Actually, it's a common misconception to think that the Great Wall was built as a military defense mechanism in the event of full scale war. For one, it's too low, easily scalable by an army with the right tools. And secondly, it's too long, and can never be effectively manned along the full length. All in all, the Great Wall was never designed to function like a city wall.
What the wall really does, and it does well, is act as a deterent and early warning mechanism against the annual and semi-annual small scale border raids from the northern nomadic tribes, where riders would just charge down south, loot what they can and quickly retreat back into the great prairies. It's actually a (relatively) economical answer to a persistent problem -- for it's very expensive for a settled agricutural civilization to mobilize an army, while it costs almost nothing for the nomads to gather up a group of riders and raid a small border settlement.
And BTW, China is far from the only one in building a wall. Almost every settled civilization on the Eurasian continent, from Koreaall the way to England, built a wall at some point in their history. The Chinese wall was the largest simply because China face the greatest threat from the Mongolian plains, which produced some of the most brutal and effiecient nomadic people in human history.
If you read some of the comments it seems enabling the graphics also enhances performance at the same time. The theory is that the decision to castrate the PC version was perhaps made at the last minute and they didn't have enough time to test and optimize the crap version.
Disclaimer: this is second hand info as I do not own the game.
You sound as if the cable boxes and DVRs have to be such power drains. The point is they can be made to use only negligible power on standby, had the people who made them been just a bit more competent.
Yes, the problem with Verizon nowadays is the other way round -- it's impossilble to get a non-Verizon phone to work on the Verizon network, because of their proprietary CDMA, and their non-contract phones are generally way overpriced. Which was quite a headache for us when my wife dropped her new HTC One in the sink last year...
Hopefully this should become less of a problem once they start their VoLTE rollout.
Since the OP is talking about privacy concerns, more likely he means the possibility of replacing the manufacturer supplied binary drivers with free/opensource ones that can be audited. To that end one needs to reverse engineer the binary drivers, and he presumes this job would be easier on Tizen (standard Linux) than on Android.
No, there is a big difference because Google's main intent is not to promote piracy.
I think what torrentz.eu promotes is simply the sharing of digital content, with or without the copyright holder's consent, not robbery and violence at sea. I could be wrong though.
So spam and poisoning is a real problem, but not an unsolvable one.
Email spam is a very different problem from p2p file sharing spam. With email, the spam filter has the luxury of getting to see the entirety of the message before deciding if it's spam. On the other hand, a p2p file sharing client only gets a filename + hash. With better heuristics it could conceivably rank the filenames based on relevance to your search term, but that is unneccessary in most cases. What's more important is to decided whether the filename actually describes the content identified by 'hash' (which could be tens to hundreds of GBs). The only reliable ways to "solve" this problem, as far as I can see, are:
1. Download the file and see for yourself (emule, gnutella, etc.)
2. Have a centralized authority/community screen the file for you (BitTorrent)
You are probably scoffing and going "Bah, what are the odds of that!"
Indeed. You haven't even got to the part where the plane apparently flew around Indonesian radar.
But your alternative scenarios are "Plane was hijacked by... conspiracy... secret landing... passengers killed/being held.... etc..."
No, the alternative scenarios simply involves a suicidal pilot, which has happened before. This one may be holding a grudge against the Malaysian gov, and trying to inflict maximum political damage by crashing the plane and making it as hard to find as possible.
And to think in this vast Universe, we are likely just another tribe, living on this tiny isolated planet we call Earth.
I just hope we don't get to meet the metaphorical White Man in my life time, because no matter what their intentions are, it never ends well for the tribers...
Jefferson was much more Hamiltonian when he himself was in the presidential office. Just sayin'.
"Ideals" and "beliefs" are mostly useful in getting the sheeples in line, because sadly for most people "ideals" and "beliefs" are much easier pills to swallow than facts and evidence. How many "ideals" and "beliefs" have we had throughout the centuries, and how much good has ever come out of those? Those great men who actually got things done and moved our society in a positive direction almost always compromised.
Well, erm, so I guess my point is, it may be more constructive to critise a politician based on the actual issues, rather than painting him with a brush and attacking his "ideal".
Yes, because the need to avoid "official embarassment" outweighs the needs of the 239 lives on board and the anguished relatives on the ground. Naturally.
Sad indeed. But it's not my fault that Malaysia Airlines chose Facebook as their official channel. Here's a non-Facebook quote if that makes you feel any better, though I suspect all non-Facebook sources are second-hand sources who themselves copied from MA's official Facebook page..
http://www.freerepublic.com/fo...
Nope. That NYT piece seems to have forgotten about the initial statement from Malaysia Airlines, which said the last time of contact with flight 370 was at 2:40am: https://www.facebook.com/my.ma...
That was before the Malaysian authorities went into full denial mode and claimed last contact was at 01:20am. The 02:40 time was inconsistent with their estimated "crash site" in the Gulf of Thailand, which was one of the initial sources of confusion. However, 02:40am turned out to be the exact time of last military radar contact which they were forced to confirm more than 5 days later. Additionally, there were the "small" details that two transponder systems were turned off one after another more than 10 minutes apart, and that the ACARS system was turned off before the last voice contact with the pilots.
In order to fit all these facts into a theory of stupidity, you'd have to accept that: 1. an unidentified flying object the size of a 777 can just fly across the width of Malaysian airspace (more than 1 hour of flight time) at cruising altitude without being noticed by the Malaysian military 2. that 02:40am time from Malaysian Airline's initial statement just turned out to match the time of last military radar contact by complete coincidence 3. nobody noticed the time descrepancies between the two transponder systems turning off.
This is clearly beyond the realm of incompetance, and can only be explained with a touch of malice. The Malaysian authorities knew from the beginning what was going on, but was more concerned with the possible liabilities and damages to their "image" resulting from a rogue pilot, than with actually finding the plane. With wanton disregard for the 239 lives on board and their relatives on the ground, they knowingly misled the international community on a wild witch hunt across the Gulf of Thailand, delaying the search for at least five crucial days, thereby eliminating any possiblity of finding survivors (if the plane had ultimately crashed), and quite possibly lowering the likelihood of finding the cockpit recorders to near zero.
Is the harddrive running open-source firmware too? How could I possibly store my data on a device that uses proprietary software?
The firmware residing in hardware ROM is considered part of the hardware. The FSF only takes issue with the binary firmware that are distributed as part of the driver software, i.e. those binary blobs under/lib/firmware. RMS even said if the hardware manufacturers put those blobs on ROM then it would be fine [1].
today's smartphone is just a compact, pocket-size general purpose computer with a radio transceiver in it.
Today's home routers are just small general purpose computers with a bunch of network ports. Today's "smart scales" are just small general purpose computers embedded in a scale. Today's smart TVs are just general purpose computers embedded inside a big TV. Today's treadmills are just general purpose computers, in a treadmill. Today's DVRs are just general purpose computers with an hdmi-in and an IR receiver. Today's PS4s and Xbox Ones are, well they are just general purpose computers really.
I fail to see how anyone can legitimately claim that installing software on it (even changing an OS) can void the warranty
They all do. If they don't, they'll have to at least double the price on most of these products.
matroska is definitely a no go on both. mp4 is recognized at least on the ps3, but can only play a very limited number of codecs. In the end I just said to hell with it and built a small XBMC box.
Oh, yes they do support DLNA. What I meant to say was that their codecs and container format support is so poor that it makes them practically useless as a living room media player, DLNA or not. I don't expect the next-gens to be any better in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
So does this mean we'll be able to get kernel mode setting with the proprietary Catalyst driver? Because that would be real sweet..:)
How, exactly, can Nvidia make games run poorly on other hardware?
http://hardware-beta.slashdot....
Yeah, that worked real well.
Actually, it's a common misconception to think that the Great Wall was built as a military defense mechanism in the event of full scale war. For one, it's too low, easily scalable by an army with the right tools. And secondly, it's too long, and can never be effectively manned along the full length. All in all, the Great Wall was never designed to function like a city wall.
What the wall really does, and it does well, is act as a deterent and early warning mechanism against the annual and semi-annual small scale border raids from the northern nomadic tribes, where riders would just charge down south, loot what they can and quickly retreat back into the great prairies. It's actually a (relatively) economical answer to a persistent problem -- for it's very expensive for a settled agricutural civilization to mobilize an army, while it costs almost nothing for the nomads to gather up a group of riders and raid a small border settlement.
And BTW, China is far from the only one in building a wall. Almost every settled civilization on the Eurasian continent, from Korea all the way to England, built a wall at some point in their history. The Chinese wall was the largest simply because China face the greatest threat from the Mongolian plains, which produced some of the most brutal and effiecient nomadic people in human history.
If you read some of the comments it seems enabling the graphics also enhances performance at the same time. The theory is that the decision to castrate the PC version was perhaps made at the last minute and they didn't have enough time to test and optimize the crap version.
Disclaimer: this is second hand info as I do not own the game.
You sound as if the cable boxes and DVRs have to be such power drains. The point is they can be made to use only negligible power on standby, had the people who made them been just a bit more competent.
Yes, the problem with Verizon nowadays is the other way round -- it's impossilble to get a non-Verizon phone to work on the Verizon network, because of their proprietary CDMA, and their non-contract phones are generally way overpriced. Which was quite a headache for us when my wife dropped her new HTC One in the sink last year...
Hopefully this should become less of a problem once they start their VoLTE rollout.
He probably means the availability of drivers
Since the OP is talking about privacy concerns, more likely he means the possibility of replacing the manufacturer supplied binary drivers with free/opensource ones that can be audited. To that end one needs to reverse engineer the binary drivers, and he presumes this job would be easier on Tizen (standard Linux) than on Android.
No, there is a big difference because Google's main intent is not to promote piracy.
I think what torrentz.eu promotes is simply the sharing of digital content, with or without the copyright holder's consent, not robbery and violence at sea. I could be wrong though.
So spam and poisoning is a real problem, but not an unsolvable one.
Email spam is a very different problem from p2p file sharing spam. With email, the spam filter has the luxury of getting to see the entirety of the message before deciding if it's spam. On the other hand, a p2p file sharing client only gets a filename + hash. With better heuristics it could conceivably rank the filenames based on relevance to your search term, but that is unneccessary in most cases. What's more important is to decided whether the filename actually describes the content identified by 'hash' (which could be tens to hundreds of GBs). The only reliable ways to "solve" this problem, as far as I can see, are: 1. Download the file and see for yourself (emule, gnutella, etc.) 2. Have a centralized authority/community screen the file for you (BitTorrent)
I don't think bluetooth has enough bandwidth for smooth video streaming.
That's why it's cheap, and it is very cheap.
Uh, what country are we talking about here? South Korea? Japan? Germany? Because I'm sure you're certainly not talking about the good ol' US of A.
You are probably scoffing and going "Bah, what are the odds of that!"
Indeed. You haven't even got to the part where the plane apparently flew around Indonesian radar.
But your alternative scenarios are "Plane was hijacked by... conspiracy... secret landing... passengers killed/being held.... etc..."
No, the alternative scenarios simply involves a suicidal pilot, which has happened before. This one may be holding a grudge against the Malaysian gov, and trying to inflict maximum political damage by crashing the plane and making it as hard to find as possible.
The highest quality streams are still no where near Blu-ray quality though.
Not really. In fact, The State Media (CCTV) itself is in the process of translating The Big Bang Theory and releasing it in mainland China , and that is probably the real reason for this ban. IOW this isn't about censorship at all, this is simply using the censorship tool to protect the (incompetant) state media from competition by the more competant private media streaming companies.
And to think in this vast Universe, we are likely just another tribe, living on this tiny isolated planet we call Earth. I just hope we don't get to meet the metaphorical White Man in my life time, because no matter what their intentions are, it never ends well for the tribers...
Jefferson was much more Hamiltonian when he himself was in the presidential office. Just sayin'.
"Ideals" and "beliefs" are mostly useful in getting the sheeples in line, because sadly for most people "ideals" and "beliefs" are much easier pills to swallow than facts and evidence. How many "ideals" and "beliefs" have we had throughout the centuries, and how much good has ever come out of those? Those great men who actually got things done and moved our society in a positive direction almost always compromised.
Well, erm, so I guess my point is, it may be more constructive to critise a politician based on the actual issues, rather than painting him with a brush and attacking his "ideal".
may be a source of official embarrassment.
Yes, because the need to avoid "official embarassment" outweighs the needs of the 239 lives on board and the anguished relatives on the ground. Naturally.
That's a good one, probably explains why Lamport only just got the award now and not much sooner :)
Sad indeed. But it's not my fault that Malaysia Airlines chose Facebook as their official channel. Here's a non-Facebook quote if that makes you feel any better, though I suspect all non-Facebook sources are second-hand sources who themselves copied from MA's official Facebook page.. http://www.freerepublic.com/fo...
About the only thing Steam doesn't require here, is a plugin for your browser.
Steam also doesn't require an "install", the game is playable after the download, unlike origin.
Nope. That NYT piece seems to have forgotten about the initial statement from Malaysia Airlines, which said the last time of contact with flight 370 was at 2:40am:
https://www.facebook.com/my.ma...
That was before the Malaysian authorities went into full denial mode and claimed last contact was at 01:20am. The 02:40 time was inconsistent with their estimated "crash site" in the Gulf of Thailand, which was one of the initial sources of confusion. However, 02:40am turned out to be the exact time of last military radar contact which they were forced to confirm more than 5 days later. Additionally, there were the "small" details that two transponder systems were turned off one after another more than 10 minutes apart, and that the ACARS system was turned off before the last voice contact with the pilots.
In order to fit all these facts into a theory of stupidity, you'd have to accept that: 1. an unidentified flying object the size of a 777 can just fly across the width of Malaysian airspace (more than 1 hour of flight time) at cruising altitude without being noticed by the Malaysian military 2. that 02:40am time from Malaysian Airline's initial statement just turned out to match the time of last military radar contact by complete coincidence 3. nobody noticed the time descrepancies between the two transponder systems turning off.
This is clearly beyond the realm of incompetance, and can only be explained with a touch of malice. The Malaysian authorities knew from the beginning what was going on, but was more concerned with the possible liabilities and damages to their "image" resulting from a rogue pilot, than with actually finding the plane. With wanton disregard for the 239 lives on board and their relatives on the ground, they knowingly misled the international community on a wild witch hunt across the Gulf of Thailand, delaying the search for at least five crucial days, thereby eliminating any possiblity of finding survivors (if the plane had ultimately crashed), and quite possibly lowering the likelihood of finding the cockpit recorders to near zero.
Is the harddrive running open-source firmware too? How could I possibly store my data on a device that uses proprietary software?
The firmware residing in hardware ROM is considered part of the hardware. The FSF only takes issue with the binary firmware that are distributed as part of the driver software, i.e. those binary blobs under /lib/firmware. RMS even said if the hardware manufacturers put those blobs on ROM then it would be fine [1].
today's smartphone is just a compact, pocket-size general purpose computer with a radio transceiver in it.
Today's home routers are just small general purpose computers with a bunch of network ports.
Today's "smart scales" are just small general purpose computers embedded in a scale.
Today's smart TVs are just general purpose computers embedded inside a big TV.
Today's treadmills are just general purpose computers, in a treadmill.
Today's DVRs are just general purpose computers with an hdmi-in and an IR receiver.
Today's PS4s and Xbox Ones are, well they are just general purpose computers really.
I fail to see how anyone can legitimately claim that installing software on it (even changing an OS) can void the warranty
They all do. If they don't, they'll have to at least double the price on most of these products.
matroska is definitely a no go on both. mp4 is recognized at least on the ps3, but can only play a very limited number of codecs. In the end I just said to hell with it and built a small XBMC box.
Oh, yes they do support DLNA. What I meant to say was that their codecs and container format support is so poor that it makes them practically useless as a living room media player, DLNA or not. I don't expect the next-gens to be any better in this regard.