Screw Mars. Learn to build sustainable life on the Moon, and the solar system is your oyster.
Mars is far away. The Moon is close. Neither has a breathable atmosphere. There's no economic reason for going to Mars - you wouldn't be able to send anything back. The moon, once you have a functioning colony there, could be a source of raw materials and manufactured goods. Things like iron beams are cheap on Earth, but it's expensive as hell to launch them. Refine and smelt the iron on the moon, and you can launch it with an oversized gauss gun.
Build your spacecraft in orbit. Build space stations where you have room to fart, and the walls are thick enough to repel radiation. Advance AI and robotics to the point where dangerous manual labor can be handled by the machines. Then, and only then, build a colony on Mars.
It's that or the space elevator. Either way, before you go colonizing Mars, you need some way of getting the supplies to build such a colony into orbit without bankrupting the world, and we need to learn to create a controlled ecosystem to live in. Colonizing the moon is one way of doing that.
The closest they get is about as close as the Sun is to Saturn. That's about eleven times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
To observers on a planet orbiting in the habitable zone of one of those stars, the other star would certainly be the brightest star in the night sky. It might even show a disk. It wouldn't heat the planet appreciably. Neither star is that much different than our Sun (A is a bit larger, B a bit smaller) so the habitable zones wouldn't be that different than the ones for our Sun.
As far as orbits go, Wikipedia says a study showed the possibility of stable orbits near or in the habitable zones of both stars.
I did that once. I couldn't find it. I did find the rubber case cover though, and gave it to the clerk at Radio Shack (she had an iPhone) when I bought my Android. That rubber case cover was why the phone didn't fly off 'til I was going 75 down highway 412.
I missed my contacts, but other than that I didn't miss the phone. My HTC has a plastic case cover, so maybe next time I leave my phone on the car it'll fall off before I'm out of the parking lot.
If every time someone saw an unattended car they would just jump in an drive away you might start seeing cars that needed "permission" to be driven in such a restrictive manner as it would be like calling the dealer or the manufacturer for permission.
Um, they have those. They're called "keys". They're given to the guy who buys the car. After that, the dealer no longer has any say, and the owner has complete control over who can operate the vehicle.
Similarly, if every time someone saw a purse they thought "JACKPOT" and ran over to grab it, it might be nice if they were locked and needed permission to be opened. Think of high-security buildings where you get let in to a man-trap where you identify yourself and ask to be let in. If you aren't authorized the outside door opens and the police take you away.
What?
Purses already need permission to be opened. It's a legal question. Seriously, you want a situation where you someone needs to get 3rd party authorization to open a purse, or they'll be immobilized and apprehended? How many tazed grandmothers do you think it will take before that idea goes out the window?
So we have software that everyone seems to want but only a few (usually around 5%) are willing to pay for. The solution seems to be to just take it, don't pay and so what... If you have a software product that has 100,000 users then anything you can do to change that 5% number to 6% is a huge win. It can mean someone's job.
I seriously doubt your numbers. The concept though, sure - increasing the number of paying customers increases profit.
Some kinds of disc copy protection do this. Requiring the CD to be in the machine is one of those. Requiring an install key is another. This will keep people from just copying the game and handing it around to all their friends.
Anything harsher than this does the opposite. The same people that will pirate a NoCD hacked game will also pirate a game that bypasses the DRM. You gain none of those customers. You lose legitimate customers because your DRM interferes with their ability to play the game they paid for. "I can't play C&C4 (or whatever) because dad's on the phone and we're on dialup" is the type of behavior that breeds the next generation of pirates.
Also, never forget that a pirated copy does not equal a lost sale. I've downloaded NoCD cracks for many games I've purchased legally, and many other do the same. Someone who is pirating a game because they can't afford it isn't going to buy the game anyway.
The problem with software today is in many places pirated software (not paid for) vastly exceeds the paid-for kind. If an individual who dedicates his time to putting out free software, that is probably OK. When a company has employees that are getting their jobs cut because of lack of income, well, I suppose if you asked those employees they wouldn't say piracy was just fine. Now, if the publisher has accepted this and decided that their products are free (to pirate) but they will be compensated by ads it is fine - until of course the pirates also disable those nasty ads.
You confuse free software with pirated software. They're not, in any way, shape, or form, the same thing.
People will be much less likely to seek out a pirated ad-free version of a game than they will a drm-free version of a game. Sure, some people probably will, but most will just put up with the ads, unless they're so intrusive as to make the game unplayable.
In many cases the point is to remove revenue from digital goods - see, they're free to make so they should be free to take, right? Except that isn't how the world of the 1900s works and many of us are stuck using this completely outmoded concept called "money". Thet want it at the grocery store, they want it at the gas station and there doesn't seem to be any way out of it. Maybe when the rest of the world catches up to the 21st Century we can get rid of money completely. Until then, my e
I completely agree with the first two points of your post. The only DRM car analogies I know are the devices that can shut your car off for nonpayment (some used dealers install these) and the device that tests your blood alcohol level before the car can start. Both of these are (in my opinion) good uses of DRM.
DVDs are another story entirely. Non-skippable ads are annoying. I don't find them acceptable. It's not DRM though - sure, any licensed DVD program is supposed to enforce it, but it's not preventing you from accessing material.
Region coding and disc encryption are DRM, and rather nasty. Sure, thanks to DVD Jon and his associates we can bypass the encryption (although not legally), but any licensed DVD device is required to enforce the region coding. Only a firmware hack can get around it.
I remember back when DeCSS first came out, and what they did to the poor boy who released it. It was a classic case of money makes right. Cooler heads prevailed eventually.
I used to buy VHS tapes all the time. I've only ever bought one DVD, and it was only because my desire to support the artist outweighed my desire to boycott the DVD consortium (Weird Al rereleased UHF due to fan demand, and probably at a loss, so I figured I'd make an exception since it was a DVD-only release). I doubt I'll buy another one. I haven't even looked at Blue-Ray (because FUCK SONY) but I don't think I'll be buying any of those either.
I rather liked the PS/2, although that might be because I only fixed them, not designed hardware for them.
It's the only system I've worked with that had caged removable parts that actually worked the way they were supposed to. You could strip one down to the case in under a minute with practice.
Dell, Compaq, and a host of other manufacturers tried to copy the idea, but they failed every time. The closest I've seen is older Sun products, and even they aren't even in the same league.
First generation SATA didn't have the little metal clip that later versions have.
I was a late adopter, and learned this lesson the hard way when I kept having to shut down my server because the cables would come loose. I had six SATA drives in there, so it happened way too often. Newer cables with the clips solved the problem.
Still, even with the clip I don't trust SATA to stay in place as well as the ol' 40 pin connectors did, although I imagine there's a lot less connection issues (i.e. having ro reseat the cable for no apparent reason) that PATA had.
The new DSL service they're transitioning to requires new modems. I signed up for the service and they sent me an IPv6-capable Motorla router.
From what I hear, they want to transition everyone from traditional DSL to the new service eventually. Your old modem won't work anymore, and you'll have to use their equipment, since they use a nonstandard type of DSL.
Be warned, though, that setting up a traditional Linux firewall with one of those things is like pulling teeth. There's no PPPoE or bridge mode available (authentication is handled by the router), and while the Motorola routers have a mode where they let you have the public IP address (by default, the router takes it), you still have to get your DHCP and whatnot from the 192.168.1.x network. Maybe a multiple IP or static IP setup would work better, I dunno. I finally gave up on it and went back to cable.
We can come up with tons of bad things to say about NTFS. It basically boils down to three things in the end, though:
1) Windows doesn't support NTFS features very well 2) NTFS is overly complex and unpredictable as a disk format 3) NTFS is outdated and doesn't support modern features
Point 1 is evidenced by how basic tools (explorer, file dialogs, etc.) don't support many of the features. You have to use command line tools for things like links. That's not a big deal on UNIX systems, but Windows isn't horribly command line friendly. The constraints for the features don't make this easier; many of them seem tacked on and awkward. I seem to remember a time when you could hard link a directory but not a file, and soft link a file, but not a directory... which makes all kinds of no sense at all (I might have that backwards).
Point 2 is evidenced by the fact that no one has yet to come up with a good way for other operating systems to write to NTFS filesystems. There's a lot of very smart people who have worked on this problem, and you still have to worry about corruption when using anything besides Windows.
Point 3 is where most people will argue their points, but to my way of thinking, this is the least important. Sure, NTFS doesn't have all the bells and whistles that btrfs, reiser4, or even JFS offer, but it's consistant (and due to point 1, you wouldn't use many of them anyway).
Personally, I don't care. I don't use Windows except on my laptop when I want to play games. However, if I were Microsoft, I'd probably take a leaf out of Linux's book and go with a three-FS setup:
1) FAT32 for compatability with consumer electronics 2) A stripped-down and cleaned up NTFS for general use (maybe this new ReFS) 3) Something like ZFS that would be used for file servers
(This is similar to what I do - I use JFS for general use, XFS for my backup system (large tarballs, mostly), and ZFS on FreeBSD for my fileserver. The only downside I've found so far is I have to look up the ZFS commands whenever I lose a drive.)
Every person gets "real work" done in a different way. I generally have a browser and a couple dozen xterms scattered around my desktops. It's how I get real work done.
There are things I do regularly that are overly time consuming in a GUI. I can't think of a way that a GUI would be able to speed up most of what I do. The attraction of a Mac is that it provides an actual UNIX environment on a system that doesn't make it awkward to use. I would be able to use a GUI where it makes sense and drop down into a terminal where it doesn't. Cygwin doesn't cut it for me. It's a fine product, but it doesn't "feel" natural.
(I never ended up buying a Mac because my iPhone taught me to hate Apple with all my soul. Thus, I dual boot the Win7 that came with my laptop with Debian. It just sucks having to close everything to reboot into Windows to play my games.)
There's no chemistry in plasma. A brown dwarf may support some kind of life, but stars like ours have no way of storing or replicating information, since only nuclear reactions are possible.
I'm not ignorant of it; it wasn't part of the point I was making.
My point was about the democratization of former communist countries after the cold war.
Our support of dictatorships does influence our power in certain areas, I suppose. I'm just not sure if its positive influence outweighs its negative influence (in terms of influence and power among other nations, morality aside).
They "capture" any they can..edu is controlled by the U.S., so yes, they could certainly take a.edu domain. I couldn't see that happening, since.edu domains are only alloted to colleges and universities, and you can get at the people responsible in easier (and less controversial) ways.
Rome was the best armed group (countries didn't really exist then) of its time. It fell, just like all empires before it.
There's a lot more to holding influence and power than a large army. Most of the influence America has is economic and social rather than military.
A few reasons for this:
1) We won the cold war. Previous areas of Soviet influence look to democratic countries as a model, and the U.S. pushes its pro-democracy stance pretty hard.
2) The English language. Yeah, the U.K. and various other countries have this too, but it benefits the U.S. more than any. English has become the dominant language for business and culture around the world.
3) Pop culture. When I was in Japan, I saw almost as many CDs and records from the U.S. as I saw Japanese ones. American TV shows are shown all over the world. American movie stars are known world-wide.
4) Inertia. America was once an industrial powerhouse. Many things which are standard now were originally conceived in the U.S. For example, most computer-related things are English-oriented (programming languages, network protocols, RFCs, etc.). Even computer standards not created in the U.S. often use English (see HTML, for instance).
5) Size. The U.S. is large, and has a large economy. The state of California has (or recently had) the 6th largest economy in the world - and it's just one state. Anyone doing business internationally would be missing a large chunk of the market by not doing business with the U.S.
As far as our military, so what? We've never gone to war with anyone with nukes. There's a good reason for that - mutually assured destruction works. If the Soviets didn't have them, the cold war would have gotten pretty hot. I doubt even ol' W would have been crazy enough to attack China.
A good chunk of developer freedom is tied up in distribution.
If you're allowed to develop, but not distribute, then your freedom as a developer has been compromised. Consider the various free applications available from the Cedega app installer - there's no entrepreneurial angle there.
Concerning the PS, yes, you're right. Apple is likely the one exception, since they're really the only ones who can get away with it.
Concerning the PPS, I'm honestly not expecting non-corporate Linux distros to "get anywhere" on phones anyway, due to a lot of other reasons, but there's plenty of phones out there without integrated radios. I imagine hobbyist distros will be developed for phones as long as there are phones for them to be developed on.
That applies to all smart phones, not just Android.
I'd say Android provides more freedom for the user and developer than the iPhone or any of the other default phone operating systems (not sure about Windows phones). You can add non-market software to them without jailbreaking them. You can't do that with the iPhone or (last I heard) a Blackberry.
Any of them are going to come with crap the manufacturer wants on there, and likely prevents you from uninstalling it as best they can. The carriers are worse, so if you bought a phone with a carrier bundle, you've got all kinds of crap on there you likely don't want. The base OS of the phone doesn't really matter - Android, iOS, BlackberryOS etc. all have crap added to them that you'd probably rather not have.
There are projects for running Linux on the iPhone, various Android phones, and probably others as well. That might be looking into if you're worried about developer and user freedom.
1) The internet was not designed to withstand a nuclear attack. Seriously. Packet switching was developed as part of a project to provide such a network, but that network was never built. You can see for yourself - there are plenty of logical maps of the ARPANET around, and there are a lot of single points of failure. Given the hysteria of the times (think Cuban missile crisis and escalating cold war tensions), if such a network had been designed, it would have been put into widespread government use, which it was not.
2) The government didn't design the internet. They funded it and provided resources (such as the packet switching research), but design was done by various universities and administration of the civilian side was done by BBN. The military had a large hand in the development of TCP/IP (as evident by some of the obsolete headers for precedence and classification), but that was years later. The government continued up into the 2000s to use its own separate non-packet-switched network for communications separated from any other network via an air gap. I believe it's been phased out, but I left the military in 2002 and don't care enough to keep up.
Even if the internet had been designed with nuclear war in mind, it certainly isn't now. Throw a nuke at Chicago, New York, or any other major communications hub and you cripple the internet. Most of the major communication lines are owned and operated by companies like AT&T, and they're more concerned with their bottom line than national security.
Check out the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late for a firsthand account of the origins of the internet. It's a good read.
That's not the point. He is obviously uninterested in the physical copy, or he would have bought it (or borrowed it from the library) instead.
The point is that he would buy the ebook version if he could. He can't, for wholly artificial reasons. The market has cut him out, so he goes around it.
They've made it easier for a potential paying customer to pirate their goods than to purchase them legally. There will always be piracy, but this is a sale they've lost because of their own policies.
When you design software, you can either design with security as part of the architecture or not. Secure software designs still have problems, but it's the difference between a pinhole and a barn door.
Unix systems were much more secure than Windows systems for years (whether they are now is up to debate). The reason is that Microsoft had to take drastic measures over more than a decade to secure their system was because their architecture was never designed with security in mind. Unix didn't have the problem - as a multiuser system, security was part of the design, so replacing insecure pieces with secure components (think rsh -> ssh, crypt() to md5(), shadow, etc.) was much easier.
In order to have a remote desktop application be part of a web browser, you need to break the security of the browser and reach the base system. I don't know how the extension framework for Chrome works (I only use it for webcomics), but I would definitely think twice before installing something like this onto a piece of software that regularly communicates with untrusted data (which is primarily what a web browser does).
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Screw Mars. Learn to build sustainable life on the Moon, and the solar system is your oyster.
Mars is far away. The Moon is close. Neither has a breathable atmosphere. There's no economic reason for going to Mars - you wouldn't be able to send anything back. The moon, once you have a functioning colony there, could be a source of raw materials and manufactured goods. Things like iron beams are cheap on Earth, but it's expensive as hell to launch them. Refine and smelt the iron on the moon, and you can launch it with an oversized gauss gun.
Build your spacecraft in orbit. Build space stations where you have room to fart, and the walls are thick enough to repel radiation. Advance AI and robotics to the point where dangerous manual labor can be handled by the machines. Then, and only then, build a colony on Mars.
It's that or the space elevator. Either way, before you go colonizing Mars, you need some way of getting the supplies to build such a colony into orbit without bankrupting the world, and we need to learn to create a controlled ecosystem to live in. Colonizing the moon is one way of doing that.
The closest they get is about as close as the Sun is to Saturn. That's about eleven times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
To observers on a planet orbiting in the habitable zone of one of those stars, the other star would certainly be the brightest star in the night sky. It might even show a disk. It wouldn't heat the planet appreciably. Neither star is that much different than our Sun (A is a bit larger, B a bit smaller) so the habitable zones wouldn't be that different than the ones for our Sun.
As far as orbits go, Wikipedia says a study showed the possibility of stable orbits near or in the habitable zones of both stars.
I did that once. I couldn't find it. I did find the rubber case cover though, and gave it to the clerk at Radio Shack (she had an iPhone) when I bought my Android. That rubber case cover was why the phone didn't fly off 'til I was going 75 down highway 412.
I missed my contacts, but other than that I didn't miss the phone. My HTC has a plastic case cover, so maybe next time I leave my phone on the car it'll fall off before I'm out of the parking lot.
Space doesn't get that small. Anything smaller than the Planck length can't be measured in any way that is meaningful.
Granted, the radius of an electron is several orders of magnitude larger than the Planck length.
If every time someone saw an unattended car they would just jump in an drive away you might start seeing cars that needed "permission" to be driven in such a restrictive manner as it would be like calling the dealer or the manufacturer for permission.
Um, they have those. They're called "keys". They're given to the guy who buys the car. After that, the dealer no longer has any say, and the owner has complete control over who can operate the vehicle.
Similarly, if every time someone saw a purse they thought "JACKPOT" and ran over to grab it, it might be nice if they were locked and needed permission to be opened. Think of high-security buildings where you get let in to a man-trap where you identify yourself and ask to be let in. If you aren't authorized the outside door opens and the police take you away.
What?
Purses already need permission to be opened. It's a legal question. Seriously, you want a situation where you someone needs to get 3rd party authorization to open a purse, or they'll be immobilized and apprehended? How many tazed grandmothers do you think it will take before that idea goes out the window?
So we have software that everyone seems to want but only a few (usually around 5%) are willing to pay for. The solution seems to be to just take it, don't pay and so what... If you have a software product that has 100,000 users then anything you can do to change that 5% number to 6% is a huge win. It can mean someone's job.
I seriously doubt your numbers. The concept though, sure - increasing the number of paying customers increases profit.
Some kinds of disc copy protection do this. Requiring the CD to be in the machine is one of those. Requiring an install key is another. This will keep people from just copying the game and handing it around to all their friends.
Anything harsher than this does the opposite. The same people that will pirate a NoCD hacked game will also pirate a game that bypasses the DRM. You gain none of those customers. You lose legitimate customers because your DRM interferes with their ability to play the game they paid for. "I can't play C&C4 (or whatever) because dad's on the phone and we're on dialup" is the type of behavior that breeds the next generation of pirates.
Also, never forget that a pirated copy does not equal a lost sale. I've downloaded NoCD cracks for many games I've purchased legally, and many other do the same. Someone who is pirating a game because they can't afford it isn't going to buy the game anyway.
The problem with software today is in many places pirated software (not paid for) vastly exceeds the paid-for kind. If an individual who dedicates his time to putting out free software, that is probably OK. When a company has employees that are getting their jobs cut because of lack of income, well, I suppose if you asked those employees they wouldn't say piracy was just fine. Now, if the publisher has accepted this and decided that their products are free (to pirate) but they will be compensated by ads it is fine - until of course the pirates also disable those nasty ads.
You confuse free software with pirated software. They're not, in any way, shape, or form, the same thing.
People will be much less likely to seek out a pirated ad-free version of a game than they will a drm-free version of a game. Sure, some people probably will, but most will just put up with the ads, unless they're so intrusive as to make the game unplayable.
In many cases the point is to remove revenue from digital goods - see, they're free to make so they should be free to take, right? Except that isn't how the world of the 1900s works and many of us are stuck using this completely outmoded concept called "money". Thet want it at the grocery store, they want it at the gas station and there doesn't seem to be any way out of it. Maybe when the rest of the world catches up to the 21st Century we can get rid of money completely. Until then, my e
I completely agree with the first two points of your post. The only DRM car analogies I know are the devices that can shut your car off for nonpayment (some used dealers install these) and the device that tests your blood alcohol level before the car can start. Both of these are (in my opinion) good uses of DRM.
DVDs are another story entirely. Non-skippable ads are annoying. I don't find them acceptable. It's not DRM though - sure, any licensed DVD program is supposed to enforce it, but it's not preventing you from accessing material.
Region coding and disc encryption are DRM, and rather nasty. Sure, thanks to DVD Jon and his associates we can bypass the encryption (although not legally), but any licensed DVD device is required to enforce the region coding. Only a firmware hack can get around it.
I remember back when DeCSS first came out, and what they did to the poor boy who released it. It was a classic case of money makes right. Cooler heads prevailed eventually.
I used to buy VHS tapes all the time. I've only ever bought one DVD, and it was only because my desire to support the artist outweighed my desire to boycott the DVD consortium (Weird Al rereleased UHF due to fan demand, and probably at a loss, so I figured I'd make an exception since it was a DVD-only release). I doubt I'll buy another one. I haven't even looked at Blue-Ray (because FUCK SONY) but I don't think I'll be buying any of those either.
That's Thai furry conventions, not Chinese.
I always thought Ballmer was more an argument against interspecies marriage.
I rather liked the PS/2, although that might be because I only fixed them, not designed hardware for them.
It's the only system I've worked with that had caged removable parts that actually worked the way they were supposed to. You could strip one down to the case in under a minute with practice.
Dell, Compaq, and a host of other manufacturers tried to copy the idea, but they failed every time. The closest I've seen is older Sun products, and even they aren't even in the same league.
First generation SATA didn't have the little metal clip that later versions have.
I was a late adopter, and learned this lesson the hard way when I kept having to shut down my server because the cables would come loose. I had six SATA drives in there, so it happened way too often. Newer cables with the clips solved the problem.
Still, even with the clip I don't trust SATA to stay in place as well as the ol' 40 pin connectors did, although I imagine there's a lot less connection issues (i.e. having ro reseat the cable for no apparent reason) that PATA had.
The new DSL service they're transitioning to requires new modems. I signed up for the service and they sent me an IPv6-capable Motorla router.
From what I hear, they want to transition everyone from traditional DSL to the new service eventually. Your old modem won't work anymore, and you'll have to use their equipment, since they use a nonstandard type of DSL.
Be warned, though, that setting up a traditional Linux firewall with one of those things is like pulling teeth. There's no PPPoE or bridge mode available (authentication is handled by the router), and while the Motorola routers have a mode where they let you have the public IP address (by default, the router takes it), you still have to get your DHCP and whatnot from the 192.168.1.x network. Maybe a multiple IP or static IP setup would work better, I dunno. I finally gave up on it and went back to cable.
We can come up with tons of bad things to say about NTFS. It basically boils down to three things in the end, though:
1) Windows doesn't support NTFS features very well
2) NTFS is overly complex and unpredictable as a disk format
3) NTFS is outdated and doesn't support modern features
Point 1 is evidenced by how basic tools (explorer, file dialogs, etc.) don't support many of the features. You have to use command line tools for things like links. That's not a big deal on UNIX systems, but Windows isn't horribly command line friendly. The constraints for the features don't make this easier; many of them seem tacked on and awkward. I seem to remember a time when you could hard link a directory but not a file, and soft link a file, but not a directory... which makes all kinds of no sense at all (I might have that backwards).
Point 2 is evidenced by the fact that no one has yet to come up with a good way for other operating systems to write to NTFS filesystems. There's a lot of very smart people who have worked on this problem, and you still have to worry about corruption when using anything besides Windows.
Point 3 is where most people will argue their points, but to my way of thinking, this is the least important. Sure, NTFS doesn't have all the bells and whistles that btrfs, reiser4, or even JFS offer, but it's consistant (and due to point 1, you wouldn't use many of them anyway).
Personally, I don't care. I don't use Windows except on my laptop when I want to play games. However, if I were Microsoft, I'd probably take a leaf out of Linux's book and go with a three-FS setup:
1) FAT32 for compatability with consumer electronics
2) A stripped-down and cleaned up NTFS for general use (maybe this new ReFS)
3) Something like ZFS that would be used for file servers
(This is similar to what I do - I use JFS for general use, XFS for my backup system (large tarballs, mostly), and ZFS on FreeBSD for my fileserver. The only downside I've found so far is I have to look up the ZFS commands whenever I lose a drive.)
Every person gets "real work" done in a different way. I generally have a browser and a couple dozen xterms scattered around my desktops. It's how I get real work done.
There are things I do regularly that are overly time consuming in a GUI. I can't think of a way that a GUI would be able to speed up most of what I do. The attraction of a Mac is that it provides an actual UNIX environment on a system that doesn't make it awkward to use. I would be able to use a GUI where it makes sense and drop down into a terminal where it doesn't. Cygwin doesn't cut it for me. It's a fine product, but it doesn't "feel" natural.
(I never ended up buying a Mac because my iPhone taught me to hate Apple with all my soul. Thus, I dual boot the Win7 that came with my laptop with Debian. It just sucks having to close everything to reboot into Windows to play my games.)
There's no chemistry in plasma. A brown dwarf may support some kind of life, but stars like ours have no way of storing or replicating information, since only nuclear reactions are possible.
I'm not ignorant of it; it wasn't part of the point I was making.
My point was about the democratization of former communist countries after the cold war.
Our support of dictatorships does influence our power in certain areas, I suppose. I'm just not sure if its positive influence outweighs its negative influence (in terms of influence and power among other nations, morality aside).
Ah, my bad, I misread.
They "capture" any they can. .edu is controlled by the U.S., so yes, they could certainly take a .edu domain. I couldn't see that happening, since .edu domains are only alloted to colleges and universities, and you can get at the people responsible in easier (and less controversial) ways.
Rome was the best armed group (countries didn't really exist then) of its time. It fell, just like all empires before it.
There's a lot more to holding influence and power than a large army. Most of the influence America has is economic and social rather than military.
A few reasons for this:
1) We won the cold war. Previous areas of Soviet influence look to democratic countries as a model, and the U.S. pushes its pro-democracy stance pretty hard.
2) The English language. Yeah, the U.K. and various other countries have this too, but it benefits the U.S. more than any. English has become the dominant language for business and culture around the world.
3) Pop culture. When I was in Japan, I saw almost as many CDs and records from the U.S. as I saw Japanese ones. American TV shows are shown all over the world. American movie stars are known world-wide.
4) Inertia. America was once an industrial powerhouse. Many things which are standard now were originally conceived in the U.S. For example, most computer-related things are English-oriented (programming languages, network protocols, RFCs, etc.). Even computer standards not created in the U.S. often use English (see HTML, for instance).
5) Size. The U.S. is large, and has a large economy. The state of California has (or recently had) the 6th largest economy in the world - and it's just one state. Anyone doing business internationally would be missing a large chunk of the market by not doing business with the U.S.
As far as our military, so what? We've never gone to war with anyone with nukes. There's a good reason for that - mutually assured destruction works. If the Soviets didn't have them, the cold war would have gotten pretty hot. I doubt even ol' W would have been crazy enough to attack China.
A good chunk of developer freedom is tied up in distribution.
If you're allowed to develop, but not distribute, then your freedom as a developer has been compromised. Consider the various free applications available from the Cedega app installer - there's no entrepreneurial angle there.
Concerning the PS, yes, you're right. Apple is likely the one exception, since they're really the only ones who can get away with it.
Concerning the PPS, I'm honestly not expecting non-corporate Linux distros to "get anywhere" on phones anyway, due to a lot of other reasons, but there's plenty of phones out there without integrated radios. I imagine hobbyist distros will be developed for phones as long as there are phones for them to be developed on.
You're right. It's been a while since my iPhone hit the asphalt at 75mph.
There was crap on my iPhone I didn't want and couldn't remove, but Apple put it there. My main point was about the software freedom angle anyway.
That applies to all smart phones, not just Android.
I'd say Android provides more freedom for the user and developer than the iPhone or any of the other default phone operating systems (not sure about Windows phones). You can add non-market software to them without jailbreaking them. You can't do that with the iPhone or (last I heard) a Blackberry.
Any of them are going to come with crap the manufacturer wants on there, and likely prevents you from uninstalling it as best they can. The carriers are worse, so if you bought a phone with a carrier bundle, you've got all kinds of crap on there you likely don't want. The base OS of the phone doesn't really matter - Android, iOS, BlackberryOS etc. all have crap added to them that you'd probably rather not have.
There are projects for running Linux on the iPhone, various Android phones, and probably others as well. That might be looking into if you're worried about developer and user freedom.
A couple points:
1) The internet was not designed to withstand a nuclear attack. Seriously. Packet switching was developed as part of a project to provide such a network, but that network was never built. You can see for yourself - there are plenty of logical maps of the ARPANET around, and there are a lot of single points of failure. Given the hysteria of the times (think Cuban missile crisis and escalating cold war tensions), if such a network had been designed, it would have been put into widespread government use, which it was not.
2) The government didn't design the internet. They funded it and provided resources (such as the packet switching research), but design was done by various universities and administration of the civilian side was done by BBN. The military had a large hand in the development of TCP/IP (as evident by some of the obsolete headers for precedence and classification), but that was years later. The government continued up into the 2000s to use its own separate non-packet-switched network for communications separated from any other network via an air gap. I believe it's been phased out, but I left the military in 2002 and don't care enough to keep up.
Even if the internet had been designed with nuclear war in mind, it certainly isn't now. Throw a nuke at Chicago, New York, or any other major communications hub and you cripple the internet. Most of the major communication lines are owned and operated by companies like AT&T, and they're more concerned with their bottom line than national security.
Check out the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late for a firsthand account of the origins of the internet. It's a good read.
You need a pre-4.0 version of Firefox to load gopher pages.
That's not the point. He is obviously uninterested in the physical copy, or he would have bought it (or borrowed it from the library) instead.
The point is that he would buy the ebook version if he could. He can't, for wholly artificial reasons. The market has cut him out, so he goes around it.
They've made it easier for a potential paying customer to pirate their goods than to purchase them legally. There will always be piracy, but this is a sale they've lost because of their own policies.
Yeah, thinking like that is what gave us Melissa.
When you design software, you can either design with security as part of the architecture or not. Secure software designs still have problems, but it's the difference between a pinhole and a barn door.
Unix systems were much more secure than Windows systems for years (whether they are now is up to debate). The reason is that Microsoft had to take drastic measures over more than a decade to secure their system was because their architecture was never designed with security in mind. Unix didn't have the problem - as a multiuser system, security was part of the design, so replacing insecure pieces with secure components (think rsh -> ssh, crypt() to md5(), shadow, etc.) was much easier.
In order to have a remote desktop application be part of a web browser, you need to break the security of the browser and reach the base system. I don't know how the extension framework for Chrome works (I only use it for webcomics), but I would definitely think twice before installing something like this onto a piece of software that regularly communicates with untrusted data (which is primarily what a web browser does).