On the first day. Anything over a few miles and you can forget about triangulation by ultrasound in water. Temperature gradients in the water bend the path in all kinds of special and wonderfull ways. This has been already attempted for obtaining maximum dive depths of sperm whales and the results were pathetic. After a few years of experimentation the idea was discarded as useless. Just ask any scientists working on cetaceans about picking up sperm whale locations and depths by sound source triangulation and watch the vile rant or half an hour worth of hysterical giggle that follows.
You missed 12 which is complete and utter bullshit.
Russia is right to be pissed off with missile batteries in Europe and is rightly pointing that they have no other function but to sour Russia relationship with Europe.
These missiles provide sabre rattling capability for some political elements in the ex-Soviet block who are anti-Russian to the point where they would like to have a Hitler statue erected on their capital's main squares. While every military specialist is aware that such missiles will be useless to "protect" the host country if the Russians decide to wipe it off the map, the politicians in question have no intention of telling this to their population. Just the opposite.
Through unilateral moves Poland, the Baltics and Chech republic (whose current president/prime minister clone pair are too Russophobic even for Lech Valensa to stomach) are trying to force the rest of Europe on a confrontation course with Russia. Things like this affect the military tactics and politics of all NATO. Poland is not in sole command of Nato, neither is the Chech republic. If they think that this type of confronation is especially good for everyone they should convince everyone to do so, instead of drawing everyone into it through the back door.
And at the end of the day, USA is still continuing their Cold War politics by inertia. They waste a phenomenal amount of resources to continue along lines that have no further meaning and use instead of even considering new threats. No wander they get their ex-best-friend to run a couple of planes into key buildings with such ease. And if they continue this way there is bound to be more of that.
Moon dust off the surface has been nicely activated by radiation and sun over centuries. It is not the relatively inert silica you get from cutting glass and rocks. It can catalyse all kinds of strange and wonderfull reactions because cosmic ray particles have kicked out (or even modified) an atom here and there and it has remained there in a very active form due to the lack of atmosphere. On earth it would have been deactivated nearly immediately by oxygen, water or even nitrogen from the air. On the moon it will stay active nearly for ever and over the years there will be more and more of these on the surface of each particle. Add to that the habit to accumulate static charges (which is actually related to the surface being active) so it sticks everywhere and you got yourself a really nasty problem on your hands.
Moon dust is something you do not like having anywhere near lungs and in fact anywhere near the innards of a space station. Think of asbestous, but with nearly instantaneous effect and the habit to cling to everything.
In the 60-es they did not care about health and safety. Nowdays, this would be considerably more difficult to ignore.
I am not a commodore expert, but IIRC 6502 and its successor 6510 had the concept of 0 page. A set of shortened (and faster) operands could use simplified conditional jump and arithmetics provided that all args were under 0x100. The basic "load next operand" routine which was invoked for anything (even displaying the command prompt) was written using zero page intructions for speed and resided in the zero page. Replacing this routine was a possibility for auto invocation. Hardly ever used on Apple where everything, but basic left this routine alone, but could have been quite usefull on the C64 (if it used it).
This routine could also be altered for all kinds of interesting stuff. Starting with practical jokes with the teacher which made fun of the "default" problems, questions and answers and going as far as adding a single read instruction to read the IO port for the speaker. That was hysterical. A nested loop sounded like motorcycle, plotting produced star war effects and most math various random farts. Total ROFL (got myself keelhauled by the headmaster for that one).
No. Wide adoption will kill wifi. In fact it is already killing it.
Wifi has a very bad frequency reuse capability. The 12 (13 in EU) channels overlap so you in fact you have 3-4 useable frequencies when dealing with wifi-to-wifi interference. On the average, in a suburbian residential neighbourhood you have more than 4 neighbours within the high interference range (higher distances in the US are compensated by the higher default power). There are up to 16 more which provide extra background noise. City deployments are even worse.
So in the current form of the protocol wifi is selfregulating. The more people use it the more it sucks. As a result its adoption will level off at some point and people will stop buying it. This will be long before it reaches universal adoption.
So in fact, wifi is not a threat for operators. Their marketing depts may jump up and down from time to time. The jumping stops once they ask their own frequency planning and modelling departments (and every cellco has these, deploying cellular is quite math heavy). It stops because every time they get an answer "Due to bad frequency reuse it is bound to become useless long before ubiquity".
The only way to change it is to completely redesign the MAC for frequency reuse while on the same channel. Either "speak only spoken-to" strategy or some CDMA-like coding strategy where interference on the same channel is considerably less relevant. Unfortunately the industry groups doing the IEEE work are not doing any of that. They are hell bent on pushing the bandwith and do not want to deal with what will become the ultimate protocol killer in the long run.
Err, you are mistaking WankerAA (and their servitors) DRM with DRM in general.
Digital signatures on all OS and software components, in-system messages (down to OS call level) and anything else that happens in the system is actually a very good way to defeat many possible attacks. Unfortunately without hardware acceleration on RSA and friends this is likely to bring even the fastest modern computer to a crawl.
One of the reasons why many companies buy IBM/Lenovo is that it generally survives a 1m drop test. I know plenty of companies that actually ask for a drop test from any new laptop vendor and the only one to agree used to be IBM and Panasonic.
The only other non-ruggedised laptops to consistently survive 1m drop test that were pre-merger Compaqs (HP does not). Most other non-ruggedised systems do not survive through that (and that is not a lot).
So, as a matter of fact, the laptop being hit very hard and being still useable and in use is something common for an IBM/Lenovo and considerably less common for let's say Sony or Acer.
Maxwell equations cannot even explain thermodynamics properly. If you start from Maxwell's original equations you cannot get to the ideal gas equations and the second law of thermodynamics without inventing an unexplainable "provided by god" constant. At the same time the same second law and the ideal gas equation can be trivially derived from the Shroedinger's equation applied for a "black" box. You do not even need to look into more complex cases and even if you do so the result does not change fundamentally.
By the way, for a variety of reasons (stupidity and hubris notwithstanding) I ended up learning modern statistical physics before Maxwellian. As a result I could never male myself digest the utter bull generated by Maxwell (it just did not make sense mathematically in many places). So I actually did this exact derivation starting from Shroedinger on my supposedly Maxwell physics exam in physical chemistry 1. The prof looked at me, looked at the exam sheet, looked at me again and said: My dear, I am supposed to give you an F for not knowing the subject. I will give you an A+ instead for not having to unlearn the next semester the loads of bull I have been forced to teach the students this semester for historical reasons. After that he threw me out of the examination room
As a matter of fact there are fewer and fewer client side apps in an average corporation. Most IT departments do not have the competence and resources to support internal development. I no longer even get pissed off when I hear an IT boss wannabie speaking the "We are not software developers" mantra. In fact in many places, not using software "as shipped and specified by the vendor" has become a firing offence.
Most internal applications have long moved to various forms of portals/intranet servers which makes the end-client platform considerably less relevant. In fact moving from IE6 to IE7 and further to vista access controls have caused (and will cause) the same level of pain as moving to a different OS + browser.
As far as corporate readiness goes, Apple has everything it needs from a technological viewpoint to be ready. However, it is not currently showing the will and desire to go after that market. It does not have a corporation oriented sales channel. It does not have corporation oriented support channel either. Its entire model is geared towards end-users (alone or within an educational establishment).
Actually the situation is not entirely dissimilar from the early PC days.
In those days enterprises where terminal shops with terminals connected to a mainframe or minivax or a unix system. Few places were running Unix using early vintage X terminals. The PC went for the small business and personal market first and from there it displaces the terminals in the larger businesses.
Nowdays the situation is about the same. Microsoft has been paying too much attention to large business customers and ignoring the place it started - SMBs, small ISVs and personal use. At the same time most internal company applications are now server based and very few things run on the clients. This is roughly the position of mainframes of old and we very well know how they have been displaced by a product which was initially adopted by SMBs and for personal use.
So, Apple if they want to, can try to repeat the Microsoft of early days. Currently, they are not showing that they are willing to do so.
It is just pain feedback (optionally with pleasure via thalamic stimulation) along with some trivial conditioning. I am fairly sure about this being so because we do not understand how a bird flies aerodynamically and do not have good enough mapping of second and higher level functions of the mammal brain to control it any better.
This means that if this is applied to soldiers they can still do things their masters do not like, just get punished more and more if they do. Nearly impossible for an animal to override such conditioning, but achieveable for a human. Dune and the Bene Gesserit test comes to mind along with many "manhood" tests performed by South (using fire ants) and North American Indians.
None the less, the only question I am interested is the longitude, latitude and altitude of this chap lab.
Today if you want. In fact yesterday. The only reason for this to be done in China is that in any civilised country the public will torch the lab doing this and they will be right to do so. In fact this will be one of the very few cases where I will happily side up with the animal rights people.
To the point:
The primary sensory and locomotor areas of the brain are very well mapped (and have been so for 20+ years now). It is trivial to implant electrodes into a sensory area which will cause you extreme pain perceived to be in a specific area. From there on you just hook the unit to a set of simple inertial sensors and deliver pain until the target turns right, left or wherever the command is. Approximate complexity of this when using sensors like the ones in the IBM and apple notebooks is at the high school student project level. From there on it is only a matter of calibrating the pain feedback loops so that the target does not pass out. In fact you do not even need to implant electrodes into specific left/right locomotor areas. Just pain/pleasure in general will be enough to get the job done (and there is nothing the test animal can do about it). Also, once the target is trained the actual commands can be delivered with minimal stimulation levels.
All I can say - this is Dr. Evil at his best and there is nothing cool, scientific, revolutionary or extremely funny in this. In fact it gives me shivers just to think about it. Vivisection at its very worst.
Inflation your honour, inflation... 700$ in 1997 terms is close to 1100$ nowdays money. The price difference between them is actually staggering. One was clearly a business/professional tool with no way for joe average to have it while the second one is in the "pocket money range" for businesses and just at about the right level for a high end phone (if you look at high end phone prices without the subsidies they are not that much different).
Not entirely true. I remember seeing somewhere that the next Power will use hypertransport and share bus and IO architecture as well as being socket compatible with AMD. It should be able to slot into the same boards. All you will need will be to replace the BIOS with a PPC boot loader. Also AMD is not actually pushing x86 everywhere. It is pushing hypertransport everywhere. It has licensed socket and bus specs to various specialised chip shops and has said that it actually sees its CPUs occupying only a fraction of the sockets in the tomorrow datacenter. The rest will be occupied by specialised kit (power included). In fact, I would not be surprised if we see a chimaera which has PPC and AMD chips on the same MB in less than 3 years.
Nothing to do with that. They do not care about boarding. Now being requisitioned and having to carry troops into the war zone is another story. Can't blame them actually. Cunard has had at least one liner sunk in the last 60 years with the loss of 6000+ lives and a countless number of near misses after being requisitioned by HMG in every major (and many minor) conflict since WW1.
That is not surprising if you think of traditional British car manufacturing values like Rover reliability, Rover quality and Rover useability. Just along Rover fat cat board bonus (67 million with the company bleeding red ink all over) vs British salary and let's just add Rover asset stripping for good measure.
The money is being redirected (according to BBC and el reg) to continue payouts on the Rover bailout which was done for the sole reason of Tony Bliar collecting himself some votes in the last election. There was no way in hell it would have survived in the first place and Antonio Bliar govt repeatedly lied to the public (nothing new here) and flaunted EU rules on state aid to try to keep it alive first by supporting the "british industrialist" group which bought it from BMW and asset stripped it (that is Alchemy partnership specialty by the way), then providing financial assistance bridge package after it went under.
As a result now science and education all over the country have to suffer (not by much, but Rover is not the only cockup, there will be more chickens flying having home to roost and having diahorea).
1. The missile hitting Gorna Bania was flying from WSW which places it more or less on the right trajectory to hit the Gematronic main antenna at Sofia North.
2. After the incident the radar was programmed with an exclusion zones to the west till the end of the war including scheduled "do not scan" periods towards the west. If the reason for the incident was not this, why the f*** was this done?
3. Besides the Gorna Bania missile there was at least one more HARM firing I know about which did not hit a populated area (somewhere on the South slope of Vitosha AFAIK) and was once again from WSW in the general direction of Sofia Airport. Probably more. Only the Gorna Bania HARM made the news.
You do not need to lie and should not lie. If a job was not working out or somebody headhunted you with a vastly superior offer out of it you might as well say it. Everything else aside the hiring person can nowdays easily find what happened to you in your previous jobs. In that case a lie will be clearly not in your favour.
The world is getting smaller and smaller and with sites like linkedin around it will take less than 15 seconds for someone to find a suitable "informal" reference. So a lie is quite likely to cost you the next job. Same for doctoring CVs, putting fake "Senior" into the job title, putting fake "responsibilities" like "mentoring junior developers" and other usual bollocks stuff people do to get themselves pushed into the higher salary bracket.
Always presume that your interviewer has looked you up on social networking sites and already has a reference for you or two before doing anything stupid (these are my observations from recently looking for a job).
During the Serbian wars NATO was scared shitless off all weather radars and shot at them without any second thoughts even if they were in neighbouring non-combatant countries. Both incidents when missiles hit buildings near Sofia (70km+ outside the Yugoslavian border) were actually firings at the Sofia Airport Gematronic radar system (the same kind some NATO country use).
In addition to that Stealth works effectively only if your receiver is colocated with the transmitter. It is easily defeated by decoupling them. There is a host of technical problems in doing this, but nothing that cannot be solved with enough software analysis of the reflected signal. It is only a matter of time until all "rogue" countries possess the relevant signal processing tech to do that.
So as far as AAA is concerned Stealth is a technology which is dead on arrival.
One of the very few cases when I am all on the side of IRS, her majesty customs and excise and the like.
Ebay is the tax evasion and stolen goods heaven heaven nowdays especially as far as computer and electronics products are concerned (one of the reasons why I have stopped using it)
It is the primary place to commit VAT fraud, sell grey (and contraband) imports, fence stolen goods, the lot.
Whatever is done to weed at least some of that, will improve the standing of companies who actually pay their bills and taxes and try to trade honestly. I am all for it. And the IRS will set a precedent which other country taxation authorities can use (for now they are mostly limited to crawling eBay with external crawlers). So for once, something done by IRS in America will have a positive effect elsewhere.
Keep your military and your CIA at home, and there will be no terrorism.
Err... Not entirely correct.
The sole mistake Americans make is by automatically assuming that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". All other mistakes including sending the military and the CIA are a mere consequence of this one.
Bin Laden was made out of nothing through the enemy of my enemy principle. He is not the only one jinn to be unbottled in this manner. Plenty of others.
What the GP has noted from a more social perspective is actually valid on the physiological level. IIRC all ova in a female are completely developed before she reaches sexual maturity and after that dormant. During each ovulation one (usually) undergoes the final stage in its development and is secreted. No new ova are created.
At the same time male spermatocites which divide to produce spermatosoids are produced constantly (albeit at a decreasing rate) until the males die. New sperm is created all the time.
So the female vs male sexuality note is actually valid all the way down to the physiological and biochemical level. As far as procreation is concerned male sexuality is not a scarce resource. Female is.
It has to do with USA claiming that their laws are universal, apply to anyone and everyone around the world and there is no other law, but USA law. And as usually the side presenting this view won in a USA court.
In fact I doubt that the supremes will do anything about it as doing anything about it will undermine one of the fundamental ideas behind the USA judicial system and foreign policy.
It is in fact an idea which is beaten into USA kids from age 3 and they cannot imagine the world without it. Just go into any toy shop and buy the "Local police patrol" from the hot wheels by Mattel. Classic example. Ugly truck with a chopper and a stormtrooper head/police car looking appearance with a chopper as an accessory. Open the container and it contains a "situation and control room" where the local police patrol can assess their brave deeds and select new targets. Guess what the targeting area shows the whole earth. That's apparently the area for local police enforcement in American understanding. This is just one (most recent - someone gave this one as a present to junior on his birthday) example. Plenty of others.
Succeptability to man in the middle attacks. - AFAIK the Baltic republics have a smartcard based ID system with personal certificates. Ater the split of the Soviet union they got nearly all of the relevant infrastructure to run public services from Scandinavian countries which have had this for a while now. Dunno about Estonia specifically, but most Scandinavian countries allow you to authenticate yourself for some of the internet accessible public services via a smartcard reader on your PC. If they have used it (they have the infrastructure to do so), the system is not succeptible to MIM as the server authenticates to the client and vice versa and this is two factor with the first one being proper SSL level auth. A MIM will not have the smartcard/certificate matching the correct second factor credentials. Similarly, the US need not worry about being late on this one. In its current state it is not late. It is never due to the lack of global mandatory smartcard based id and lack of agreement on having it.
Network outages / succeptability to DDoS attacks. I would not be particularly worried about that for a Baltic state (or any small country). The traffic is mostly local and the local zombies cannot generate enough of it (and it is trivial to filter it down to local only or prioritise). This is definitely a concern in a large country where the Tier 1 cartel has allowed the killing of peering points and traffic is not local and there are plenty of chokepoints to DOS. Once again in its curerent state US is not late - it is not likely. US internet infrastructure with its limited peering and cartel-like arrangements will be very susceptible to this. Compared to that most of EU will be OK or in the worst case will need some minimal extra regulatory intervention
Possibility of ISP censorship of votes. See first point. If they use their IDs MIM is not feasible so the ISP cannot censor votes, it can only censor the whole election and if this does not make them lose their telecom license dunno what will.
Overall, I would not worry about this trendy thang hitting US in the immediate future. It requires global working smartcard ID and heavily regulated non-centralised telecoms infrastructure to work (especially in a large country). None of these are particularly popular in the US nowdays.
Applause.
Methinks that this can get on an even more interesting twist if the operators are to allow Vonage and the like (and/or to interop with them using local operator owned SIP border controllers). There are already SIP clients for the Symbian and the other high end phones. In fact there may be more readily available customers with compatible phones compared to Skype for this one.
That will firmly put Skype where it belongs - as the odd man out who keeps on speaking about openness while keeping its own protocols closed.
Slashdot Mirror
On the first day. Anything over a few miles and you can forget about triangulation by ultrasound in water. Temperature gradients in the water bend the path in all kinds of special and wonderfull ways. This has been already attempted for obtaining maximum dive depths of sperm whales and the results were pathetic. After a few years of experimentation the idea was discarded as useless. Just ask any scientists working on cetaceans about picking up sperm whale locations and depths by sound source triangulation and watch the vile rant or half an hour worth of hysterical giggle that follows.
You missed 12 which is complete and utter bullshit.
Russia is right to be pissed off with missile batteries in Europe and is rightly pointing that they have no other function but to sour Russia relationship with Europe.
These missiles provide sabre rattling capability for some political elements in the ex-Soviet block who are anti-Russian to the point where they would like to have a Hitler statue erected on their capital's main squares. While every military specialist is aware that such missiles will be useless to "protect" the host country if the Russians decide to wipe it off the map, the politicians in question have no intention of telling this to their population. Just the opposite.
Through unilateral moves Poland, the Baltics and Chech republic (whose current president/prime minister clone pair are too Russophobic even for Lech Valensa to stomach) are trying to force the rest of Europe on a confrontation course with Russia. Things like this affect the military tactics and politics of all NATO. Poland is not in sole command of Nato, neither is the Chech republic. If they think that this type of confronation is especially good for everyone they should convince everyone to do so, instead of drawing everyone into it through the back door.
And at the end of the day, USA is still continuing their Cold War politics by inertia. They waste a phenomenal amount of resources to continue along lines that have no further meaning and use instead of even considering new threats. No wander they get their ex-best-friend to run a couple of planes into key buildings with such ease. And if they continue this way there is bound to be more of that.
Worse.
Moon dust off the surface has been nicely activated by radiation and sun over centuries. It is not the relatively inert silica you get from cutting glass and rocks. It can catalyse all kinds of strange and wonderfull reactions because cosmic ray particles have kicked out (or even modified) an atom here and there and it has remained there in a very active form due to the lack of atmosphere. On earth it would have been deactivated nearly immediately by oxygen, water or even nitrogen from the air. On the moon it will stay active nearly for ever and over the years there will be more and more of these on the surface of each particle. Add to that the habit to accumulate static charges (which is actually related to the surface being active) so it sticks everywhere and you got yourself a really nasty problem on your hands.
Moon dust is something you do not like having anywhere near lungs and in fact anywhere near the innards of a space station. Think of asbestous, but with nearly instantaneous effect and the habit to cling to everything.
In the 60-es they did not care about health and safety. Nowdays, this would be considerably more difficult to ignore.
I am not a commodore expert, but IIRC 6502 and its successor 6510 had the concept of 0 page. A set of shortened (and faster) operands could use simplified conditional jump and arithmetics provided that all args were under 0x100. The basic "load next operand" routine which was invoked for anything (even displaying the command prompt) was written using zero page intructions for speed and resided in the zero page. Replacing this routine was a possibility for auto invocation. Hardly ever used on Apple where everything, but basic left this routine alone, but could have been quite usefull on the C64 (if it used it).
This routine could also be altered for all kinds of interesting stuff. Starting with practical jokes with the teacher which made fun of the "default" problems, questions and answers and going as far as adding a single read instruction to read the IO port for the speaker. That was hysterical. A nested loop sounded like motorcycle, plotting produced star war effects and most math various random farts. Total ROFL (got myself keelhauled by the headmaster for that one).
No. Wide adoption will kill wifi. In fact it is already killing it.
Wifi has a very bad frequency reuse capability. The 12 (13 in EU) channels overlap so you in fact you have 3-4 useable frequencies when dealing with wifi-to-wifi interference. On the average, in a suburbian residential neighbourhood you have more than 4 neighbours within the high interference range (higher distances in the US are compensated by the higher default power). There are up to 16 more which provide extra background noise. City deployments are even worse.
So in the current form of the protocol wifi is selfregulating. The more people use it the more it sucks. As a result its adoption will level off at some point and people will stop buying it. This will be long before it reaches universal adoption.
So in fact, wifi is not a threat for operators. Their marketing depts may jump up and down from time to time. The jumping stops once they ask their own frequency planning and modelling departments (and every cellco has these, deploying cellular is quite math heavy). It stops because every time they get an answer "Due to bad frequency reuse it is bound to become useless long before ubiquity".
The only way to change it is to completely redesign the MAC for frequency reuse while on the same channel. Either "speak only spoken-to" strategy or some CDMA-like coding strategy where interference on the same channel is considerably less relevant. Unfortunately the industry groups doing the IEEE work are not doing any of that. They are hell bent on pushing the bandwith and do not want to deal with what will become the ultimate protocol killer in the long run.
Err, you are mistaking WankerAA (and their servitors) DRM with DRM in general.
Digital signatures on all OS and software components, in-system messages (down to OS call level) and anything else that happens in the system is actually a very good way to defeat many possible attacks. Unfortunately without hardware acceleration on RSA and friends this is likely to bring even the fastest modern computer to a crawl.
One of the reasons why many companies buy IBM/Lenovo is that it generally survives a 1m drop test. I know plenty of companies that actually ask for a drop test from any new laptop vendor and the only one to agree used to be IBM and Panasonic.
The only other non-ruggedised laptops to consistently survive 1m drop test that were pre-merger Compaqs (HP does not). Most other non-ruggedised systems do not survive through that (and that is not a lot).
So, as a matter of fact, the laptop being hit very hard and being still useable and in use is something common for an IBM/Lenovo and considerably less common for let's say Sony or Acer.
What a load of bull.
It has been a while, but IIRC:
Maxwell equations cannot even explain thermodynamics properly. If you start from Maxwell's original equations you cannot get to the ideal gas equations and the second law of thermodynamics without inventing an unexplainable "provided by god" constant. At the same time the same second law and the ideal gas equation can be trivially derived from the Shroedinger's equation applied for a "black" box. You do not even need to look into more complex cases and even if you do so the result does not change fundamentally.
By the way, for a variety of reasons (stupidity and hubris notwithstanding) I ended up learning modern statistical physics before Maxwellian. As a result I could never male myself digest the utter bull generated by Maxwell (it just did not make sense mathematically in many places). So I actually did this exact derivation starting from Shroedinger on my supposedly Maxwell physics exam in physical chemistry 1. The prof looked at me, looked at the exam sheet, looked at me again and said: My dear, I am supposed to give you an F for not knowing the subject. I will give you an A+ instead for not having to unlearn the next semester the loads of bull I have been forced to teach the students this semester for historical reasons. After that he threw me out of the examination room
Ahem.
As a matter of fact there are fewer and fewer client side apps in an average corporation. Most IT departments do not have the competence and resources to support internal development. I no longer even get pissed off when I hear an IT boss wannabie speaking the "We are not software developers" mantra. In fact in many places, not using software "as shipped and specified by the vendor" has become a firing offence.
Most internal applications have long moved to various forms of portals/intranet servers which makes the end-client platform considerably less relevant. In fact moving from IE6 to IE7 and further to vista access controls have caused (and will cause) the same level of pain as moving to a different OS + browser.
As far as corporate readiness goes, Apple has everything it needs from a technological viewpoint to be ready. However, it is not currently showing the will and desire to go after that market. It does not have a corporation oriented sales channel. It does not have corporation oriented support channel either. Its entire model is geared towards end-users (alone or within an educational establishment).
Actually the situation is not entirely dissimilar from the early PC days.
In those days enterprises where terminal shops with terminals connected to a mainframe or minivax or a unix system. Few places were running Unix using early vintage X terminals. The PC went for the small business and personal market first and from there it displaces the terminals in the larger businesses.
Nowdays the situation is about the same. Microsoft has been paying too much attention to large business customers and ignoring the place it started - SMBs, small ISVs and personal use. At the same time most internal company applications are now server based and very few things run on the clients. This is roughly the position of mainframes of old and we very well know how they have been displaced by a product which was initially adopted by SMBs and for personal use.
So, Apple if they want to, can try to repeat the Microsoft of early days. Currently, they are not showing that they are willing to do so.
mammal brain. Sorry - meant to say vertebrate brain (too high blood level in the coffee subsystem).
It is not at that level.
It is just pain feedback (optionally with pleasure via thalamic stimulation) along with some trivial conditioning. I am fairly sure about this being so because we do not understand how a bird flies aerodynamically and do not have good enough mapping of second and higher level functions of the mammal brain to control it any better.
This means that if this is applied to soldiers they can still do things their masters do not like, just get punished more and more if they do. Nearly impossible for an animal to override such conditioning, but achieveable for a human. Dune and the Bene Gesserit test comes to mind along with many "manhood" tests performed by South (using fire ants) and North American Indians.
None the less, the only question I am interested is the longitude, latitude and altitude of this chap lab.
Today if you want. In fact yesterday. The only reason for this to be done in China is that in any civilised country the public will torch the lab doing this and they will be right to do so. In fact this will be one of the very few cases where I will happily side up with the animal rights people.
To the point:
The primary sensory and locomotor areas of the brain are very well mapped (and have been so for 20+ years now). It is trivial to implant electrodes into a sensory area which will cause you extreme pain perceived to be in a specific area. From there on you just hook the unit to a set of simple inertial sensors and deliver pain until the target turns right, left or wherever the command is. Approximate complexity of this when using sensors like the ones in the IBM and apple notebooks is at the high school student project level. From there on it is only a matter of calibrating the pain feedback loops so that the target does not pass out. In fact you do not even need to implant electrodes into specific left/right locomotor areas. Just pain/pleasure in general will be enough to get the job done (and there is nothing the test animal can do about it). Also, once the target is trained the actual commands can be delivered with minimal stimulation levels.
All I can say - this is Dr. Evil at his best and there is nothing cool, scientific, revolutionary or extremely funny in this. In fact it gives me shivers just to think about it. Vivisection at its very worst.
Inflation your honour, inflation... 700$ in 1997 terms is close to 1100$ nowdays money. The price difference between them is actually staggering. One was clearly a business/professional tool with no way for joe average to have it while the second one is in the "pocket money range" for businesses and just at about the right level for a high end phone (if you look at high end phone prices without the subsidies they are not that much different).
Not entirely true. I remember seeing somewhere that the next Power will use hypertransport and share bus and IO architecture as well as being socket compatible with AMD. It should be able to slot into the same boards. All you will need will be to replace the BIOS with a PPC boot loader.
Also AMD is not actually pushing x86 everywhere. It is pushing hypertransport everywhere. It has licensed socket and bus specs to various specialised chip shops and has said that it actually sees its CPUs occupying only a fraction of the sockets in the tomorrow datacenter. The rest will be occupied by specialised kit (power included).
In fact, I would not be surprised if we see a chimaera which has PPC and AMD chips on the same MB in less than 3 years.
Nothing to do with that. They do not care about boarding. Now being requisitioned and having to carry troops into the war zone is another story. Can't blame them actually. Cunard has had at least one liner sunk in the last 60 years with the loss of 6000+ lives and a countless number of near misses after being requisitioned by HMG in every major (and many minor) conflict since WW1.
That is not surprising if you think of traditional British car manufacturing values like Rover reliability, Rover quality and Rover useability. Just along Rover fat cat board bonus (67 million with the company bleeding red ink all over) vs British salary and let's just add Rover asset stripping for good measure.
The money is being redirected (according to BBC and el reg) to continue payouts on the Rover bailout which was done for the sole reason of Tony Bliar collecting himself some votes in the last election. There was no way in hell it would have survived in the first place and Antonio Bliar govt repeatedly lied to the public (nothing new here) and flaunted EU rules on state aid to try to keep it alive first by supporting the "british industrialist" group which bought it from BMW and asset stripped it (that is Alchemy partnership specialty by the way), then providing financial assistance bridge package after it went under.
As a result now science and education all over the country have to suffer (not by much, but Rover is not the only cockup, there will be more chickens flying having home to roost and having diahorea).
Double bullshit.
1. The missile hitting Gorna Bania was flying from WSW which places it more or less on the right trajectory to hit the Gematronic main antenna at Sofia North.
2. After the incident the radar was programmed with an exclusion zones to the west till the end of the war including scheduled "do not scan" periods towards the west. If the reason for the incident was not this, why the f*** was this done?
3. Besides the Gorna Bania missile there was at least one more HARM firing I know about which did not hit a populated area (somewhere on the South slope of Vitosha AFAIK) and was once again from WSW in the general direction of Sofia Airport. Probably more. Only the Gorna Bania HARM made the news.
You do not need to lie and should not lie. If a job was not working out or somebody headhunted you with a vastly superior offer out of it you might as well say it. Everything else aside the hiring person can nowdays easily find what happened to you in your previous jobs. In that case a lie will be clearly not in your favour.
The world is getting smaller and smaller and with sites like linkedin around it will take less than 15 seconds for someone to find a suitable "informal" reference. So a lie is quite likely to cost you the next job. Same for doctoring CVs, putting fake "Senior" into the job title, putting fake "responsibilities" like "mentoring junior developers" and other usual bollocks stuff people do to get themselves pushed into the higher salary bracket.
Always presume that your interviewer has looked you up on social networking sites and already has a reference for you or two before doing anything stupid (these are my observations from recently looking for a job).
There is a grain of truth in this one.
During the Serbian wars NATO was scared shitless off all weather radars and shot at them without any second thoughts even if they were in neighbouring non-combatant countries. Both incidents when missiles hit buildings near Sofia (70km+ outside the Yugoslavian border) were actually firings at the Sofia Airport Gematronic radar system (the same kind some NATO country use).
In addition to that Stealth works effectively only if your receiver is colocated with the transmitter. It is easily defeated by decoupling them. There is a host of technical problems in doing this, but nothing that cannot be solved with enough software analysis of the reflected signal. It is only a matter of time until all "rogue" countries possess the relevant signal processing tech to do that.
So as far as AAA is concerned Stealth is a technology which is dead on arrival.
One of the very few cases when I am all on the side of IRS, her majesty customs and excise and the like.
Ebay is the tax evasion and stolen goods heaven heaven nowdays especially as far as computer and electronics products are concerned (one of the reasons why I have stopped using it)
It is the primary place to commit VAT fraud, sell grey (and contraband) imports, fence stolen goods, the lot.
Whatever is done to weed at least some of that, will improve the standing of companies who actually pay their bills and taxes and try to trade honestly. I am all for it. And the IRS will set a precedent which other country taxation authorities can use (for now they are mostly limited to crawling eBay with external crawlers). So for once, something done by IRS in America will have a positive effect elsewhere.
Err... Not entirely correct.
The sole mistake Americans make is by automatically assuming that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". All other mistakes including sending the military and the CIA are a mere consequence of this one.
Bin Laden was made out of nothing through the enemy of my enemy principle. He is not the only one jinn to be unbottled in this manner. Plenty of others.
Bollocks,
What the GP has noted from a more social perspective is actually valid on the physiological level. IIRC all ova in a female are completely developed before she reaches sexual maturity and after that dormant. During each ovulation one (usually) undergoes the final stage in its development and is secreted. No new ova are created.
At the same time male spermatocites which divide to produce spermatosoids are produced constantly (albeit at a decreasing rate) until the males die. New sperm is created all the time.
So the female vs male sexuality note is actually valid all the way down to the physiological and biochemical level. As far as procreation is concerned male sexuality is not a scarce resource. Female is.
This case has nothing to do with Mickey Mouse.
It has to do with USA claiming that their laws are universal, apply to anyone and everyone around the world and there is no other law, but USA law. And as usually the side presenting this view won in a USA court.
In fact I doubt that the supremes will do anything about it as doing anything about it will undermine one of the fundamental ideas behind the USA judicial system and foreign policy.
It is in fact an idea which is beaten into USA kids from age 3 and they cannot imagine the world without it. Just go into any toy shop and buy the "Local police patrol" from the hot wheels by Mattel. Classic example. Ugly truck with a chopper and a stormtrooper head/police car looking appearance with a chopper as an accessory. Open the container and it contains a "situation and control room" where the local police patrol can assess their brave deeds and select new targets. Guess what the targeting area shows the whole earth. That's apparently the area for local police enforcement in American understanding. This is just one (most recent - someone gave this one as a present to junior on his birthday) example. Plenty of others.
- Succeptability to man in the middle attacks. - AFAIK the Baltic republics have a smartcard based ID system with personal certificates. Ater the split of the Soviet union they got nearly all of the relevant infrastructure to run public services from Scandinavian countries which have had this for a while now. Dunno about Estonia specifically, but most Scandinavian countries allow you to authenticate yourself for some of the internet accessible public services via a smartcard reader on your PC. If they have used it (they have the infrastructure to do so), the system is not succeptible to MIM as the server authenticates to the client and vice versa and this is two factor with the first one being proper SSL level auth. A MIM will not have the smartcard/certificate matching the correct second factor credentials. Similarly, the US need not worry about being late on this one. In its current state it is not late. It is never due to the lack of global mandatory smartcard based id and lack of agreement on having it.
- Network outages / succeptability to DDoS attacks. I would not be particularly worried about that for a Baltic state (or any small country). The traffic is mostly local and the local zombies cannot generate enough of it (and it is trivial to filter it down to local only or prioritise). This is definitely a concern in a large country where the Tier 1 cartel has allowed the killing of peering points and traffic is not local and there are plenty of chokepoints to DOS. Once again in its curerent state US is not late - it is not likely. US internet infrastructure with its limited peering and cartel-like arrangements will be very susceptible to this. Compared to that most of EU will be OK or in the worst case will need some minimal extra regulatory intervention
- Possibility of ISP censorship of votes. See first point. If they use their IDs MIM is not feasible so the ISP cannot censor votes, it can only censor the whole election and if this does not make them lose their telecom license dunno what will.
Overall, I would not worry about this trendy thang hitting US in the immediate future. It requires global working smartcard ID and heavily regulated non-centralised telecoms infrastructure to work (especially in a large country). None of these are particularly popular in the US nowdays.Applause. Methinks that this can get on an even more interesting twist if the operators are to allow Vonage and the like (and/or to interop with them using local operator owned SIP border controllers). There are already SIP clients for the Symbian and the other high end phones. In fact there may be more readily available customers with compatible phones compared to Skype for this one. That will firmly put Skype where it belongs - as the odd man out who keeps on speaking about openness while keeping its own protocols closed.