I faintly remember that the French government tried something like that some years ago, only to have the server receiving the forwarded Spam crash under the load..
I'm not sure that the 'vicinity of a computer' is the important, it's more a human problem: if you can reach a big enough number of human, there is a high probability that you'll find one dumb/ill enough to believe you..
I've spent quite some time evaluating Python and Ruby as I was trying to find the "best", my conclusion was that these language were twins, they had exactly the same qualities (with a little preference for Ruby), but Python doesn't suit my boss either..
The thing: with the number of tools written in shell&Perl, you cannot avoid having those two installed, and advocating a *third* interpreter is a hard sell (plus he didn't like the space indentation of Python).
>Remember this is in Communist China. The press loves to tell us that China is now post-communism since it allows citizens to own businesses.
And? Your post suggest that having the freedom to own business is the same as having freedom of press, speech, etc of course those are very different freedom. So yes, China is post-communism, it is still a dictatorship governed by a kind of oligarchy.
>I wouldn't mind paying $200 for the XO, even if just to see how it ticks.
I doubt that you'd like this version as the keyboard is made for children (smaller keys)..
But yes with a normal keyboard, the high black&white DPI, 1.5kg and nearly 0 power consumption for still display, rugged design, all this would make the OLPC a *very nice* book-reader.
And one which can read pdf instead of being restricted to proprietary formats..
Well for me, the more I used Perl, the less I liked it so I'm not surprised that Perl's popularity has faded..
When I was taught Perl, I thought 'cool a better, more powerful, portable shell' and then I had to maintain Perl's code, some written by beginners and some by 'experts'.. And I discovered what a mess Perl is..
Sure it's portable but the language don't give you the correct defaults so beginners code is usually awful AND experienced Perl coders let them sucked by TWTDI which makes their code hard to maintain by anybody else..
It takes *a lot* of self-discipline to write maintainable/readable Perl, so not surprisingly lots of Perl code is junk.
Hating Perl, I looked for another language and found Ruby which unfortunately I don't use that much as my boss won't let me do it (not widespread enough for him), *sigh* such a beautiful language and having to use shell or Perl instead..
>I fully disagree. Anything that helps us expand our sphere of empathy helps. Working on one will likely have a positive effect on the other.
Uh? When Lady Di died, people felt a lot of grief even though they only "knew" her though TV and mags, yet people still don't talk to their neighbours and couldn't care less when they die..
Soldiers 'empathysing' with the robots they use, don't prevent them to use the same robots to kill other humans!
>First, why would there be a single dominant OS Because application writers tries to reduce their cost by supporting only one OS?
As for your other points, I agree but note that while Linux has some mechanism to run untrusted binaries in a sandbox, they aren't currently provided to the user in a easy-to-use way, so in practice it isn't much better than windows here..
You're contradicting yourself: as you said a riot is a *REaction*, so what was the action? Two triggers: 1- the state of the suburbs in France 2- some stupid speech of Sarkozy
While Sarkozy cannot be seen as responsible of (1) (the over-concentration of suburb for poors creating ghettos), when he was the mayor of a rich town, this town paid money to avoid having social housing on their area so with him as a president, it is quite likely that the ghettos will grow.
Plus he is for 'tough police' and has even insulted policemen which do 'proximity action' (maintain social relationship such as sport action, etc). He is seen as a guy who despise the poor, and he makes stupid speech about 'order' even though the truth is that in some suburb, the police is not able to maintain order.
So with all this, I expect Sarkozy to trigger big riots in 2-3 years, maybe not at the scale of 1968, but they'll be quite big.
> Frankly it appeared that [France] was right regarding Iraq.
Well, you know that the bearer of bad news isn't welcomed usually whatever the truth is..
I'm French, so maybe I'm biased, but the mess that the US went into was obvious, the only things which surprised me is that Americans elected again Bush after he wasted billions of taxpayers dollars in a war started under false reason (no WMD: either he's a liar or an incompetent).
The only non obvious thing about this mess, is how it'll end..
>"I am going to take your code, make a small change and call it mine" that wouldn't exist if no copyright existed in the first place.
Why do you say that having 'no copyright' would remove 'I am going to take your code, make a small change and call it mine'?
If there was no copyright, you could copy the binary as much as you want, but that doesn't mean that you could get an easy access to the source code as the GPL provide. Sure, without the copyright, the incentive to 'hide the source' is reduced, but even without copyright some would take code, enhance it and still hide the result, just for the publicity benefit for example: being the one who distribute the 'official version' of the binary has some benefits..
>Sarkozy is seen as a divisive figure for his demand that immigrants learn Western values
Sarkozy is seen as a divisive figure not for the reason written, but because when he was in the government he triggered the 'suburb riots' due to his foolish comments.
While coding an OS in BASIC is a pretty stupid idea (and the presentation 'mechanism' in the article is a strange way to manage a company), the fact that Gates didn't take personally the 'your code is crap' is a good point.
One of the real question is: why IEEE standardised the WEP in the first place? If they made such basic mistakes in security on one standard, what prevents them to do other identical mistakes.
Sure, it tough to devise 100% secure scheme, but there is a huge difference between coming with say MD5 which took years to be broken and WEP which was seen as broken as soon as it was studied by security experts..
Well, it's *misplaced* moral: ReiserFS is the collective work of a bunch of people (some of whom are still maintaining it, despite not earning money for it).
Even assuming that Reiser killed his wife, why would you 'punish' his collaborators which also worked on the project with him?
Let's suppose that Reiser sent a one-line patch to the Linux kernel, would you stop using Linux? Clearly no, so at which percentage does Reiser contribution matter enough to stop using a product?
I don't know you, but I find the last question *ridiculous* which show quite well, that describing the use of a software product as a moral issue is absurd.
PS: I did have the same questions when one famous French singer killed a woman, I was wondering if it's right to buy CDs from his old group or not, then thought that he was part of a team, and there 's no real reason to punish the whole team because of the lead singer's behaviour.
Well, this could maybe reduce the heat generated by the laser diode itself (don't know if this improvement is applicable to this part), but there will still be the heat generated by the laser beam on the CD, which of course is lower but it'll still be there.
>64% merely shows that alot of Linux users prefer the commandline, because it is quite powerful and efficient.
Note that it can be because the commandline is efficient or because the GUI tools provided by the distribution sucks: a long time ago, Mandrake's upgrade tool was quite good in the commandline version, but the corresponding GUI shell sucked big time, which made me loose quite some time because while the GUI was easy to find, its commandline counterpart was "hidden"..
>We live in a world where people will trade their password for a bar of chocolate.
The 'study' I've seen, didn't check that the password given was legitimate, so in fact the study was "Would people give you a random word for a bar of chocolate?"
If there is a more serious study, I'd be interested to hear about it, otherwise please stop quoting this "study".
>I can pass non-text data from one function to another with no prob.
Sure, the pipe can pass anything, but as there is no standard to pass anything but ASCII encoded text, you're more or less restricted to use this on Unix otherwise you'll have to modify all the tools: watch how slow the transition to Unicode was..
In theory, one could define a 'common' binary encoding of objects easily on Linux, but then you have to modify each tool, each scripting language to make it work, a huge task.. In practice, especially on Linux it's nearly impossible: there is no central authority: remember, there are *still* copy/paste problems between some toolkits..
I think you're wrong.. Sure there are computer with 5 9 availability, my first job was programming on a Stratus, an expensive but very reliable computer, but 1) even with a Stratus those 5 9 are mostly theoretical, in one year, I've seen: - power outage: the maintenance guy cut the wrong cable. - several software failures.
2) a complex system is usually less reliable than the parts used to build it.
Well in another case multimedia handling, he clearly disfavoured Vista: Vista reads natively MP3, the most popular compressed audio format, Ubuntu doesn't by default, yet he put both on par..
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I faintly remember that the French government tried something like that some years ago, only to have the server receiving the forwarded Spam crash under the load..
We'll see if it work better this time.
I'm not sure that the 'vicinity of a computer' is the important, it's more a human problem: if you can reach a big enough number of human, there is a high probability that you'll find one dumb/ill enough to believe you..
Sigh, when you ask any young child "how was the world created?"
He can only answer: I don't know, not 'there is no god' because he *doesn't know* what a god is.
So we are all born agnostic.
Then when we explain to children what a god is, he can become atheist, believer, or stay agnostic.
So no, children are not born atheist, it doesn't make sense.
>Exactly. Were you born with a belief in god? No, then you were born an atheist.
Surely you mean agnostic not atheist.
>You just need no belief in god.
You're again confusing agnosticism and atheism.
I've spent quite some time evaluating Python and Ruby as I was trying to find the "best", my conclusion was that these language were twins, they had exactly the same qualities (with a little preference for Ruby), but Python doesn't suit my boss either..
The thing: with the number of tools written in shell&Perl, you cannot avoid having those two installed, and advocating a *third* interpreter is a hard sell (plus he didn't like the space indentation of Python).
>Remember this is in Communist China. The press loves to tell us that China is now post-communism since it allows citizens to own businesses.
And? Your post suggest that having the freedom to own business is the same as having freedom of press, speech, etc of course those are very different freedom.
So yes, China is post-communism, it is still a dictatorship governed by a kind of oligarchy.
>I wouldn't mind paying $200 for the XO, even if just to see how it ticks.
I doubt that you'd like this version as the keyboard is made for children (smaller keys)..
But yes with a normal keyboard, the high black&white DPI, 1.5kg and nearly 0 power consumption for still display, rugged design, all this would make the OLPC a *very nice* book-reader.
And one which can read pdf instead of being restricted to proprietary formats..
Well for me, the more I used Perl, the less I liked it so I'm not surprised that Perl's popularity has faded..
When I was taught Perl, I thought 'cool a better, more powerful, portable shell' and then I had to maintain Perl's code, some written by beginners and some by 'experts'.. And I discovered what a mess Perl is..
Sure it's portable but the language don't give you the correct defaults so beginners code is usually awful AND experienced Perl coders let them sucked by TWTDI which makes their code hard to maintain by anybody else..
It takes *a lot* of self-discipline to write maintainable/readable Perl, so not surprisingly lots of Perl code is junk.
Hating Perl, I looked for another language and found Ruby which unfortunately I don't use that much as my boss won't let me do it (not widespread enough for him), *sigh* such a beautiful language and having to use shell or Perl instead..
>I fully disagree. Anything that helps us expand our sphere of empathy helps. Working on one will likely have a positive effect on the other.
Uh? When Lady Di died, people felt a lot of grief even though they only "knew" her though TV and mags, yet people still don't talk to their neighbours and couldn't care less when they die..
Soldiers 'empathysing' with the robots they use, don't prevent them to use the same robots to kill other humans!
>First, why would there be a single dominant OS
Because application writers tries to reduce their cost by supporting only one OS?
As for your other points, I agree but note that while Linux has some mechanism to run untrusted binaries in a sandbox, they aren't currently provided to the user in a easy-to-use way, so in practice it isn't much better than windows here..
>>There is little if anything that a firewall can do that an operating system can't.
>Except maybe be one box, instead of 200?
Except of course, that it only works in very specific situations, in general 'defence in depth' is much less brittle..
You're contradicting yourself: as you said a riot is a *REaction*, so what was the action?
Two triggers:
1- the state of the suburbs in France
2- some stupid speech of Sarkozy
While Sarkozy cannot be seen as responsible of (1) (the over-concentration of suburb for poors creating ghettos), when he was the mayor of a rich town, this town paid money to avoid having social housing on their area so with him as a president, it is quite likely that the ghettos will grow.
Plus he is for 'tough police' and has even insulted policemen which do 'proximity action' (maintain social relationship such as sport action, etc).
He is seen as a guy who despise the poor, and he makes stupid speech about 'order' even though the truth is that in some suburb, the police is not able to maintain order.
So with all this, I expect Sarkozy to trigger big riots in 2-3 years, maybe not at the scale of 1968, but they'll be quite big.
> Frankly it appeared that [France] was right regarding Iraq.
Well, you know that the bearer of bad news isn't welcomed usually whatever the truth is..
I'm French, so maybe I'm biased, but the mess that the US went into was obvious, the only things which surprised me is that Americans elected again Bush after he wasted billions of taxpayers dollars in a war started under false reason (no WMD: either he's a liar or an incompetent).
The only non obvious thing about this mess, is how it'll end..
>"I am going to take your code, make a small change and call it mine" that wouldn't exist if no copyright existed in the first place.
Why do you say that having 'no copyright' would remove 'I am going to take your code, make a small change and call it mine'?
If there was no copyright, you could copy the binary as much as you want, but that doesn't mean that you could get an easy access to the source code as the GPL provide.
Sure, without the copyright, the incentive to 'hide the source' is reduced, but even without copyright some would take code, enhance it and still hide the result, just for the publicity benefit for example: being the one who distribute the 'official version' of the binary has some benefits..
>Sarkozy is seen as a divisive figure for his demand that immigrants learn Western values
Sarkozy is seen as a divisive figure not for the reason written, but because when he was in the government he triggered the 'suburb riots' due to his foolish comments.
While coding an OS in BASIC is a pretty stupid idea (and the presentation 'mechanism' in the article is a strange way to manage a company), the fact that Gates didn't take personally the 'your code is crap' is a good point.
One of the real question is: why IEEE standardised the WEP in the first place?
If they made such basic mistakes in security on one standard, what prevents them to do other identical mistakes.
Sure, it tough to devise 100% secure scheme, but there is a huge difference between coming with say MD5 which took years to be broken and WEP which was seen as broken as soon as it was studied by security experts..
Well, it's *misplaced* moral: ReiserFS is the collective work of a bunch of people (some of whom are still maintaining it, despite not earning money for it).
Even assuming that Reiser killed his wife, why would you 'punish' his collaborators which also worked on the project with him?
Let's suppose that Reiser sent a one-line patch to the Linux kernel, would you stop using Linux?
Clearly no, so at which percentage does Reiser contribution matter enough to stop using a product?
I don't know you, but I find the last question *ridiculous* which show quite well, that describing the use of a software product as a moral issue is absurd.
PS: I did have the same questions when one famous French singer killed a woman, I was wondering if it's right to buy CDs from his old group or not, then thought that he was part of a team, and there 's no real reason to punish the whole team because of the lead singer's behaviour.
Well, this could maybe reduce the heat generated by the laser diode itself (don't know if this improvement is applicable to this part), but there will still be the heat generated by the laser beam on the CD, which of course is lower but it'll still be there.
>64% merely shows that alot of Linux users prefer the commandline, because it is quite powerful and efficient.
Note that it can be because the commandline is efficient or because the GUI tools provided by the distribution sucks: a long time ago, Mandrake's upgrade tool was quite good in the commandline version, but the corresponding GUI shell sucked big time, which made me loose quite some time because while the GUI was easy to find, its commandline counterpart was "hidden"..
>We live in a world where people will trade their password for a bar of chocolate.
The 'study' I've seen, didn't check that the password given was legitimate, so in fact the study was "Would people give you a random word for a bar of chocolate?"
If there is a more serious study, I'd be interested to hear about it, otherwise please stop quoting this "study".
>I can pass non-text data from one function to another with no prob.
Sure, the pipe can pass anything, but as there is no standard to pass anything but ASCII encoded text, you're more or less restricted to use this on Unix otherwise you'll have to modify all the tools: watch how slow the transition to Unicode was..
In theory, one could define a 'common' binary encoding of objects easily on Linux, but then you have to modify each tool, each scripting language to make it work, a huge task..
In practice, especially on Linux it's nearly impossible: there is no central authority: remember, there are *still* copy/paste problems between some toolkits..
I think you're wrong..
Sure there are computer with 5 9 availability, my first job was programming on a Stratus, an expensive but very reliable computer, but
1) even with a Stratus those 5 9 are mostly theoretical, in one year, I've seen:
- power outage: the maintenance guy cut the wrong cable.
- several software failures.
2) a complex system is usually less reliable than the parts used to build it.
Well in another case multimedia handling, he clearly disfavoured Vista:
Vista reads natively MP3, the most popular compressed audio format, Ubuntu doesn't by default, yet he put both on par..
>Table top fusion is also advancing so I'm not so sure things have to be big to be useful.
Table top fusion is useful sure but not for producing energy so I don't see how it's related to the current subject.