to almost give away the economy models in order ot meet overall standards.
Add $50 or so worth of corrosion-resistant fittings and seals to that Chevy Subdivision so it can burn E85, and bingo: that 20MPG land bruiser now gets 30MPG in the eyes of the bill, raising fleet averages considerably.
Well, this may be a problem if the car can continue to be used with gasoline (which it can). If it were E85-only, it would be a great way of getting E85 adopted. But even so, if this manages to make most cars E85 compatible quickly, it's still a good thing.
And which in passing gives yet another sop to the corn/ethanol industry.
And what's wrong with that? We want renewable fuels, and those are the people who deliver it.
The best way to improve efficiency is market forces.
That's what fuel efficiency standards do: they raise the cost of producing gas guzzlers, since manufacturers need to adjust the prices of fuel efficient vehicles downwards to make the mix work out.
It's a great free market approach and preferable to simply increasing the price of gas further, which is regressive.
There is no clear and definite answer to what's in an encrypted file. Most importantly, someone may actually have forgotten the key, making it impossible for him to comply. Also, there are some techniques that result in different content for different passwords, meaning that the government can keep claiming that there is more stuff even when the defendant has already produced one password.
So, with a container, at worst, the government can force it open, and then everybody knows. But with encryption, a defendant simply cannot comply in some situations, and there is no way of telling whether an inability to hand over the keys is genuine or just a pretext.
Therefore, the answer is clear: nobody should be forced to hand over encryption keys; it simply doesn't make any sense to have such a requirement.
If you feel someone hasn't complied with your license, then enforce your rights.
Going closed source because of a license abuse of a single individual just shows Brewster wasn't serious about open source in the first place.
A lot of Google's projects have been steady gainers rather than swift victories. OpenSocial clearly has a tough road ahead, but I wouldn't count it out just because it's off to a slow start; that's simply to be expected for this kind of project.
I'm pretty convinced there's no app *yet* on Linux as easy/fun to use (as as well integrated with the other apps) as iMovie / iDVD
You know, I initially had high hopes for iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, and iPhoto; it's one of the reasons I got a Mac. But one by one, I gave up on those apps. They look great during demos, and seem like fun initially, but they don't scale, they don't work with many standard formats, they mangle their libraries, move files around, and they really try to make it hard to use anything other than Apple products.
The iApps are designed to sell Macs and other Apple products. In the end, getting my work done was more fun, which is why I do all my multimedia stuff on Linux now (the alternative would have been to shell out thousands for Apple's professional apps).
The ability to use the same multimedia files from iPhoto, to iMovie, to Mail, to iWeb, etc make the significant difference
I don't see any functional difference there: the equivalent Gnome and KDE apps also allow you to use "the same multimedia files" across all apps.
In my case, the iApps are an important part of my use of a computer.
Translation: you're used to them.
Hang on, you originally implied that with Linux, you didn't have to install third-party applications. So, it turns out you do have to manually install applications.
No, you don't have to "manually install" applications. You just tell the computer what you want to use, and the rest is automatic.
Most Mac apps are extremely simple to install (usually drag-n-drop to applications folder) - so I don't see how that is any more difficult than installing using a package manager.
That's a typical geek view. For non-technical users, Macintosh installs turn out to be a big source of confusion.
So, how often is that going to come up?
It comes up quite frequently, actually. It's unavoidable when an OS X upgrade fails (which they do from time to time), when the system disk fails, and when installed software makes the system slow or unstable.
No they don't, if they're new Mac users, their Mac comes pre-installed with Mac OS and the iLife suite as well as several third-party apps.
What comes pre-installed on a Mac is not sufficient for regular desktop usage; at the very least, you need an office suite, but many people need even more software.
Anyway, under Linux, how does Linux know which applications the new user wants to use?
Unlike Mac, which comes only with iLife, Linux comes with a full set of desktop applications. All those applications are listed in the "Applications" menu. If you need something unusual, you can select Applications > Add/Remove... and just click on what you want; the rest is automatic.