Well, with fuel-prices going up, I'm sure the US will learn quickly. Actually, they're in for a steep learning curve.
By contrast, in Zurich here it's not uncommon even for high-level bank-employees to get to work by public-transport. Lack of parking-space helps there, though.
Ah, well. Computers in Africa...2nd hand or not. There's no electricity for maybe 95% of the population 95% of the day (ZA excluded). So, this stuff mostly worthless, comparable to the proverbial fridge in the Arctic (well, global warming may actually kill this joke...)
As others have pointed out: Africa must
- get its shit together
- not spend so much on military
- spend more for the whole population
- not for the relatives of the guy in power at the moment
- build up social systems, educational system etc that dev-aid and NGOs are currently doing for all the dictators who in turn take the money to swiss banks and weapon-dealers...
In short: get rid of nepotism and civil wars.
All this talk about famins etc and "we should let the surplus population die" - relax: due to several factors (peak oil, exhaustion of other stuff like phosphate that artifical fertilizer is made of, China + India with higher meat-consumption etc.pp.), producing agricultural products will get much more expensive here in the 1st world. I don't think people can imagine how expensive it will get and and how much they will have to pay for stuff. As a result, we will not be able to sustain the food-aid projects like in the last decades - simply because there will not be any surplus food around here to send down - there hardly isn't today already, UN food aid program costs have already skyrocketed to the point where FAO is scrambling to pay for the costs.
For Africa, it will mean more wars, more problems, more deaths, more catastrophes - but it will also have unprecedented consequences on our life.
Now, the students' confidential. detailed Vulnerability Assessment Report to the MBTA is out in public, thanks to the wise guys submitting it to the court (as "Exhibit A"). Apart from the fact that the MBTA would have normally paid five-figures to receive such a report from some risk-management firm, it also lists a few of the glaring shortcomings of the system.
Who in his right mind would store the (money-equivalent) value of a card on the card itself? Even my university back in the 90s was smart enough not to do that for such a simple thing as a cafeteria-card (the card had a number on it - all data was stored on a PC in the backroom). Hello, McFly - anybody at home? It's no longer 1972, where you needed 30k of equipment to read and write data from a smart-card or swipe-card. It's 21st century now. Fraudsters have made a business over stuff with much less profit than in this case. And trying to keep the information about all this stuff secret has helped spread the news about the talk all over the web. What a great achievement.
> Drugs are not being pushed into this country, they > are being pulled in, by America's insatiable > demand, and the drug trade will exist as long as > the demand remains.
Exactly. Unfortunately, it's an inconvenient truth.
I don't think so. After all, it wouldn't make sense. AFAIK, he can stilly barely speak Russian. There was a longer story online somewhere talking about the relationship to Nina and how it developed. Maybe also on the Wired threat-level blog. There are enough Europeans, too, traveling to Ukraine+Russia each year, literally "shopping" for a women. He's not unique. Only a uniquely bad ending. I really pity both parties.
> "No, that's not true," answered Sharanova, who had > testified earlier Reiser and her daughter met when > Nina went with a friend who was to meet Reiser at > a cafe to act as a translator.
> Since when is a 19 year old, of age to vote, > considered a "boy"?
Because he can't legally buy alcohol (in the US)? He can happily buy milk-shakes, ice-cream, lolly-pops and orange-juice, though. Sounds like he's still a boy:-)))
It's arguable that Werner Von Braun, father of the V-2, was also instrumental in getting the US to the moon (solving some of the really hard parts of development of the Saturn V). I'm not sure what Von Braun's political stance was. .. It's save to say that he would join whomever would offer to pay his bills (and boy did the Apollo program rack-up bills). USA probably offered the best overall package.
Germany in 33-45 offered possibilities to scientists or entrepreneurs who were unscrupulous and obsessed enough that would never every arise again in history. It's only comparable with the building of the pyramids. It's said that war shoes the best and worst in people. In Werner von Brauns case, it's probably both. He was smart enough to see when the end was inevitable and moved all of his staff, all of his research, notes, drawings, construction-plans and even most of the physical material (prototypes etc.) into the US-zone at the end of the war. That was his "get out of jail"-card.
This has nothing to do with Hans Reiser, though. Hans Reiser is no Werner von Braun. He's got no "get out of jail"-card.
As I recall, he said the V2 being used as a weapon was "his darkest day" because he wanted it used for space travel.
Whether it influenced his joining the SS or not, civilian rocketry was forbidden by the Nazi party, so it was either join them or don't do it. While I don't know his personal beliefs, in many ways he was a victim of circumstance - he was an SS officer before he claimed to have known about the deaths in labor camps (though I'm sure he knew they were anti-semitic) and at one point was under investigation by the gestapo during the war for anti-patriotic thinking. Given the situation and the government running a police state spying and incarcerating anyone that opposed them, I imagine he felt powerless to change it. Giving Werner von Braun the benefit of the doubt is noble (I'm German), but there is one thing that smart people in Germany during 33-45 realized: if you are unscrupulous, there is no limit how far you can get. Like all scientists, he had a dream he would sacrifice anything for. Even the lifes of others. British people are still outraged over the fact the the guy responsible for bombing London would sit next to a pool in Texas in the late 40s instead of the trial-bench in Nurenberg. During the Nazi-reign, nearly nearly endless resources could get committed to your project - if you had the buy-in of the handful of top-brass that were able to directly talk to the Fuehrer and influence him.
You clearly have no idea of anything in this area. The reason most of Africa is in constant need of aid is that a lot of the stuff that gets "sent" there in turn destroys what little of a functioning economy is still left there (take for example shipments of chicken-meat, subsidized by EU, destroying the business of local chicken farmers). In addition, the various financial donations allow most of Africa's dictators to spend most of their cash on weapons and enriching themselves and their cousins - instead of building a school-system, a health- and social security system. That's what NGOs, foreign governments, Red Cross and who else not does for them. I'm really sick of people like you who think it's a question of dumping enough food there - it's clearly not.
The best way to "heal" Africa would really be to leave it alone. And don't ship any weapons there anymore, first of all.
Well, as hardly more than 50% go to the ballot anyway, and of those who do go, the vote is pretty much evenly devided between the two almost identically streamlined candidates, one could argue that elections are merely a charade anyway. Entertainment for the masses, if you want. As industry-lobbyists, pressure groups and political activity committees have most parties and politicians in most countries of the world literally by the balls (hi Eliot...), elections become less and less important every day.
Too bad for those, who died for our "freedom" today. It will be interesting to see what emerges from the current political, ethical and socio-economic statement of bankruptcy of our society that is so overtly delivered to us via TV/web every day. Unfortunately, we are all part of it, not just mere by-standers who can watch the events as they unfold.
> The only way to be sure about archiving email is to copy all messages immediately on the server-side. Incidentally, it's easy to do that with > Exchange (and most other enterprise email systems).
Qmail: compile qmail with QEXTRA set and use the qmail-tap patch from init7.
Or postfix+always-bcc. But you still need some kind of archiving solution anyway...
Are you new here? Honestly, this is a classic, almost Hollywood-style presidential-aid-villain-style tactic. First, you dry up all the funding to something so that you can later claim there was not enough money to do it right. And in the process of doing it "not right" some important stuff gets lost so the people in charge can't be charged later (which they can't anyway, because presidents make a habit of indemnifying their successors and most of the senior staff around them, because if they wouldn't, their successor wouldn't indemnify them...).
Still wondering why people actually get out of their bed and vote?
> Um. Have you ever tried making ice cream from 100% cream?
No, but if I remember the recipes from the ice-cream maker of my mother correctly, it usually consists of yoghurt and a varying amount of wipped cream. Of course, this is only good for immediate consumption (because it will freeze to a concrete block in the freezer) - but that's true for almost all convenience-products, in some way or other.
I always found it distracting to have a laptop in a meeting. It's OK when you have one designated note-taker. Everybody else just uses the laptop to goof off. I wouldn't take it there anyway.
I don't know. I'm German;-) There's probably "good" icecream out there - it's just incredibly hard to find. And then, one can make his own, via an icecream-maker and a cook-book.
> BUT: why should ice cream substitute soybean oil for milk fat?
If you take a look at the ingredients (and in Germany, most ice-cream doesn't look that scary, yet), you'll see that, depending on the price, most ice-cream basically consists of "waste products" that occur when you process milk. Take butter, for example. Butter is made from milk. If you take out most of the fat from milk, you end up with butter on one side and skimmed milk on the other side. The market for skimmed milk is not exactly bustling, so you have to use it for something else. My mom tells me that they used to use it to feed pigs on the farm, when she was young. Nowadays, it's put into ice-cream. Of course, if you would make ice-cream from skimmed milk, it would be just a block of frozen water. So you've got to put fat into it again. In Germany, I see mostly margarine put in as a "butter"/cream replacement, but maybe this is just an euphemism for using soybean-fat, too. Of course, all the rest of the stuff in a typical bargain-icecream also only serves the purpose of "fixing" an otherwise broken product.
Your question about why the manufactures just don't use "real" milk and cream actually has to anwsers: a) price - icecream would be much more expensive and people wouldn't be able to afford it in large quantities. It would be a luxury b) people would get pretty fat pretty fast from such an ice-cream (cream has 80something % fat). By having somehow less fat in there, people can eat more (thus buy more). Profit !!!
I usually avoid supermarket-icecream (which is, of course, also served in restaurants). It's really sad, but I don't really consider it "ice cream" anymore. It's a scam. But people like to believe it's still "ice cream". I guess, they'd also like to believe that soilent green is actually a cookie made from spelt.;-)
I think I'll buy an ice-cream machine for the summer...
FreeBSD is not without problems, but I still don't see a replacement on the horizon any time soon. And FreeBSD does have a leadership. If the ports-system would work 105% on (Open)Solaris, I'd change ship for most bigger servers. As it stands, a lot of stuff that doesn't involve a complicated software-stack is going to make this switch in the mid term here. Provided, I can streamline the installation enough and we get the patching process under control. But anything with weird PHP dependencies (and that includes, strictly speaking, phpMyAdmin) is a real big time-killer on anything else but FreeBSD.
The irony here is that if you follow his link you'll see that the display that is sold with this PC actually displays the default MacOS X Tiger backdrop.
I also don't believe that the box sold above is as silent as an iMac. They don't tell you which motherboard you buy and who supplied the graphic-card. Good luck getting a BIOS update for it, if it's some OEMed non-standard stuff that the supplier (DFI, ASUS, ASROCK - you name them) simple refuses to acknowledge the pure existence of... This machine is only good for gaming (and which games draw support from quad-core chips anyway?) - for the rest it's oversized. A Mac Mini with 2 GB RAM and iWork costs about 700 UKP and will be sufficient for 99.9% of the purposes. It's also small, beautiful and silent.
Also, 2 GB RAM is really the minimum for running Vista...
> What do you mean none of their other activities are successful? > The XBox 360 has become the best gaming platform for hardcore gamers,
Which is a niche-market to start with.
> beating out the over-hyped (and -priced) Playstation 3.
But it got beaten by the Wii, which has a broader appeal and is more "family-friendly". Which you conveniently left-out;-)
> I'd say MS's game console division is quite successful.
If you call sinking at least 6 billion in hard cash over the years before finally making a small profit in a single quarter (until now) "a success", then, yes, the division is successful. There must even be people in MSFT who believe the same and pay the execs there boni.
But the fact is: MSFT will *never* make back the money they put into the XBox (and later projects) - it's a money sink that would have killed every other company. Though, investors would have stopped the project long ago.
Currently, MSFT seems to be suffocating from themselves. AAPL and GOOG are standing aside while counting their cash. Especially AAPL: do you realize that AAPL currently sits on some 15 billion USD of hard cash, adding about, I think, between a half and a full billion per quarter to it? They don't have a single project (even Apple-TV) that doesn't at least turn a small profit.
> unless you're just using it for simple word processing (little more than a text editor could do)
Incidentially, that's how a large portion of the large amount of users who use MS-Word actually use it: like an electronic typewriter. I wonder how many people actually use tabs... MSFT probably knows - and has no answer to this other then removing or crippling wordpad.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, with fuel-prices going up, I'm sure the US will learn quickly.
Actually, they're in for a steep learning curve.
By contrast, in Zurich here it's not uncommon even for high-level bank-employees to get to work by public-transport.
Lack of parking-space helps there, though.
Ah, well.
Computers in Africa...2nd hand or not.
There's no electricity for maybe 95% of the population 95% of the day (ZA excluded). So, this stuff mostly worthless, comparable to the proverbial fridge in the Arctic (well, global warming may actually kill this joke...)
As others have pointed out: Africa must
- get its shit together
- not spend so much on military
- spend more for the whole population
- not for the relatives of the guy in power at the moment
- build up social systems, educational system etc that dev-aid and NGOs are currently doing for all the dictators who in turn take the money to swiss banks and weapon-dealers...
In short: get rid of nepotism and civil wars.
All this talk about famins etc and "we should let the surplus population die" - relax: due to several factors (peak oil, exhaustion of other stuff like phosphate that artifical fertilizer is made of, China + India with higher meat-consumption etc.pp.), producing agricultural products will get much more expensive here in the 1st world. I don't think people can imagine how expensive it will get and and how much they will have to pay for stuff.
As a result, we will not be able to sustain the food-aid projects like in the last decades - simply because there will not be any surplus food around here to send down - there hardly isn't today already, UN food aid program costs have already skyrocketed to the point where FAO is scrambling to pay for the costs.
For Africa, it will mean more wars, more problems, more deaths, more catastrophes - but it will also have unprecedented consequences on our life.
Now, the students' confidential. detailed Vulnerability Assessment Report to the MBTA is out in public, thanks to the wise guys submitting it to the court (as "Exhibit A").
Apart from the fact that the MBTA would have normally paid five-figures to receive such a report from some risk-management firm, it also lists a few of the glaring shortcomings of the system.
Who in his right mind would store the (money-equivalent) value of a card on the card itself?
Even my university back in the 90s was smart enough not to do that for such a simple thing as a cafeteria-card (the card had a number on it - all data was stored on a PC in the backroom).
Hello, McFly - anybody at home?
It's no longer 1972, where you needed 30k of equipment to read and write data from a smart-card or swipe-card.
It's 21st century now. Fraudsters have made a business over stuff with much less profit than in this case.
And trying to keep the information about all this stuff secret has helped spread the news about the talk all over the web.
What a great achievement.
> Drugs are not being pushed into this country, they
> are being pulled in, by America's insatiable
> demand, and the drug trade will exist as long as
> the demand remains.
Exactly.
Unfortunately, it's an inconvenient truth.
I don't think so.
After all, it wouldn't make sense. AFAIK, he can stilly barely speak Russian.
There was a longer story online somewhere talking about the relationship to Nina and how it developed.
Maybe also on the Wired threat-level blog.
There are enough Europeans, too, traveling to Ukraine+Russia each year, literally "shopping" for a women. He's not unique. Only a uniquely bad ending.
I really pity both parties.
Hm. I thought I had read that differently.
Actually, it seems to that both may be true:
> "No, that's not true," answered Sharanova, who had
> testified earlier Reiser and her daughter met when
> Nina went with a friend who was to meet Reiser at
> a cafe to act as a translator.
From: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20080214/ai_n21416688
Unfortunately, I can't post and moderate ;-)
Actually, his wife worked as a translator and he met her while meeting with prospective Russian brides...
> Since when is a 19 year old, of age to vote,
> considered a "boy"?
Because he can't legally buy alcohol (in the US)? :-)))
He can happily buy milk-shakes, ice-cream, lolly-pops and orange-juice, though.
Sounds like he's still a boy
'Nuff said. ;-)
But it's the effort that counts, isn't it?
USA probably offered the best overall package.
Germany in 33-45 offered possibilities to scientists or entrepreneurs who were unscrupulous and obsessed enough that would never every arise again in history. It's only comparable with the building of the pyramids.
It's said that war shoes the best and worst in people. In Werner von Brauns case, it's probably both. He was smart enough to see when the end was inevitable and moved all of his staff, all of his research, notes, drawings, construction-plans and even most of the physical material (prototypes etc.) into the US-zone at the end of the war. That was his "get out of jail"-card.
This has nothing to do with Hans Reiser, though.
Hans Reiser is no Werner von Braun. He's got no "get out of jail"-card.
Whether it influenced his joining the SS or not, civilian rocketry was forbidden by the Nazi party, so it was either join them or don't do it. While I don't know his personal beliefs, in many ways he was a victim of circumstance - he was an SS officer before he claimed to have known about the deaths in labor camps (though I'm sure he knew they were anti-semitic) and at one point was under investigation by the gestapo during the war for anti-patriotic thinking. Given the situation and the government running a police state spying and incarcerating anyone that opposed them, I imagine he felt powerless to change it. Giving Werner von Braun the benefit of the doubt is noble (I'm German), but there is one thing that smart people in Germany during 33-45 realized: if you are unscrupulous, there is no limit how far you can get.
Like all scientists, he had a dream he would sacrifice anything for. Even the lifes of others.
British people are still outraged over the fact the the guy responsible for bombing London would sit next to a pool in Texas in the late 40s instead of the trial-bench in Nurenberg.
During the Nazi-reign, nearly nearly endless resources could get committed to your project - if you had the buy-in of the handful of top-brass that were able to directly talk to the Fuehrer and influence him.
You clearly have no idea of anything in this area.
The reason most of Africa is in constant need of aid is that a lot of the stuff that gets "sent" there in turn destroys what little of a functioning economy is still left there (take for example shipments of chicken-meat, subsidized by EU, destroying the business of local chicken farmers).
In addition, the various financial donations allow most of Africa's dictators to spend most of their cash on weapons and enriching themselves and their cousins - instead of building a school-system, a health- and social security system.
That's what NGOs, foreign governments, Red Cross and who else not does for them.
I'm really sick of people like you who think it's a question of dumping enough food there - it's clearly not.
The best way to "heal" Africa would really be to leave it alone.
And don't ship any weapons there anymore, first of all.
Well, until Steve Jobs says so. ;-)
Well, as hardly more than 50% go to the ballot anyway, and of those who do go, the vote is pretty much evenly devided between the two almost identically streamlined candidates, one could argue that elections are merely a charade anyway. Entertainment for the masses, if you want.
As industry-lobbyists, pressure groups and political activity committees have most parties and politicians in most countries of the world literally by the balls (hi Eliot...), elections become less and less important every day.
Too bad for those, who died for our "freedom" today.
It will be interesting to see what emerges from the current political, ethical and socio-economic statement of bankruptcy of our society that is so overtly delivered to us via TV/web every day.
Unfortunately, we are all part of it, not just mere by-standers who can watch the events as they unfold.
> The only way to be sure about archiving email is to copy all messages immediately on the server-side. Incidentally, it's easy to do that with
> Exchange (and most other enterprise email systems).
Qmail: compile qmail with QEXTRA set and use the qmail-tap patch from init7.
Or postfix+always-bcc.
But you still need some kind of archiving solution anyway...
Are you new here?
Honestly, this is a classic, almost Hollywood-style presidential-aid-villain-style tactic.
First, you dry up all the funding to something so that you can later claim there was not enough money to do it right.
And in the process of doing it "not right" some important stuff gets lost so the people in charge can't be charged later (which they can't anyway, because presidents make a habit of indemnifying their successors and most of the senior staff around them, because if they wouldn't, their successor wouldn't indemnify them...).
Still wondering why people actually get out of their bed and vote?
> Um. Have you ever tried making ice cream from 100% cream?
No, but if I remember the recipes from the ice-cream maker of my mother correctly, it usually consists of yoghurt and a varying amount of wipped cream.
Of course, this is only good for immediate consumption (because it will freeze to a concrete block in the freezer) - but that's true for almost all convenience-products, in some way or other.
I always found it distracting to have a laptop in a meeting.
It's OK when you have one designated note-taker.
Everybody else just uses the laptop to goof off.
I wouldn't take it there anyway.
It keeps you awake in those meetings that seem to take *forever*.
Just keep in touch with your Dell laptop.
> Is Ben & Jerry's made from decent ingredients?
;-)
I don't know. I'm German
There's probably "good" icecream out there - it's just incredibly hard to find.
And then, one can make his own, via an icecream-maker and a cook-book.
Why not tattoo a number on every prisoners' arm?
Oops, we had that before.
Nevermind...
Yeah, I hate criminals. Some should never be let out.
But they are still humans. Not cattle.
> BUT: why should ice cream substitute soybean oil for milk fat?
;-)
If you take a look at the ingredients (and in Germany, most ice-cream doesn't look that scary, yet), you'll see that, depending on the price, most ice-cream basically consists of "waste products" that occur when you process milk. Take butter, for example. Butter is made from milk. If you take out most of the fat from milk, you end up with butter on one side and skimmed milk on the other side.
The market for skimmed milk is not exactly bustling, so you have to use it for something else. My mom tells me that they used to use it to feed pigs on the farm, when she was young.
Nowadays, it's put into ice-cream. Of course, if you would make ice-cream from skimmed milk, it would be just a block of frozen water. So you've got to put fat into it again. In Germany, I see mostly margarine put in as a "butter"/cream replacement, but maybe this is just an euphemism for using soybean-fat, too.
Of course, all the rest of the stuff in a typical bargain-icecream also only serves the purpose of "fixing" an otherwise broken product.
Your question about why the manufactures just don't use "real" milk and cream actually has to anwsers:
a) price - icecream would be much more expensive and people wouldn't be able to afford it in large quantities. It would be a luxury
b) people would get pretty fat pretty fast from such an ice-cream (cream has 80something % fat). By having somehow less fat in there, people can eat more (thus buy more). Profit !!!
I usually avoid supermarket-icecream (which is, of course, also served in restaurants). It's really sad, but I don't really consider it "ice cream" anymore. It's a scam. But people like to believe it's still "ice cream". I guess, they'd also like to believe that soilent green is actually a cookie made from spelt.
I think I'll buy an ice-cream machine for the summer...
FreeBSD is not without problems, but I still don't see a replacement on the horizon any time soon.
And FreeBSD does have a leadership.
If the ports-system would work 105% on (Open)Solaris, I'd change ship for most bigger servers. As it stands, a lot of stuff that doesn't involve a complicated software-stack is going to make this switch in the mid term here. Provided, I can streamline the installation enough and we get the patching process under control.
But anything with weird PHP dependencies (and that includes, strictly speaking, phpMyAdmin) is a real big time-killer on anything else but FreeBSD.
The irony here is that if you follow his link you'll see that the display that is sold with this PC actually displays the default MacOS X Tiger backdrop.
I also don't believe that the box sold above is as silent as an iMac.
They don't tell you which motherboard you buy and who supplied the graphic-card. Good luck getting a BIOS update for it, if it's some OEMed non-standard stuff that the supplier (DFI, ASUS, ASROCK - you name them) simple refuses to acknowledge the pure existence of...
This machine is only good for gaming (and which games draw support from quad-core chips anyway?) - for the rest it's oversized.
A Mac Mini with 2 GB RAM and iWork costs about 700 UKP and will be sufficient for 99.9% of the purposes. It's also small, beautiful and silent.
Also, 2 GB RAM is really the minimum for running Vista...
> What do you mean none of their other activities are successful?
;-)
> The XBox 360 has become the best gaming platform for hardcore gamers,
Which is a niche-market to start with.
> beating out the over-hyped (and -priced) Playstation 3.
But it got beaten by the Wii, which has a broader appeal and is more "family-friendly".
Which you conveniently left-out
> I'd say MS's game console division is quite successful.
If you call sinking at least 6 billion in hard cash over the years before finally making a small profit in a single quarter (until now) "a success", then, yes, the division is successful.
There must even be people in MSFT who believe the same and pay the execs there boni.
But the fact is: MSFT will *never* make back the money they put into the XBox (and later projects) - it's a money sink that would have killed every other company. Though, investors would have stopped the project long ago.
Currently, MSFT seems to be suffocating from themselves. AAPL and GOOG are standing aside while counting their cash.
Especially AAPL: do you realize that AAPL currently sits on some 15 billion USD of hard cash, adding about, I think, between a half and a full billion per quarter to it? They don't have a single project (even Apple-TV) that doesn't at least turn a small profit.
> unless you're just using it for simple word processing (little more than a text editor could do)
Incidentially, that's how a large portion of the large amount of users who use MS-Word actually use it: like an electronic typewriter.
I wonder how many people actually use tabs...
MSFT probably knows - and has no answer to this other then removing or crippling wordpad.